My father, Manmohan Singh Chadha, who has died aged 84, was a talented entrepreneur. He set up a series of successful companies, initially concerned with the wholesale food distribution of south-east Asian foods and latterly an investment company focused on industrial warehouse space.
Manmohan was born in Roopwal, British India, to Dropadi (nee Sethi) and Saradar Singh Chadha, and was a survivor of partition in 1947 along with his parents, six sisters and two brothers. Manmohan later put their escape down to being in the back of a lorry rather than taking a midnight train. His father had been a zamindar (landowner) prior to partition, and, post-partition, ran a grain and transport business. After a short period of refugee status in Phagwara, his father played a leading role in settling the model town that was built to the west of the Grand Trunk Road – a road that 50 years later Dad and I travelled north along to better understand the family’s flight.
After leaving Ramgarhia College, Phagwara, in 1956, he spent a year in Bombay (now Mumbai) looking into the motor spare parts business, but in 1957 decided to join his sister and brother-in-law in business in freezing West Yorkshire on the Leeds Road. The trading business, Kohli and Company Limited, was sufficiently successful to be the focus of an article in the Yorkshire Post (28 September 1972) lauding the success of the new immigrant community.
By 1980, aware of industrial decline in the north, he had moved the family to London, first to Harrow and then to Northwood, and set up his next venture, Chadha Oriental Foods Limited, distributing mostly Chinese and Singaporean food stuffs, based first in Willesden and then Greenford. His regular trips to south-east Asia revealed some foresight on his part, placing him a generation ahead of the rest of the country in terms of globalisation. In 1997, the company was sold and he embarked on yet another venture, this time an investment company, Thorneycroft Asset Management, in Mayfair. There, a multicultural team invested in a string of industrial estates backed enthusiastically by his many contacts. My father retired finally in 2016.
Apart from philanthropy and the work that he did in establishing the Brent Sikh Centre, my father spent most of his spare time working on his golf handicap.
He is survived by his wife, Manjit (nee Anand), whom he met in Dehradun in 1965 and married the following year, his three children, Harpreet, Gurneen and me, six grandchildren, Jasleen, Mohnique, Nihal, Avreen, Ankit and Ahren, and his sister, Amrit.
