My grandfather Roger Sawtell, who has died aged 95, was a proponent of employee-owned businesses and spent much of his life either working for such enterprises or helping to set them up.
Roger was born in Sheffield, the middle of three children of Horace Sawtell, a steelworks engineer, and Barbara (nee Leslie). He won scholarships to Bedford school and then the University of Cambridge, where he studied mechanical sciences, leaving with his degree in 1948 to work as an engineer at English Electric in Rugby in Warwickshire, and then Spear & Jackson in Sheffield. After 16 years at Spear & Jackson he was offered the role of managing director, but turned the offer down, as he had decided that his future should lie in working for a company with a more egalitarian business structure.
He was guided on that path by his Christian beliefs, but also by a meeting he had in 1967 with the economist EF Schumacher, developer of the concept that “small is beautiful”, which affected him deeply and helped to shape the rest of his working life.
In 1968 he joined Trylon, an employee-owned company in the Northamptonshire village of Wollaston that made fibreglass canoes. Throughout the 1970s he also served as chair of the Industrial Common Ownership Movement (now Co-operatives UK), and he wrote a book, How to Change to Common Ownership, which was published in 1975.
In 1980, with a group of friends, Roger opened the Daily Bread Co-operative, a wholefood shop in Northampton. He worked with the business full-time until retirement in 1987, although he carried on after that as a part-time worker until 1995. Both Trylon and Daily Bread continue to trade today, owned and run by their workers.
In 1984 Roger and his wife, Susan (nee Flint), whom he had married in 1957, joined up with others to combine two houses on a street in Northampton to create a Christian community of households living under one roof. Known as the Neighbours Community, it grew to encompass four other houses and was home to more than 50 people over the course of 23 years.
Roger and Susan lived there from 1984 to 2007, when they moved into a retirement apartment just round the corner, at which point the project came to a natural end. In 2015, Roger’s book about life in the community, Under One Roof, was published, and the following year his autobiography, A Somewhat Upside-Down Life, also touched on his years living there.
In 2019 Co-operatives UK awarded Roger their inaugural lifetime achievement award for his work in the movement.
Throughout their 70s and 80s, Roger and Susan regularly visited the Greek island of Amorgos, where they loved to walk and swim. On Amorgos, as in all areas of his life, Roger made many friends, always finding time to listen to and support others.
He is survived by Susan, by their three children, Ruth, Mary and Peter, and eight grandchildren. Another daughter, Rebecca, died in 2021.
