Anthony Lidster has been involved in the stone industry all his life, most recently with memorial wholesaler George Willcox. Now he has retired, but that has just given him more time to pursue his fascination with stone, minerals and the earth.

After a lifetime in the stone industry Anthony Lidster says: “When it’s time to retire you know it’s time to retire. There comes a time when you have to hang up your boots.”

Only Anthony is not exactly retiring because he will continue to run his A&P Ceramics business supplying plaques to memorial masons. And he is not hanging up his boots, either, because he and his wife, Maggie, are enthusiastic walkers and plan to spend time exploring Northumberland from their holiday home there.

They both share an interest in geology and earth sciences and plan to examine rocks during their walks. Anthony even plans to continue his studies of Earth Sciences with the Open University to add a Masters to the degree he obtained in 2007. “I’m a great believer in lifelong learning,” he told NSS. He is now a member of the Open University Geological Society, which has involved him in visits to New Zealand, Siberia and Antarctica, and during his studies he visited a collapsed volcano in the Atacama Desert of South America.

Some of Anthony’s earliest memories are of stone and the masons making memorials at the family business of Lidster & Sons Ltd. The company, started by his grandfather, was already 50 years old when Anthony was initiated into it by helping his father, who by then ran the business. He needed help with supervising the installation of a 7.5ton gantry at the company’s then newly acquired premises in Worksop, Nottinghamshire. It was 1960 and Anthony was just 10. Six years later he left school and joined the family firm full time.

Even before Lidster & Sons was established, the Lidster family had a long history in the stone industry, having quarried dolomite from Anston, near Sheffield, for many years – the stone used to construct the Houses of Parliament. The villages of North and South Anston are mentioned in the Domesday Book and the name is thought to derive from ‘an stan’ (a stone) due to the amount of quarrying in the area.

Shortly after Anthony joined Lidster & Sons, the family firm joined forces with F W Bull & Sons of Rayleigh, Essex, and after that Carpenters of Bridgewater, in Somerset, to form The Memorial Firms, which sold memorials countrywide.

In those days, most memorials were marble and limestone and The Memorial Firms bought marble as block from Italy. It was sawn into slab at Bull’s yard and the slab was transported to Worksop  to be sawn into useable sizes for memorials. Lidster carried large stocks of sawn all round marble and limestone.

There were no granite memorials coming from China and India then. The Memorial Firms’ stones were all made and carved in Worksop and Rayleigh. Most of the lettering was hand cut and leaded.

“We would visit Carrara a couple of times a year to buy block,” says Anthony. “In one week we would buy enough to fill a 750ton charter ship. The blocks we went to see were normally still up in the quarries and we had some memorably hair raising journeys to the higher quarries, which tended to yield the best marble for monumental work. The roadways up there were very basic single track and we often met trucks bringing block down. They were not inclined to give way and were not able to stop.

“Buying marble block was a skill in itself. Apart from the fact we could never be sure we would receive the blocks we had selected, even after ‘indelible’ marking, you could never be sure what was going on inside a block, even though it looked good on the outside.”

After a number of blocks had fallen apart as they were slabbed in Essex, The Memorial Firms established their own primary sawmill in Carrara, where frame saws slabbed the stone that was then shipped in containers.

The move into granite was relatively slow. India had started to invest in quarrying and manufacturing machinery and The Stone Firms starting buying from the sub-continent in the late 1970s. At much the same time, another company started importing the Indian granite – George Willcox, in Evesham, Worcester, where Anthony would eventually end up.

Those early stones was poorly polished with punched edges and made to a tolerance of plus or minus six inches (150mm). “Every face was concave,” says Anthony, “which I suppose you would consider an achievement these days!”

Customers liked the dark granite, especially as more companies started importing it and the competition drove down prices.

“Carrying the large stocks we did, other retail monumental masons were coming to us for supplies and hence Valley Wholesale Memorial Company was born.”

At the beginning of the 1980s, Lidster & Sons acquired a company that was wholesaling marble to the fireplace and decorative trades and Anthony became rooted in the coloured marble slab trade, frequently visiting Italy and Portugal to buy marble.

The company was one of the early entrants to the granite kitchen worktop market because of its access to granite from the memorial side. All the worktops were entirely finished by hand at that time, which was reflected in the price. Nearly all of them were sold to customers in London.

After experiencing most aspects of the stone industry, including a brief sojourn into quarrying and architectural stone, Anthony eventually ended up back where he had started in the monumental trade with his cousin at R Lidster Ltd.

“However, I can safely say that the most rewarding time in the business has been the past nine years with Willcox Granite, building up sales in the North. It is not always easy to work for someone else after running your own business, but Willcox gave me the autonomy I was used to, which I believe paid off for all concerned. It is an excellent company with excellent prospects and I wish the Directors, John Linley and Simon Bellamy, and the team there the prosperous future they deserve in the industry.”