Clayton Love Jnr: The 'Renaissance Man' who brought shopping centres to Cork
Former British ambassador to Ireland Veronica Sutherland with Clayton Love Jnr. Picture: Dan Linehan
Retail has continued down the Love family generations, as has the name Clayton Love: it has passed down now to a fifth generation of ‘Claytons’ just prior to ‘Junior’s’ passing, weeks ahead of his 95th birthday in April.
During a long and productive life, showing innovation and adaptation in the retail sector, as well as success in sport, sailing and a devotion to family life, Clayton Love Jnr developed about 500,000sq ft of suburban Cork shopping centres, in parallel with the southern city’s growth in Douglas, Wilton and Blackpool.
He also left a mark on the wider commercial field, in business, and the brewing industry as a chairman of the 1792-founded Beamish & Crawford brewery — where he replaced Seán Lemass as chair in 1971.
He was in the hot seat there as the historic brewery competed from its South Main Street base with its local stout rival, Murphy’s Brewery, as well as with the Dublin monolith Guinness, in what were tumultuous trading years of brewery takeovers, overseas ownerships and, later, mergers.
Mr Love was president of Cork Chamber of Commerce in 1979 and 1980, at a time when he was also extremely active in developing major Cork shopping centres.
He opened Cork’s very first shopping centre — with outdoor malls — in suburban Douglas in 1971, after Ireland’s first such centre opened in Stillorgan, Dublin, in 1966.
Douglas was anchored by entrepreneur Pat Quinn’s Quinnsworth and Mr Love bolstered it with well-established local family traders, butchers and merchants.
Across the burgeoning suburbs, Clayton Love Jnr also bought 200 acres of land from the SMA religious order at Wilton (for a reported £1m) as that western suburb also expanded, then spinning off smaller land sale ‘lots’ to various builders, as ‘cash cows,’ and as family houses replaced dairy herds.
He also sold land at Wilton to the ESB, before going on to open the Wilton Shopping Centre in 1979, which is now anchored by Tesco (Mr Love had visited Tesco in Chineham, Basingstoke, to see its operation there prior.)
Having sold his successful Douglas Village Shopping Centre, Clayton Love Jnr then captured Dunnes as the anchor for his Douglas Court centre nearby, which opened in 1990.
He later bought back his first ‘baby’, Douglas Village Shopping Centre in 1999 — it was subsequently largely demolished and redeveloped over a decade ago via his later company, the Shipton Group.
‘Junior’ also set his eye on retail sites north of the river Lee, buying Blackpool’s Polefield from the ESB in the 1970s, but it took over 20 years before he crossed enough hurdles to finally open the Polefield site as a successful mixed-use scheme along with a retail park, office park plus apartments, as well as a multi-screen cinema in 2000, the Millennium Year, three decades after his first shopping centre foray at Douglas.
It seemed a case of trading in shopping centres, as easily as others buy and sell groceries. No surprise: after all, Clayton Love Jnr was born into an early 20th-century retailing and wholesaling family.
The family had fruit, veg and fish markets in branded timber fish boxes (including a line providing for ocean-going liners in Cork Harbour), at various times on Coach Street, on Oliver Plunkett Street and at St Peter’s Market, stretching from North Main Street to Cornmarket Street.
On Cornmarket Street, the Love family’s St Peter’s Market (later spawning a cash and carry business) directly faced Musgraves, another Cork family who went on to control the Irish retail giant SuperValu/Centra group.
Notably, Cork has produced several major family-founded retail empires: the Roche family’s Roches Stores; Ben Dunne’s Dunnes Stores with international business; Musgraves and Mallow-based wholesalers the Barry Group, while Clayton Love Jn and, later, Cork developer Owen O’Callaghan separately went on to deliver enormous cathedrals and centres of commerce for late 20th and 21st century retailers.
Clayton Love’s family development company, the Shipton Group, later eyed up retail opportunities in Cork county, in Fermoy and Carrigaline.
However, the financial and property crash from 2008 hit Shipton Group hard in the following years when Bank of Scotland put on the squeeze — even though all repayments and commitments were being met, note the family’s supportive observers.
Tributes following his death in Dublin this week were led by Tánaiste Micheál Martin, who described him as “a Renaissance man, well-read, erudite, altruistic, and a patron of the arts with the public interest at heart. Clayton was a tremendous advocate for Cork as a key strategic and international city.”
Numerous others described Clayton Love Jnr as “one of life’s gentlemen”, praising his business acumen with skills including visionary strategic thinking and innovation, determination, ability to delegate, time-keeping, loyalty, commitment to Cork and, most remarked upon, his people skills and an ability to listen and to treat others with dignity.
Away from business, he was a lifelong lover of the sea, adept in sailing dinghies, and competing at international level in the challenging 505 class; he was instrumental in seeing the potentially choppy changeover/merger from the venerable Royal Munster Yacht Club to the Royal Cork Yacht Club in the 1960s, serving as an early commodore, as well as being a founder member of the Irish Dinghy Racing Association, later the ISA.
He sailed in craft large and small, naming many of his dinghies Miss Betty after his beloved wife Betty (nee McCann) to whom he was married for 50 years, having three children, Clayton (Minor,) Sarah and Neill.
Larger boats he owned included the Royal Tara and, given his nature, the appropriately titled Assiduous.
His sailing career covered thousands of nautical miles and included many Admirals Cups, as well as races in the Mediterranean, and he raced with names such as Hugh Coveney, Harold Cudmore and on board the likes of New Zealand designer Ron Holland’s Big Apple and Silver Apple of the Moon.
Apart from land-based commitments to the likes of Fota Wildlife Park, Clayton Love Jnr led fundraising and volunteer efforts to establish a lifeboat service in Crosshaven (he had served as deputy chair of the UK-based RNLI for a period) and the life-saving boat he delivered for Cork harbour in 2002 was called Miss Betty.
He oversaw the lengthy restoration of the classic Cork Harbour One Design boat called Jap, enabling it to be raced on the European Classic Boat Circuit: it is now in the permanent care of Crosshaven’s RCYC.
After selling the family home, Clanrickarde on Cork City’s Blackrock Road in the early 2000s, Mr Love nursed his wife Betty in her illness in Currabinny until her death in 2006, overlooking the waters of Cork Harbour, visited by grandchildren for whom they had bunks crafted by boat builders to match those in ocean-going yachts.
Lucky in love, Clayton Jnr remarried in 2013, aged in his mid-80s to Barbara McGonigal, who had previously been married to his lifelong friend Liam McGonigal.
He is survived by his wife Barbara, and family Clayton, Sarah (Cronin) and Neill, by 10 grandchildren, 12 great-grandchildren and by his brother John.
‘Home is the sailor, home from sea.’
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