Ernest Shenton dating history

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Ernest Shenton was one of the driving forces behind an embryonic Dixons and brought one-hour photo processing to the high street in the Eighties with his chain of Photo Shop minilabs. The Austrian-born refugee helped the Dixons founder Charles Kalms and his son Stanley, later Lord Kalms, to build the company from a handful of portrait studios into a retail chain and mail-order empire. Dixons, renamed DSG International, is currently Europe's biggest retailer of consumer electronics. On leaving Dixons, Shenton became a trailblazer in the one-hour retail photo-processing market, building up a profitable chain of 34 shops despite cut-throat competition. He also liked to test the boundaries of architecture and design with a penchant for the ultra modern. The film director Stanley Kubrick wanted to use a log cabin built by Shenton, which was part-suspended over a lake in Stanmore, North London, and decked out in avant-garde furniture, in his masterpiece A Clockwork Orange (1971). Shenton, however, turned down Kubrick's request.