We look at the legacy of a great man, Kendrick Gilkes, who started the Stort Group in 1981 and laid the foundations for the successful business we know today, still managed by his family and continuing to fulfil Kendrick’s vision from 45 years ago.
Kendrick Gilkes was born in 1940 in Oxfordshire – the lucky result of his parent’s honeymoon, for which his father was given special leave from the army. As a war baby, his father was posted in Belgium for much of Kendrick’s early life, so his initial years were spent with his mother and aunt in the tiny hamlet of Duns Tew, near Chipping Norton. It was only when his father returned home from the war that the family moved to Banbury, where Kendrick spent the rest of his childhood and attended grammar school.
In the late 1950s, Kendrick went to study chemistry at the University of Birmingham. Here, he discovered jazz, fast cars, and a lab assistant called Marguerite, who in 1964 became Kendrick’s wife and lifelong ally.
After University, Kendrick started his career as a paint chemist at Courtaulds (now part of AkzoNobel), and was moved around the country from North Wales to Surrey, to Newcastle, Essex and back to Newcastle, finally ending up at Berger Paints. Fifteen years later, with Margaret Thatcher in charge of a country characterised by miners’ strikes, industrial closures and job losses, Kendrick was distraught and disillusioned at having to make a whole team redundant, and he left Berger to set out on his own.
By 1980, the family had moved to Bishops Stortford (from which the Stort business took its name). Kendrick was well travelled and he saw a niche in the market. He saw he could sell chemicals sourced from overseas to customers in the UK. With children now at school, Marguerite was also free to offer full practical support behind the scenes. With Kendrick at front of house, and Marguerite responsible for credit control and teaching herself to touch type, the two of them started Stort Chemicals Ltd in 1981.
Reflecting the strong friendships he had built, Kendrick had a friend at Eggar & Co in Surrey, who gave him the opportunity to act as an agent to sell his waxes so he was able to start Stort with a living business, to give him a launching pad into chemical distribution. The company was quickly successful, and by 1985 Kendrick was able to buy new premises for the business, enabling him to expand further.
Helped by his natural linguistic skills, he had a particular affinity with France and Germany. This, combined with his love of meeting and talking to new people, was the key to the company’s next big development. While on a trip to Germany he was in a company canteen when he noticed someone sitting by himself. Being Kendrick, he figured the lone man was in need of company and might like to chat, so he went over and introduced himself. That introduction led to the formation of Stort F&F (Fragrances and Flavours), now a key pillar in the Stort Group business alongside Stort Industrial and Stort Life Sciences.
Kendrick was probably best known for that friendly, outgoing nature. He is fondly remembered as someone who would call the office from his car, just minutes after leaving. He wanted human connection, and he was great at achieving it. Reflecting this, his daughters remember that Kendrick was one of the first people to get a car phone, in the days before modern mobile phones, and they recall going on journeys with him, constantly on his car phone acting as his personal assistant for the day while he drove and they relayed his conversation to whomever was on the other end of the line.
Kendrick was passionate about the chemical distribution industry. In the words of his daughter Emma Marchant, who joined the company in 2001, “He absolutely loved to sell. He loved meeting people, and he was passionate about the products he was selling and the applications he was selling into.”
“He would print everything and never throw anything away,” she adds. “Even right to the end at the care home, you could take a piece of paper to him from 20 years ago and he would always know what and who it was for, and he would have a story to tell.”
Kendrick and Marguerite shared a love of travel, so having their own company with overseas suppliers suited them perfectly. They travelled the world for their work, went on Concorde three times, and they loved the Caribbean. Kendrick also never lost his fondness for fast cars. From the moment he could afford his first Porsche, he always had a sports car in his fleet!
Kendrick did not necessarily expect his children to follow him into the business, but his son Richard joined the company in 1996, after coming down from Oxford and obtaining his MBA from Cranfield University. Richard took over as Managing Director in 2000, when Kendrick became Executive Chairman of the Stort Group. They were subsequently joined by Emma in 2001, and in 2017 his grandson, Matthew Sanderson, became the first of the third Gilkes generation to join the firm. Kendricks other daughter, Melanie Sanderson, joined in 2024 along with Kendricks’ granddaughter Rebeca Sanderson, securing the company as a full family business.
Kendrick was Chairman of the Chemical Business Association (CBA) from 2004 to 2006, and during his tenure he was involved in the Chemistry of the Cabbage national campaign which was a big push for STEM subjects at British schools. He is part of the first father-son duo to Chair the CBA, as Richard subsequently took the Chair between 2023 and 2025.
Sadly, Marguerite passed away from cancer in 2018 but – like Kendrick himself – never actually retired from the job. They both just kept going for as long as they could, dedicated to the family company they had built.
Their legacy is one of the top independent chemical distributors in the UK. Now into the third generation, Stort Group remains 100% family-owned. With the close relationships Kendrick formed throughout his career, and with Marguerite as his firmest supporter throughout, he managed to build an impressive company, with dedicated, technically trained staff and an impressive family involvement across three generations. In true Kendrick spirit, Stort Group prides itself on prioritising the personal along with the professional, and they consider their customers and suppliers to be part of the Stort family.
The number of people who attended his funeral is testament to the number of lives Kendrick touched. The passing of such a vibrant character will always leave a chasm in the lives of the people who knew him, but we can be confident that Kendrick Gilkes will never be forgotten by any of them, and long may his legacy live on.
Contact Stort Group
