Britain: A One-Woman Show

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By her own admission, Mrs. Margery Hurst is one of Britain's richest and most self-esteeming women. She has more reason than most for being both. At 51, she heads Britain's largest secretarial employment agency, London's Brook Street Bureau, which she herself founded in 1946 with a $200 loan. "I never thought for a moment that I could fail," says Mrs. Hurst. Her confidence in herself has not been misplaced. This week her Brook Street Bureau will take the unusual step of going public with the sale of 540,000 of its shares for more than $1,000,000. Another 1.8 million shares and a 73% control of Brook Street remain in the hands of Mrs. Hurst and her family.

More than a quarter of a million girls annually find jobs through the Brook Street Bureau, lured by its imaginative advertising and reputation for considerate treatment. They are hired by an impressive list of clients, including Philips, Monsanto, Woolworth, Pan American and Bendix, who pay dearly for the services of what Mrs. Hurst characterizes as "the Rolls-Royce of employment agencies." Brook Street carefully tests its girls for professional skills, personality and appearance, accepts only one out of every three it interviews, and refuses to place a shorthand typist unless she has had a minimum of three years' experience. In setting up tests, Mrs. Hurst at first demanded that applicants equal her own typing skill. She soon realized, of course, that "no one was likely to be as good as I, so I had to put up with 95% perfection."

By striving for perfection, Mrs. Hurst has made Brook overflow its banks. Profits have risen from $55,000 in 1955 to more than half a million dollars last year. In addition to its main office in London, the bureau has opened 46 branches, five of them last year. The Hurst chain's overseas offices in New York, San Francisco, and Sydney, Australia, do a two-way business, finding English secretaries for American and Australian firms, American and Australian secretaries for English firms.

This shorthand road to success has brought handsome Margery Hurst the rewards she feels she so richly deserves. She lives with her lawyer-manufacturer husband and two teen-age daughters in a 22-room country home in Surrey, has a Mayfair flat, a Bentley, a swimming pool, a butler and a lady's maid. But her proudest possession remains the Brook Street Bureau. "I have built up this business on my own," she says. "Absolutely on my own. It is a one-woman show."