1946–1963
Before the firm
Clement Templeton came home in 1946 after four years as a navigator with Bomber Command. He took articles with Holroyd Barraclough, a Bradford practice whose clients were mostly wool merchants and worsted spinners, and completed his articles in 1951. Colleagues remembered him as good with numbers and bad at pretending to be impressed. He also kept a navigator’s habit: write down where you are before you decide where to go.
Ruth Shaw joined the same practice as an articled clerk in 1949, aged nineteen. Her father kept the books for a co-operative society in Halifax. She completed her articles in 1954, one of very few women in the West Riding to do so that decade. By 1962 she ran the firm’s tax work in everything but title.
In the spring of 1963 the senior partner told her she would not be made a partner, “for the comfort of the clients”. Clement resigned the same week.
1963–1979
The early years
That September they took two rooms on the first floor at Park Square East, with a junior named Dennis Firth, who stayed for thirty-eight years. The first client was a wire-drawing firm in Holbeck that followed Ruth from Bradford. It stayed with us until it closed in 1991.
Within a few years the practice acted for businesses across Leeds and Bradford, most of them small manufacturers and family shops. Two habits from those years are still house rules:
- Answer the phone. Clement believed a client who couldn’t reach their accountant would start making decisions without one.
- Write it down plainly. Ruth sent every client a one-page letter with their accounts, setting out what had happened and what to watch next. We still do.
1980–1999
Harder decades
The 1980s were cruel to the mills and works that made up much of our client list. We lost many of them. The firm became known for helping owners close a business with dignity: paying suppliers, protecting what redundancy pay it could, and making sure families weren’t left with debts that weren’t theirs.
In 1983, when a Bradford dyeworks closed, Ruth sat with its bank until every employee’s redundancy pay had been met in full. We still tell new trainees that story.
The firm grew with what came next: distributors, food producers, engineering subcontractors, and later software and design studios. Clement retired in 1986. In 1984 we bought our first computer, an Apricot, to run a payroll bureau. Our outsourced finance team grew from that machine.
Ruth stayed as senior partner until 1994, the year a trainee named Fenella Garside arrived.
2000–2019
Three offices
In 2003 we opened in Sheffield, taking on the clients of Gordon Hepworth, a sole practitioner retiring after forty years among the city’s toolmakers, cutlers and engineers. The office moved into a former file works on Alma Street, Kelham Island, in 2011.
In 2009 we merged with Ashworth Pike, a four-person practice in Manchester that acted for creative and digital businesses. It gave us an office on King Street, and our first clients who had never owned a filing cabinet.
2004 to now
Why the name stays
Clement died in 2004. Ruth died in 2018, aged eighty-nine. She read every partners’ newsletter until the end and returned corrections in green ink. No Templeton or Shaw has worked here since Ruth retired, and the partners have never considered changing the name.
During the pandemic every office line was answered from home, and we filed clients’ first furlough claims over the weekend the scheme opened. Fenella Garside has been senior partner since 2019. There are now seven partners, across Leeds, Sheffield and Manchester.
House rules
What we hold to
- Answer the phone. A person picks up during office hours, and every client has a named partner and manager who know them.
- Plain figures. If you can’t explain your accounts to your family after reading our letter, the letter has failed.
- Bad news early. You hear what you would rather not while there is still time to act.
- Fees in writing. Fixed, agreed before we start, and reviewed once a year. No invoice should surprise you.
- Long tenure. We expect to know a business for decades. Many clients are on their second or third generation with us.