ADVERTISING FEATURE

Do you want someone to come round to your house and push jelly through your letterbox? Perhaps you're in need of a reliable tradesman to nail a poodle to the underside of a coffee table? Or maybe you're just looking for someone who can impersonate a chicken?

Well now you need look no further -
Wm Hawtrey & Co. can do all this and more.

Founded in 1906 by General Sir William Hawtrey DSO, Hawtrey & Co. have over fifty years' experience of providing highly specialised and unusual services to the general public. In fact, as keen mathematicians will have deduced, they've actually been at it for over a hundred years, so it's probably about time somebody updated their advertising copy.

Before he started the company, Sir William enjoyed a successful and varied military career, distinguishing himself in such far flung locations as Indonesia, the Sudan, Bolivia and Tibet. Not that he ever served in those places, but he did spend quite a lot of time on holiday. He was also awarded the Distinguished Service Order for disarming a Prussian on the seafront at Brighton during a weekend break in 1897.

However, notable though his military exploits were, it was an entirely unrelated talent that was to inspire his business venture. From a very early age, Sir William had been able to guess the weight of sausages just by looking at them, and although he never found any practical application for this talent within his lifetime*, it led him to form two conclusions. Firstly, he believed that there must be many other people who had similar wild and unexpected talents. Secondly, he reasoned that no matter how apparently pointless such talents were, there must exist a demand for them somewhere.

He went on to form a company that would gather together people who specialised in such disparate and impractical practices, offering their services to the public. In doing this he arrived at a third conclusion: this being that no matter how insane and inadequate your business plan, if you keep plugging away at if for long enough, you're sure to find some idiot to invest in it.

Since being floated on the stock exchange in 1998, Wm Hawtrey & Co PLC have gone from strength to strength, and despite never having had a single customer in the entire time it has been existence, the company remains as vibrant as ever.

So if you need someone to paint smiley faces onto bananas, terrify a rodent through the medium of dance, build a map of the London Underground out of chocolate fingers, shout rude words at a nun in Chiswick, fill socks with a variety of soft cheeses, lift a pig up onto a high shelf and leave it there overnight, learn how to play the spaghetti harp, underline every instance of the word 'sometimes' in the works of Charles Dickens, fix headlights to a cow, keep tabs on a prominent greengrocer or simply hurl a range of different sized spanners at the Moderator of the Church of Scotland, then give Hawtrey's a call today.

Wm Hawtrey & Co.

No, we don't know either.

*We have been asked to point out that Hawtrey never found an application for this ability after his lifetime, either.