David Gold said he wept at the birth of his first child, because the baby was a girl, Jacqueline. He had wanted a boy to go to football with, who might grow up to run a family business – he and his brother Ralph were early entrepreneurs in soft porn, starting with stocking spicy mags in a station kiosk in the 1950s, then producing their own publications and selling sex accessories.
Jacqueline Gold, who has died of breast cancer aged 62, did go into the family business, but not as inheritor. She scrounged temporary work from her father at 19 and was paid £45 a week to handle the payroll for a few semi-respectable sex shops that he had bought out of receivership. Their original founder had called them “Ann Summers” after his secretary, as he intended them to attract women, but what clientele they had were, said Gold, the “seedy raincoat brigade”.
