Background and career
Owen John Oyston (born 3 January 1934) is an English businessman best known as the former majority owner of Blackpool Football Club. Oyston was convicted of rape and indecent assault of a 16-year-old girl in 1996. He served three years and six months of a six-year sentence in prison. He was released after a judicial review of the parole board's refusal to grant parole. On 25 February 2019, Oyston and his daughter, Natalie Christopher, were removed from the board of Blackpool Football Club.
Oyston was born in County Durham, but his family moved to Blackpool when he was two. He was educated at St Joseph's College in the town. He opted out of further education at sixteen and started his career as an actor. In the 1950s, he moved to London, where he started his business career as a sewing-machine salesman; however, the firm failed, and in 1960 he moved home to Blackpool.
Following his conviction for rape and subsequent release from prison, Oyston continued to operate his various businesses. He returned to estate agencies and glossy magazines. He relaunched Oyston's estate agency and revived two previously low-profile Ridings Publications titles, The Lancashire Magazine and The Yorkshire Ridings Magazine, with managers and journalists who previously worked with him on the "Life" series of county magazines.
After undertaking various sales jobs based in or around Blackpool, Oyston had considerable success in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s in the estate agency business. By the mid-1980s Oyston's Estate Agents had become the largest firm of family-owned estate agents in the United Kingdom. In 1987, he sold Oyston's Estate Agents for an estimated £37 million to Royal Insurance, just weeks before the stock market crash. The sale was complicated by a personal intervention at the annual general meeting of Royal Insurance on 21 April 1988 by Michael Murrin, a political agitator from Preston funded by Sir Peter Blaker, a Conservative MP and rival cable television franchise bidder. Murrin described handling company tax documents stolen from Oyston's Estate Agency to trigger a tax investigation. “The conspirators had stolen the income tax records of their political opponents, a crime never previously recorded in the 200-year history of income tax in Britain.” On 25 October 1991,Private Eye reported “In the middle of this extraordinary feud is one Michael Murrin, a fish and chip shop owner from Preston. He has now revealed that he was first hired to dig for dirt on Oyston more than 10 years ago by Bill Harrison, a Tory millionaire whose house outside Preston was used by Margaret Thatcher as a helicopter base during Conservative party conferences in Blackpool.” In April 1992, Esquire stated that the principal source of funds for a seven-year campaign had been William Harrison (1921–1999), a Lancashire property developer. The report by Chris Blackhurst described "a seamy saga of smears, death and vendetta. Or how two Tory MPs, a fish and chip shop owner, and a Blackpool wheeler dealer with a secret grudge tried to ruin a socialist millionaire."
Oyston built up holdings in publishing, including the Lancashire Life series of magazines, before selling them in 2000 to the Archant Publishing Company. He was a major investor in the News on Sunday, a struggling left-wing tabloid newspaper. It had been launched in April 1987 and had been kept afloat during the 1987 general election campaign thanks to the extension of a loan from the Transport and General Workers Union. However, after the election, it went bankrupt and Oyston then bought it outright. Just five months later, in November 1987, it ceased publication. He was a major investor in, and chief executive of, Miss World’s international beauty pageant through Trans World Communications until 1991.
Oyston had media interests in commercial radio. He was chairman of the Red Rose Group, later to be named Trans World Communications, which owned and launched Red Rose Radio in Preston in October 1982. The group went on to purchase Radio Aire in Leeds, Red Dragon Radio in Cardiff, and Piccadilly Radio in Manchester. All these stations were subsequently sold to the publishing group Emap. Oyston also acquired The Superstation, which had been set up in 1987 as a central, syndicated overnight sustaining service for independent local radio in the UK. It closed in 1990.
