Sir Ernest Hall is reflecting on how he escaped the unpromising circumstances of his birth, and transcended them, becoming rich, a knight of the realm and, especially in his later years, able
to fulfil the hopes and dreams of his youth.

As a child, no one expected Ernest to succeed, nor even particularly wanted him to. His parents would have preferred to hold him back rather than see him climb out of their own narrow, northern horizons to better himself.

But better himself he did. He made his fortune first in Yorkshire textiles, then property development, selling up 25 years ago to found Dean Clough, the celebrated arts and business complex, renowned now as a model of regeneration, created from a derelict former carpet mill in Halifax. He was knighted in 1993 and this year's Sunday Times Rich List estimates Sir Ernest and his family as worth £50m.

Against the odds, he became a success. And it is failure, he suggests, that has had much to do with it – chiefly his failure to follow his first, life-long passion to pursue his dream of becoming a full-time professional concert pianist.

He was born in 1930 in working class Bolton, Lancashire, where his parents worked in mills and then ran a pie shop. "I was a child full of fear," he remembers: "Of other children, of school, of authority, but most of all, of death.

An early memory is of walking out towards the moors, stopping at a beautiful old stone house, open to the public. Entering the main hall, he finds himself transported, entranced by the tall pillars, the white walls and the wooden roof supports that criss-cross high above his head. "This is paradise. This is a house for angels," he
tells himself. "This is eternity, but even so I feel I'm looking into my own future."

His experiences of failure and success have led Sir Ernest to believe strongly that each and every human being is capable of astonishing development in a unique way. In 1986, as a member of the Arts Council, he gave a lecture called In Defence of Genius. "It really seemed to strike a chord," he says. "So many people are desperate to know that they are wonderful and unique. It gets forgotten and lost in a system where people are measured in a terrifying way. It's a much underrated quality, the uniqueness of the human race.

"We are evolutionary by nature. We can evolve into better people. We really have the ability to transcend the boundaries
of destiny."

And so he has charted his own meteoric, transcendent development in How To Be A Failure and Succeed, the story of his life up to the age of 53 – the period before Dean Clough. Most names have been changed and Sir Ernest hesitates to describe it as
an autobiography.

"An autobiography would imply that I am going to tell every aspect," he says. "The only things
I tell are those which remained with me. It was my way of reliving the past."

Music is where it all started for young Ernest. When he is nine, someone brings a wind-up gramophone into the classroom and he hears "a divine sound". His parents buy him a piano and he begins lessons. He passes his 11-plus but mum and dad don't want him to go to grammar school, his mother warning: "I don't believe in so much education. It gives them ideas. They get too big for their own parents."

The headmaster steps in to persuade them otherwise.

Ernest makes up in hard work, talent and ambition what he lacks in opportunity, and secures a place at the Royal Manchester College of Music to study the piano, where he develops to such a level that he is sought out to play at increasingly prestigious recitals and concerts.

His parents remained unimpressed, resentful and uninterested, something that disappoints Sir Ernest to this day. A renowned, much-respected pianist, he still performs in public and tells how his mother failed to attend an important concert he gave a few years ago, afterwards commenting: "I like something you can sing along to."

He sighs: "That's the culture gap I've always felt – living in one world, yet feeling that my parents were living in another." Despite their differences, Sir Ernest has never forgotten his responsibilities and continues to look after his mother, who is now 107 years old.

Music propelled Ernest into the world of the middle and upper classes, and the book provides a fascinating account of the tentative progress of a working class young man making his way in post-war northern Britain, with society and its rules in a state of anguished flux.

He marries middle-class fellow music student Ruth, whose father has made his money in textiles. It's the door to another intriguing new world for Ernest, who is beginning to doubt his ability ever to make it as a world-class concert pianist.

As a businessman he is astonishingly adept, transferring to it all his industrious vigour, first in textiles in Yorkshire, becoming managing director, mill owner, and then turning to property development. Aged 53, he sells his business interests for a huge cheque and decides to combine his love of the arts with his flair for enterprise in the brave and stunning venture that becomes Dean Clough.

Sir Ernest admits that there are gaps in the book. His wedding is not mentioned (it was a register office do, as his mother refused to have anything to do with it), nor are the births of his children (he has four from his first marriage and another son, now age 23, from his second), but this is because he was concentrating on how he developed into a success, not because these personal events were unimportant to him.

His first wife died in 1996. "I was devoted to her even though we got divorced," he says. He married a second time to Sarah, Lady Hall, although they don't live together now and his partner is the cookery guru Prue Leith (on her website, she sweetly describes him as her "sous-chef"). Lady Hall has a chateau in France and a cottage, not far from Royds Hall, near Bradford, the house Sir Ernest owned from 1975 to 2004. These days, he's a bit of a nomad, he says, flitting between England, France and his house in Lanzarote.

It's a long, long way from his birthplace in a Bolton mill street, a painting of which is used on the book cover. It's by Sir Ernest's father, Ernest Senior, who discovered art in retirement (he died when he was 86). "He did it all from memory," says Sir Ernest. "He had no education, no profession, no artistic inspiration as I understood it, and yet after he retired he had the urge to paint.

"Naivety is a very important quality. Business schools turn out people far too clever to do anything because they see all the pitfalls," he says, adding that if he and his son, Jeremy, had known what they were up against when they first created Dean Clough, they might never have started it. "We were not clever enough to see that it was impossible. It's run very professionally now."

The story of Dean Clough (he retired as chairman this year) will be told in a second book, which he hopes to finish by the end of the year. "But I'm very busy. I've still got the Chopin project," he says, with enthusiasm. It has long been his ambition to record the complete works of Chopin – 14 CDs in all, of which he has so far recorded seven. He plans to complete the project in time for the bicentenary of Chopin's birth, in 1810. "I shall be 80 years old," he says. At 78, he's still reaching, still transcending boundaries. "Dreams of achievement have an amazing power in your life," he says. "You find that you are elevated by ambition itself."


How to Succeed and Be A Failure, by Sir Ernest Hall, is published today (Book Guild at £17.99). To order a copy from the Yorkshire Post Bookshop, call free on 0800 0153232 or go online at www. yorkshirepostbookshop.co.uk. Postage and packing is £2.75.