Obituary: Evan Steadman

Mick Elliott writes: Evan Steadman was best known as the organiser of the UK’s most successful trade shows. He was a larger than life character and in truth the epithet showman would better describe him. He had a highly efficient team which looked after the show organisation.

Steadman’s forte was the marketing of the show. Marketing was in fact his background. In the 1970s he was marketing manager for Texas Instruments in the UK. At the time, semiconductor advertising was stodgy fare. A possibly apocryphal story has him calling his team together at TI, picking up sheaves of paper, declaring “This is what I think of your marketing plans”, and chucking the lot out of the nearest window.

His modus operandi was to make an impact. For TI he achieved this by commissioning Ralph Steadman, the eminent British cartoonist and caricaturist to design an advertising campaign. The electronics advertising industry had never seen anything like it and hasn’t since.

In the mid 70s Steadman turned his attention to exhibitions. His first foray, a semiconductor event called Seminex, was satisfactory. He then hit the jackpot with the All Electronics Show, which started as a very affordable benchtop show in the Great Room of the Grosvenor House Hotel in London and grew into the British Electronics Week, which took up half of Olympia.

It was a huge success, and very different from previous rather stuffy UK shows. The feature was a prize car to be won by one lucky visitor.

The show did not fulfil his ambition of toppling the Munich Electronica event as Europe’s premier electronics exhibition. The parochial title put off some overseas exhibitors and visitors, and Steadman’s marketing, which featured a John Bull character holding a British bulldog, was also seen as a deterrent.

Alongside the show he staged the Electronics Industry Ball at the Grosvenor House featuring the first annual industry awards dubbed the TOBIEs (named after Steadman’s son).

As Electronica remained impregnable Steadman sold the business for £5m to of all people Robert Maxwell, thus becoming one of the few who made money from the man Private Eye dubbed the Bouncing Czech. Steadman also backed a number of UK-based PR agencies the most successful and durable being Bush, Steadman, a partnership with Peter Bush, a company which is still in business today.

Inevitably, he was attracted to the real show business and he became a backer or angel to the musical Me and My Girl, which originally starred Robert Lindsay and Emma Thompson. He was a generous host to many at the Strand theatre, the venue for the show which ran for years in London. Another of his ventures was the Jewellery Fair and Steadman appeared on BBC’s Breakfast News adorning the presenter Selina Scott with a £1m necklace to publicise the event.

However he never lost touch with the electronics industry and launched in the 90s a new show called the Electronic Components Industry Fair. It’s democratic theme limited the exhibitors, no matter how big or small, to a maximum of three shell scheme units. One could be bought for £1,000 – thus producing the show’s motto of A Stand for a Grand. It proved a popular strategy with the SMEs, less so with the bigger companies who like to flex their exhibition muscles with large, purpose built stands. The visitor turn out was excellent.

The industry ball was also successfully revived and is the forerunner of Electronics Weekly’s Elektra Awards.

In latter years Steadman also attempted to produce a musical based on Maxwell’s life. He was prevented from staging it because Maxwell’s sons successfully pleaded it could prejudice their upcoming trial. Their victory made the Nine O’Clock News where, incongruously given he had just seen a great deal of money disappear, Evan appeared pouring champagne for the disappointed cast. That however was his way!

Unfortunately Steadman’s health which had not been robust for some years – he was on his third liver transplant – began to fail and without his energy the show plateaued and was sold off, and while remaining a constant visitor to other shows, that was pretty much it and he retired gracefully to his homes in Cambridge and the South of France.

Mick Elliott