Fifty years ago, a man whose entrepreneurial spirit did not let him stay satisfied with a safe salary at the Medical College library, bought himself two knitting machines and six sewing machines and set about pioneering an industry. Those were days when imports ruled the roost and anything local was sneered at as inferior.

Bernard Botejue

But Bernard Botejue who died last week did not let the then business climate loaded against indigenous products daunt him. He used to pedal to the Pettah with a boxload of his banians tied to the carrier at the back and hawk them to various merchants he wooed both with the quality of the product and a price that was cheaper than the imported competition.

In those days. Botejue's small factory employed six girls who cut and sewed the banians from the fabric he knitted and finished himself. He was not the only player in the field. The bigger mills in Moratuwa, also into hosiery, gave him stiff competition. But Bernard Botejue soldiered on and by the sixties when government policy looked with favour on indigenous industry, his Bernard's banians had become a household name.

When Botejue died, the small business he pioneered in an environment far from friendly to domestic industry had grown into an industrial group of five companies, Bernard Botejue Industries Ltd., Texfabric Exports Ltd., Bernard Phillknit (Ceylon) Ltd., Bernit Trading Co. Ltd. and Bernard's with a workforce of over two thousand. It was truly a log cabin to White House epic achieved with grit, determination and a will to succeed.

As his business grew in the sixties, Bernard Botejue Industries Ltd. was incorporated in 1967 when the factory was employing 300 workers. Six years later, the company was exporting T shirts to the USA. That was a moment that Botejue savoured. His products could compete effectively in one of the world's most sophisticated markets.

The opening of the economy in 1977 gave many entrepreneurs new opportunities and Bernard Botejue was not slow in seizing these. Those were exciting years when the company grew both in domestic and export markets. Always far-seeing, he invested the money he earned not only in expanding his factories but also in educating in children abroad and helping them to gain the knowledge and expertise that would take the family business to new horizons.

By 1978, Botejue had entered into a technical and marketing collaboration with a large knitted glove manufacturer in the USA and floated Texfabric Exports Ltd. to do this business. By then his two sons had completed their education abroad and joined him in a business that was both growing and prospering.

In 1980 he signed a joint venture agreement with a Hongkong outfit big in the manufacture and export of men's and women's underwear and set up another company, Bernard Philknit (Ceylon) Ltd. to service this collaboration. Even as his business grew, he was doing what the country desperately needed by creating new job opportunities for young people. With Bernard Philknit, the workforce had grown 50% to 450.

During the Premadasa years when the government launched the ambitious 200 garment factories programme in an effort to take jobs to the countryside where most of the unemployed youth lived, Botejue set up a new factory in Kolonne to make knitted garments. This venture alone now employs 600 people while the whole group has over 2,000 employees on board.

Always a family man, Botejue who schooled at St. Thomas', Mt. Lavinia and was patron of the Scout Association there, never let his success get to his head. Simple and unassuming, he was a silent philanthropist and social worker whose generosity had benefited many in the area in which he lived. A past president of the Apparel Association, he was very much a part of the growth of an industry whose job creation propensities gave him particular satisfaction.