Clive Emson, the head of Clive Emson Land and Property Auctioneers and a regular face on Homes Under the Hammer for more than 20 years, died on Wednesday peacefully with his family by his side at the age of 79. His death closes a career that began at a junior estate agent's wage of £1.50 a week and ended with a business known across southern England.
His family said Emson's life in property was built from the ground up. He left the King's School, Rochester at 16 with a couple of O-levels and started at Geering and Colyer in Maidstone in 1968, learning the trade the hard way before launching his first estate agency, Clive Emson and Co, in Hythe in 1973. He later described those early years as rough going, saying, “It was not the best time of my life, and I was a nightmare for them.”
What followed was a steady expansion that turned a local agent into a name recognised well beyond Kent. Emson merged his business with Ward and Partners in 1983, saw the chain taken over nationally by Prudential in 1986 and resigned three years later after becoming disillusioned. He then struck out again, opening his own firm in Folkestone during the height of the recession before later taking over a small industrial unit on Medway City Estate in Strood. From there, the portfolio gradually spread across southern England, from Kent to Cornwall and including the Isle of Wight.
His auction business became just as familiar. The company outgrew its venue at the Great Danes Hotel in Maidstone and moved to the Kent County Showground at Detling, where the Clive Emson Conference Centre is now one of several halls used for its six-weekly land and property sales. Since the pandemic, those sales have remained online, keeping the company visible even as the format changed. Emson's own shorthand for the job was simple: “have gavel, will travel.”
Beyond business, he was awarded an MBE for services to vulnerable and disadvantaged young people in Kent, a distinction that reflected work outside the auction room. He met his wife Sue at a Tonbridge branch where she was the daughter of the boss, and they were married for 50 years before her death six years ago. They had two children, James, 52, who was managing director, and Rebecca, 55, whose husband Steve was involved in the IT side of the company.
Emson also spoke with unusual frankness about the job he chose over office life, saying it was “more laid back, and I enjoyed talking and meeting people.” That instinct helped turn a boy who left school at 16 into a businessman with a reach that stretched from one end of the south of England to the other. His death leaves behind a family-run company, a long provincial footprint and a public persona that made him far better known than most auctioneers ever become.
