Early Life
Sugar was born in Hackney, east London, into a Jewish family. He is the youngest of four children of Fay (1907–1994) and Nathan (1907–1987) Sugar. His father was a tailor in the East End garment industry.
When Sugar was young, his family lived in a council flat. Because of his profuse, curly hair, he was nicknamed "Mopsy". He attended Northwold Primary School and then Brooke House Secondary School in Upper Clapton, Hackney, and made extra money by working at a greengrocers. In The Apprentice (2009), Sugar revealed "I was in the Jewish Lads Brigade, Stamford Hill Division, Trainee Bugler, but it didn't make me sell computers!" After leaving school at 16, he worked briefly for the civil service as a statistician at the Ministry of Education. He started selling car aerials and electrical goods out of a van he had bought with his savings of £50.
Read more about this topic: Alan Sugar
Famous quotes containing the words early and/or life:
“Many a woman shudders ... at the terrible eclipse of those intellectual powers which in early life seemed prophetic of usefulness and happiness, hence the army of martyrs among our married and unmarried women who, not having cultivated a taste for science, art or literature, form a corps of nervous patients who make fortunes for agreeable physicians ...”
—Sarah M. Grimke (17921873)
“In certain almost supernatural states of the soul, the profundity of life reveals itself entirely in the spectacle, however ordinary it may be, before ones eyes. It becomes its symbol.”
—Charles Baudelaire (18211867)