36 | Tees Business
“I hope Acklam Hall
helps to spread a
positive message
further afield about
what this town can
deliver.”
Hallmark: He is Acklam Hall’s custodian
but Neil Whittingham’s real business
passion is in the health sector.
Here’s to good health: the new medical
facility will open by Christmas.
Acklam Hall was built in 1683.
pretty much seven nights a week. He wanted
to give us the best possible start he could,
so he sent us to Mill Hill. Then, when I was
11, he had a cash flow issue and gave us the
news we were being packed off to Stokesley
School.”
Whittingham was eventually employed
within his father’s building business
after potential opportunities to become
a professional footballer with Aston Villa
and Middlesbrough failed to materialise.
A contract offer from Villa was put on hold
when their European Cup-winning manager
Ron Saunders suffered a heart attack. When
the teenager’s Villa youth coach Brian Little
switched to Boro, he was offered trials by his
local club but turned down the opportunity,
instead joining his father’s building firm at the
age of 18.
Over the next 10 years, he qualified as a
chartered builder whilst helping his father
expand the business, as they built a series
of nursing homes – but then a disagreement
between the two over the firm’s future
resulted in Whittingham Jnr’s sudden
departure.
“I was totally committed to the business
but my old man just wouldn’t let me off the
leash to expand it. When I reluctantly put in
my notice, he sacked me immediately!”
With his second child on the way, a
mortgage, a bank overdraft and no income,
Whittingham was driven to act fast, so he
sold the house he’d recently built, investing
the profits into a local business, Weatherhead
Construction.
The firm became local leaders in the field
of building health facilities, an area which
Whittingham has expanded since setting up a
new business, WW Transitional Care.
“I have a personal desire to try to help the
provision of health care across the area,” he
says. “That’s driven by having seen my father
spend his last days in a nursing home, where
his dignity was stripped away from him. We
seem to have a gap between health care and
end-of-life living, so I’ve made it my business
to create projects that get the different
healthcare providers working and talking with
each other.”
It’s a journey that has brought him to
Acklam Hall, by some margin his grandest