After her death at the age of 62, RICHARD KAY remembers Jacqueline Gold trends now

Hers was a tale of two very different lives. One was the poised and polished businesswoman who made the sleazy sex toys and kinky lingerie industry respectable, earning herself a fortune – and once drawing a knowing look from the late Queen – in the process.

The other was a young girl sexually abused as a teenager by a stepfather whose brutality was ignored by her mother, something she kept secret for 25 years.

Both lives belonged to Jacqueline Gold, the retail genius behind the Ann Summers chain, whose death at the age of 62 after a long battle with breast cancer was announced yesterday.

In a statement, her family said her passing had left them ‘utterly heartbroken’. Her death comes just weeks after that of her beloved football club boss father David Gold, the joint chairman of Premier League West Ham, and the man whose trust in his daughter was to transform both their lives.

Sex was the family business.

Her father made his money largely out of top shelf magazines. His pornographic publishing empire included such titles as Hardcore Housewives, Rustler, Butt Babes and Derriere.

It was said that when Jacqueline was born he cried because she wasn’t a boy who could inherit the business.

In the event Jacqueline revolutionised it by taking Britain’s raunchiest company mainstream. In 1979, just out of school, she did work experience at an Ann Summers store – her father had bought its four outlets after they had gone bust a few years earlier. In those days they were the seedy destinations for men in dirty raincoats, a world away from the glitzy High Street emporiums they were to become.

She was getting paid less than the tea lady on £45 a week when she had a flash of inspiration after spending an evening at a Tupperware-style party.

‘Some of the girls there knew I was working at Ann Summers,’ she recalled. ‘They said to me, “We want to buy sexy underwear and sex toys to spice up our marriages, but we don’t want to have to go into a sex shop”.’

It was a eureka moment. ‘I saw an opportunity to empower women, the exact opposite to what had happened to me as a child,’ she said. By 21 and with a plan in mind, she made her pitch to her father’s board of directors, a group of men running a business completely targeted at men. It was not easy. One of the directors hurled his glasses on the table and told her: ‘This is never going to work. Women just aren’t interested in sex.’

Ms Gold later recalled: ‘I thought, “That says more about your sex life than the real world”.’

The board, however, agreed and the rest is history.

From a handful of organisers – housewives earning money on commission – she reached 500 within a matter of months, and soon there were thousands.

It was quite simply the most successful party plan operation in the country, transporting sex out of sex shops and into living rooms from which men were banished.

The savvy plan allowed Ann Summers to get around laws that prevented sex toys being put on public display. She was determined to take it away ‘from the raincoat brigade and turn it into a female institution’.

She became chief executive of the company in 1987. In 2000, Ann Summers acquired the Knickerbox brand, which now has a concession in every store.

Along the way this purveyor of sex toys, bondage gear, racy underwear and vibrators was made a CBE in 2016 and introduced to the Queen at a Buckingham Palace reception.

Indeed the detail of that royal encounter in 2007 is worth repeating. ‘Everyone was very nice,’ she said of the reception. ‘We talked about how I employ 10,000 people and that I’m based in Surrey. The Queen said, “Where are you from?’’ She looked at my badge and said “Oh Ann Summers’’.

‘The twinkle in her eye meant it was obvious she

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