Former Sessions manager tells of heart emergency A MANAGER at Sessions of York who suffered a near-fatal heart attack after learning that he was to be made redundant from the York print company, along with 96 others, said today: “I don’t blame the firm.”

Peter Haw, 63, the general manager of Sessions’ machine division, collapsed after making his way to the Huntington company to clear up paperwork and drop off his company car and credit card.

He is recovering at his home in Stockton Lane, York, and keeping his career options open after ambulancemen, whom he could not praise more highly, had to resuscitate him and make an emergency dash to Leeds General Infirmary.

There, cardiac specialists operated on him to insert two stents to open his clogged arteries.

Mr Haw said: “It came out of the blue. The specialist said that the ingredients for a heart attack would have been there anyway.”

There was no holiday pay or redundancy from the ill-fated firm, which added to the pressure, but Mr Haw said he was certain it was a thrombosis waiting to happen.

He said: “Possibly the stress over a short period could have acted as a catalyst but I am in no way blaming Sessions.”

In fact, had he not been at the firm’s premises when he collapsed, he might have been dead. An ambulance, fortunately in the vicinity, took a mere two minutes to arrive. Any longer could have been fatal, he pointed out.

The irony was that division had been making money. It had just delivered the second of two £250,000 machines to Bangladesh, “but whatever money we made was offset by the core business, self-adhesive labels, which suffered an estimated £700,000 loss.”

Three of the 13 employees in the machine division were asked to stay on by the administrators, P&A Partnerships of Sheffield, to finish two machines ordered by chocolate manufacturers Thorntons and one for pharmaceutical company Thermo Fisher.

Mr Haw understood that two of his team had now found jobs, but the rest were standing by in the hope that the administrators could find a buyer for his division.

“I hope so because it would take many years to assemble a team of that calibre, each one of them a specialist in their own field,” he said.

Already eight jobs have been rescued after the £135 million turnover Paragon Print & Packaging Group of Spalding, Lincs bought Sessions self-adhesive label printing business. But the machine division and commercial printing operation remain for sale.

Mr Haw blamed the collapse of Sessions on rising raw material costs, having taken on a major labelling contract with contact lens manufacturer Bausch and Lomb.

He said he had sympathy for Mark Sessions, who had visited him. “He was absolutely gutted. I have never come across an employer who holds the interest of his employees in such high regard. In its 199 years his firm gave thousands of York people meaningful employment.”