LEIGH COLLINS meets the man who has moved Margaret Thatcher, the Queen ...and £1.2billion-worth of royal armour.

Q:What do Buckingham Palace, 10 Downing Street, and the Tower of London have in common?

A: Whetstone overseas movers Michael Gerson Ltd have moved items in or out of them all.

Michael Gerson, the 64-year-old owner and founder of Michael Gerson Ltd, based in Downland Close, celebrated 40 years of his international moving company at the Chicken Shed theatre in Southgate on Monday.23/4

The company is probably best-known for moving a tearful Margaret Thatcher out of number ten in the days before her successor was chosen.

"Moving Margaret Thatcher out of Downing Street was quite interesting," he said, "because the country sort of came to a halt. The media were so bereft of things to write about because there were no politics, that the moving men were the things that took up the news.

"She said she wasn't going to stand [in the Tory party leadership ballot] on Thursday and I went down to see the job on Friday. Then we did it over the weekend principally and also the Monday. They had the ballot on Tuesday."

Mr Gerson's association with Baroness Thatcher goes back more than 20 years, since she first opened his Whetstone site in June 1978, when she was Leader of the Opposition.

When British forces first landed on the Falkland Islands to fight the Argentinian invasion on May 21, 1982, Baroness Thatcher was opening Mr Gerson's phase two warehouse at the same location.

She also opened Mr Gerson's second warehouse in the Midlands in 1988 when she was in her third term as Prime Minister.

Testing Mr Gerson's claim that his company will take anything anywhere, the Whetstone movers were entrusted with delivering a bicentennial gift from the people of Australia to the Queen in 1988.

The Australian State Coach, an ornate horse-drawn carriage was safely delivered from Sydney to the Royal Mews at the back of Buckingham Palace, where the Queen keeps her horses, carriages and Rolls Royces.

Mr Gerson even had a chat about the carriage with Her Majesty.

"When I met the Queen I asked her how she liked it," said Mr Gerson. "She was rather surprised about that, she didn't know who I was from Adam."

This was not the last of Mr Gerson's encounters with royalty.

In 1995, his company began moving the centuries-old Royal Armouries collection from the Tower of London to a new purpose-built museum in Leeds more than 40,000 items in all.

"There were hundreds of muskets and thousands of swords and cannons even body armour for an elephant," he said. "Henry V came back from Agincourt [in 1415], took his armour off and it stayed there ever since."

The 1,892-piece elephant armour took three months to put back together in Leeds.

Another suit of armour belonging to Henry VIII was valued at £30 million five years ago.

The entire collection was valued at £1.2billion a big responsibility for the removal firm.

Mr Gerson is something of a collector himself, and displayed his own 1902 pantechnicon pulled by shire horses Hercules and Samson from Finchley's College Farm along with a steamwagon from 1934, and a vintage van from 1947.

In fact his Morris Minor van was the one of the first vehicles to travel from Britain to France through the Channel Tunnel when it took part in the official opening.

Starting from small offices at 447 High Road, Finchley, Michael Gerson Ltd has grown enormously. In 1983, it was awarded the Queen's Award for Export Achievement, and now it is a world-renowned company, employing 92 staff.

Mr Gerson says he is 'surprised' at the company's success. "I didn't think when I started it would flourish the way it has. I just played it by ear."