Company Of Adventures - Merchant Prince Part 26

Gordon Smith, the scion of a wellknown grain family with the appropriate Winnipeg CANADIAN AT LAST 435.

credentials (directors.h.i.+ps in Beaver Lumber and Monarch Life) joined the board, as did James Richardson, who became chairman and the fourth-gen- eration member to head the family grain firm. (This particular Richardson later became minister of national defence in the Trudeau cabinet.) Two other previously named Committeemen, Stewart Searle and Joe Harris, J . oined the parent board.

But the most significant catch was Graham Towers, the former (and first) governor of the Bank of Canada, who during his twenty-year reign at the central bank had become universally recognized as the countrys most respected economic thinker. In his time, Towers had preserved an unsullied reputation for business prescience, but he never lost his shy and self-depreciating presence. At one time he found himself at a Maritimes hotel without enough cash to settle his account. When a suspicious cas.h.i.+er demanded identification before he would cash a cheque, the Bank of Canada Governor tried with considerable embarra.s.sment to avoid revealing who he was, but finally pulled out a dollar bill and reluctantly showed the startled hotel employee his signature, then decorating Canada's paper currency.

As the Canadian Committee grew in stature, the British board was undergoing a similar metamorphosis. The distinguished but largely decorative Lords Waverley and Alanbrooke departed, while J.E.H. Collins, a thirty-six-year-old financier who later headed Morgan, Grenfell, the London banking firm, moved in, as did Henry (later Lord) Benson and Lord Heyworth.

Collins put in a useful decade and a half on the board, questioning policies with youthful vigour, but it was Benson and Heyworth who caused the most troubleand, in retrospect, the most regret. A distinguished Coopers & Lybrand accountant who had served as a colonel in the Grenadier Guards, Benson was a born 436 MERCHANT PRINCES.

troubleshooter, having chaired three dozen commissions and inquiries.

'rough and unsentimental, he took a good look at the HBC and decided the make-up of its non-executive board of directors was all wrong. To help him with what he felt were the required reforms, he recruited to the board Lord Heyworth, the recently retired head of Unilever, one of the world's great trading companies. Heyworth had worked for the AngloDutch soap and food multinational in Canada, had married a Canadian and was vitally interested in improving the HBCs administration.

The pair set down the necessary steps to reorient a firm whose earnings and performance record they felt had been deplorable. They recommended that the Company's most able operating executives be appointed to a revamped board that would include half a dozen Canadians of Graham Towers's stature; that the Company be immediately Canadianized by transfer of its charter across the Atlantic; and that the HBCs Canadian headquarters be moved from Winnipeg to Montreal or Toronto. The hidden item on their agenda was that Keswick, whom they considered too old-fash- ioned and too compa.s.sionate to wield a broad enough axe, be shoved aside and replaced by Heyworth as a fulltime Governor with clear executive powers to modernize the Company and turn it Canadian. The rest of the board demurred, and even if nearly all of the directors would later admit that Benson and Heyworth had been right, not much happened.

What brought the impa.s.se to a head was the move by Keswick to fill a British board vacancy with Lord Cobbold, the retiring governor (1949-61) of the Bank of England. A subsequent Lord Chamberlain of the Royal Household and later a permanent Lord in Waiting to the Queen, Cameron Fromanteel Cobbold CANADIAN AT LAST 437.

was the perfect personification of the trend Benson and Heyworth had been protesting against: perpetuation of the Company's creaky command structure by the naining of yet another distinguished non-executive director with little knowledge of Canada and less of retailing to a board already top-heavy with such creatures. "Benson and Heyworth," Links later recalled, "argued that far from adapting ourselves to change, we were determined to perpetuate the traditional, dccorative, and entirely ineffective board of the past. All of us agreed there was much to be said about the approach of appointing executive directors, but little to be (lone about it until the right people could be found. Interestingly, the Canadian members were aghast at the prospect and demanded that Benson and Heyworth resign immediately. There was no difficulty about this-neither of them wanted to stay under existing conditions. Heyworth just walked out of the board meeting but Benson, cerebrally superior to anv of us, stayed behind to tell us not what he thought of the Canadians but what the Canadians thought of us, one by one. There was no malice in this, nothing more than a sense of duty to ensure that we did not continue under any delusions."

Keswick won that round ("They had no notion of the strength of the man they were up against," his wife later declared). It was a remarkable reflection on both men that after it was all over, Benson remained Keswick's personal accountant. Yet it was a hollow victory. Looking back on Benson's thwarted coup dYtat, Peter Wood enthusiastically sided with the departed renegades, "They were absolutely right," Wood maintained.

"If their advice had been followed, the Company would have moved to Canada ten years earlier and it would have been very different. For one thing, we could have got into the first instead of third generation of shopping 438 MERCHANT PRINCES.

centreS, which would have meant grabbing a lot of the most desirable locations. We could never do that as long as Chester was around."

HAVING CONSOLIDATE'D ills POWEIZ and position, by the late 1950s Chester had changed. The provocative complainer of the Cooper period had been replaced by a far more equable and cultured presence who had become a fervent Canadian nationalist. He regarded his past battles with London as having been a microcosm of Canada's struggle to free itself from foreign domination, and in Winnipeg's case to become less dependent on the overwhelming influence of central Canadian bankers. He was part of the small but powerful circle of Manitoba capitalists-the Richardsons, the Rileys, the Gourleys and others-dedicated to halting at Winnipeg the flow of money eastward from British Columbia and the Prairies, which was why they launched financial service inst.i.tutions and insurance conipanies.

Within that context Chester grew frustrated by his confinement to his Winnipeg circle and, incongruous as it seemed, enjoyed nothing so much as his semi-annual visits to London. Corporately, he desperately wanted to be the architect of the Company's patriation to Canada, realizing that it had become silly to have the HBC run from London. But personally, he loved the stays in his suite at the Dorchester Hotel, his dinners with the cultured members of the HBC board at Claridges and the St James's Street clubs, or at Greenwich. He enjoyed especially spending weekends at the country home of Joe Links, playing poker and discussing modern art, "He was totally dedicated to the HBc and everybody, both in London and Canada, knew it and respected him for it," Links reminisced. "We all liked his company, and above all, trusted him."

CANADIAN AT LAST 439.

Chester did not plan to attend the Company's May 1959 Court because most of the board was due to be in Winnipeg during July in connection with the Queen's visit for the Rent Paying Ceremony. He did, however, go to London in February and et.i.ther caught pneumon1a or suffered a mild stroke. On his way home, he convalesced at Toronto's Park Plaza Hotel for a week.

On July 23 at a Canadian Committee meeting in Winnipeg, one of the subjects discussed was enlargement of the Company board that would have made more room for Canadians while retaining the requirement that eight directors-including the Governor and Deputy Governor-should be U.K.

residents. Chester stood alone in opposing the restriction, and when he recognized there would be no movement on the issue, orally submitted his resignation.

He was on the platform at the Rent Paying Ceremony at a.s.siniboine Park the next day and even gave a large garden party at his home immediately afterwards. Although his resignation did not officially take effect until September 30, he never again set foot in Hudson's Bay House.*

RICHARD MURRAY, WHO NOW BECAME the HBC's Managing Director, possessed the one quality that could never have been ascribed to Chester: he was a diplomat.

*Chester's final bonus and pension payment amounted to $505,000. The pressures of work removed, Chester lived another seventeen years. Although he resolutely stayed away from the HBC and didn't even shop at its Winnipeg store, in 1976, when he knew he was dying, Chester returned to the Company fold. He requested that his burial service be celebrated byJack Dangerfield andjoan Whiti ng, HBC executives who had become Anglican priests. And so it was.

440 MERCHANT PRINCES.

High-strung, romantic and compa.s.sionate, with a wideranging mind and a set of beliefs stronger than the discipline required to contain them, he tended to be indecisive and dithering. Yet Murray was, in a way, the perfect trans-Atlantic gentleirian-in awe of the Establishments on both sides of the ocean, yet their willing and capable instrument. Ile got along with the Canadians who mattered as well as with Keswick, and after one of the Governor's C anadian visits wrote him a typically effusive letter: "The atmosphere was indeed extraordinary, when vou arrived; in fact, it defied description or a.n.a.lysis. Your direct, constructive and friendly approach to all issues and personalities in the short time you were with us did a tremendous amount of good." Murray was a true Bay man, outrageously proud of working for what he described as "the most h.e.l.lishly modern old-fas.h.i.+oned company in the world," and boasted that the Winnipeg headquarters staff often came to work at 7:45 in the morning, although the office didn't officially open until 8:30, just to get an early start.* He wasn't a retailer, and swore he never would be, but loved what he called "the trading part" of the Company and was known to comfort employees complaining about their jobs with the slightly incongruous sally: "How would you like instead to be a vice-president of General Motors in charge of designing tail lights?"

*Murray fitted right in Aith the Compam,'s Scottish traditions, although he had been born in Winnipeg. When he was out driving, he not only tried hard to make sure that the money he put into parking meters covered only his required time, but if he miscalculated and returned before the meter had expired, he'd sit in his car until it did.

CANADIAN AT LAST 441.

A graduate in liberal arts and law from McGill University, Murrav volunteered for the Royal Canadian Navy and served as a corvette signals officer, then joined External Affairs and was almost immediately posted to the Canadian Emba.s.sy in Was.h.i.+ngton. He worked under Lester Pearson, Hume Wrong, Clifford Clark, Norman Robertson, Wynne Plumptre and John Deutsch, the intellectual giants who dominated Canada's post-war recovery, and emerged from that magic apprentices.h.i.+p as both a patriot and a Liberal.*

Unable to meet the expenses of his growing family on an External salary, Murray joined the HBCs fur department in Montreal and within two years was named head of the New York fur-sales operation. Thrust among the street-wise Jewish traders of Seventh Avenue, he surprised everyone, including himself, by successfully turning the FIBCs auction house into a major profit centre that set the trade's pace and prices. By 1955, he had been transferred to Winnipeg as Chester's chief of staff and heir apparent.

Murray's first major move as Managing Director was his 1960 decision to purchase Henry Morgan & Company, a Montreal-based, family-owned department store with ten outlets and annual sales of $48 million. The move, financed with a rights issue and an increase in equity share capital, broke Chester's most sacred

*During the 1962 general election, when the upstart Quebec wing of the Social Credit party threatened the Liberal party's bastion, Murray was watching the outcome on television in the viceregal suite of the Royal York Hotel in Toronto with a group ofHBC executives. As a news flash appeared on the screen that a Cr6ditiste had captured the traditionally Rouge seat of Quebec East, Murray jumped to his feet and shouted, "It's a national disgrace! "

442 MERCHANT PRINCES.

Y. R. "d.i.c.k" Murray, Managing Director, HBC

commandment that the Company not go "whoring in the Fast." Since Morgan's owned five shopping-centre branches, the purchase signalled the Bay's first venture into the suburbs, a move that Chester had also vehemently opposed. Morgan's staff organization and downtown store turned out to be riddled with problems and neglect, while Montreal's carriage trade, which had sustained the main store, promptly switched to shopping at Ogilvy's.

"Those wheat farmers from Winnipeg moved CANADIAN AT LAST 443.

in and catered to a wider market," Aird Nesbitt, who then owned Ogilvy's, disdainfully declared. "Now the Morgan family buys in our store."

Despite its hold steps eastward, the Hudson's Bay Company retained its reputation as "the sick man of the Canadian retail business," its image tarnished by age and conservatism. There was growing evidence that the acquisition had been a desperately costly way to break into the East; $12 million had been spent to modernize its stores, and the chain had still to produce any profit. ,,A stroll through any Bay [department store unit]

in the 1950s and 1960s indicated that the ingrained and rigid policies of the 1930s were not about to be abandoned overnight," reported James Bryant, a department store chronicler. "In a Bay store in the Boulevard Shopping Centre in the east end of Montreal, six years after the Bay had taken it over from Morgan's, the luggage department consisted of one camper's trunk and one suitcase. On them leaned a lonesome bicycle, the total stock in that category." Murray hired a top U.S. retailing consultant, Alfred H. Daniels, a former head of Federated Department Stores, to survey the scene. He found deep variances between both stores and departments. "There were no common denominators," Daniels reported.

"You could have a fairly good shoe department in Vancouver, and the world's worst in Winnipeg. The Victoria store should have been sunk; it was a disgrace. None of the tricks of merchandising that

*A condition of the purchase was that Bart Morgan, the chain's chairman, be allowed tojoin the HBC board. He was welcomed, but Morgan seldom showed up, attending only 13 out of 147 HBC board meetings between April 13, 1961, and November 1, 1968, mainly the immial all-expenses-paid trips to the London annual Court. He almost never went to Winnipeg and was eventually dropped.

444 MERCHANT PRINCES.

had been developed in the previous decade were being used, or even heard of in many instances. They didn't know how to make a profit-the whole emphasis was on cost control. Don't spend a cent. They didn't even have records on profitability, so that prominent s.p.a.ce in a store might be given to toothpaste and shaving cream, on which you hardly made a dime, while cosmetics, on which you can make billions, were in the rear corner or some G.o.ddainn place.The Bay had no understanding of the fas.h.i.+on business. They had a lot of klutzy guys who could have been there or at Rupert's Landing, and had almost no important women or Jews in the Company. Yet they had the best name in the business, and problems that were both definable and rectifiable."

One of the rectifiable factors was finally moving the Bay into the shopping centres sprouting outside Canada's main cities. The rush to the suburbs had dramatically reversed the long-term (lip in department stores' sales, so that by 1967, more than a third of their increased turnover was coming out of the suburbs. Apart from the Morgan's acquisitions, the Hudson's Bay Company's first shopping-centre branch-a Morgan'swas opened at Eglinton Square in Metro Toronto in 1963, but it was a further six years before the first western suburban store went on stream, in Richmond, outside Vancouver. That store turned a profit in its first year, but it almost wasn't built. George Weightman, a Company marketing executive, had taken Murray on a tour of Richmond, parts of which lie very close to sea level and in those days had ditch drainage.

"There were these wide ca.n.a.ls along the sides of each road, perpetually filled with water, and every house had a footbridge for access,"

Weightman recalled. "After I had been driving d.i.c.k Murray around for a few hours through the rain between these ca.n.a.ls, he drew himself up to his full height, gazed at the watery view, and declared, 'As CANADIAN AT LAST 445.

long as I'm Managing Director of this Company, we'll never build a store in this swamp!"'*

At about this time, Murray presided over a sad historical event. York Factory, the great tidewater headquarters on Hudson Bay where the HBC had perfected the fur trade as a world-scale enterprise and the base from which the first trader-explorers had set out to probe the Company's inland empire, was turned over to the federal government as a national historic site. The object of a major naval engagement, invasions and b.l.o.o.d.y battles, York Factory had changed hands between the French and English ten times, eventually becoming not only the centre of the fur trade but also the venue for the annual meeting of the Council of the Northern Department of Rupert's Land, the body charged with governing the greater part of what would later become Canada. At one time, the depot had consisted of more than thirty buildings that included a haberdashery, ironmongery

*The Company followed up its free-standing suburban store in Richmond by opening later the same year its first western shopping-centre outlet at Lougheed Mall in Burnaby, also adjoining Vancouver, and in 1973 it built a shopping mail around its Richmond store. The failure to turn a profit at Morgan's made Murray gun-shy of any further expansion and inhibited any move to the suburbs. The Eglintorl Square store was an exception-complete -A ith a "parkade," which now sits useless and dilapidated. Murray was finally persuaded to add another Montreal suburban store in CMteauguay.

It was approved by the Canadian Committee, and Murray, who was going to the United Mngdom for the annual Court, decided to stop off in Montreal on the way and look at the site. Ile was appalled by what he saw-a spa.r.s.e collection of blue-collar housing developments bordering the Mohawk reserve-and he pulled the item off the agenda for the Board meeting in London. Chiteauguay ruined his appet.i.te for further suburban expansion and lowered his confidence in the judgment of Bay retail management.

446 MERCHANT PRINCES.

and even a perfumery, but in the 1930s all the structures but one were torn down for firewood. All that remained was the three-storey depot building, the "Big House" on the sh.o.r.e of the Hayes River, its hundred vacant windows yawning in the early sunsets. After 2 7 5 years of trading, the Company had abandoned the post in 1957, and now it was cutting the final ties. Even the handing-over ceremony didn't disturb York Factory's hibernation: it was conducted at Lower Fort Garry, more than five hundred miles to the southwest.

But York Factory couldn't entirely shed its heritage. The government did next to nothing with it, and the Big House started to be overrun with looters and loiterers, duck hunters who would come in off the Bay and set up bowling alleys on its main floor, using leftover cannon b.a.l.l.s and empty beer bottles as pins. There was always the danger of fire; above all, it didn't seem right that this ghost of a wilderness metropolis should be given up to neglect and the ravages of nature. At least that was the feeling of Doug MacLachlan, a Winnipegger who had served briefly as an HBC apprentice clerk at York Factory in the late 1930s. A tight-end on the Blue Bomber champions.h.i.+p football team of 1947, MacLachlan later ran his own fur-trading post at St Theresa Point on Island Lake in northern Manitoba, but his heart belonged to York Factory. After Ottawa took over, he became the desolate post's only permanent resident, tending the place, collecting relics (more than five thousand of them-candlesticks, strap-on skates, scissors and guns), guiding visitors, trapping to keep alive and setting up a chapel on the depot's second floor. "Sometimes you arrive at a place, and you feel as if you'd been there before," MacLachlan reminisced. "When I first got to York Factory, I knew where everything was, even the location of buildings no longer standing. It was kind of peculiar, but [ felt that it should be properly protected, CANADIAN AT LAST 447.

that there was something valuable here for the whole country." When the Canadian fur-trade historian .,krthur J. Ray visited York Factory in the summer of 1982, he was discouraged by what he saw: "This summer marked the 300th anniversary of the founding of the first York Factory. At the end of each century the post has faced crises. In 1782 it was sacked and burned by the Comte de La P6rouse. In 1882 it was experiencing the trauma of readjusting to new economic and environmental circ.u.mstances.... In 1982 it is the heritage of the post that is threatened. Unless an aroused (and interested) public makes a concerted effort to make sure that appropriate actions are taken to save the architectural and archaeological heritage, too little will be done too late. I am not optimistic. I have a sinking feeling that the post is in its twilight years."

At the government turnover ceremony, Murray had joked about the absence of either adventure or profit in the exchange, but another decision caused a lot more harm to the Company's historical reputation. His man- agement committee, concerned about lack of a national ident.i.ty-Morgan's in the East, the Bay in the Westand a reputation for high prices and unfriendly service, persuaded Murray to hire a team of New York image- makers to come up with a solution. The result was the replacement of an inconsistent collection of mainly green signs and grey bags proclaiming in Old English script "Hudson's Bay Company" with a bright yellowish ochre designation in modern typeface that flatly stated "The Bay." An executive recalls that Murray had to be dragged along, protesting about tradition, and he personally vetoed a scheme for Beatle-influenced psychedelically coloured trucks.

By the mid- I 960s, Murray had a more serious worrv. His friend and mentor, Tony Keswick, decided to retire from the Governors.h.i.+p (though not yet the board) 448 MERCHANT PRINCES.

because, as he told friends, he would not personally preside over the Company's departure from Britain. Such a transfer had become an urgent necessity. Canadians on the British board had been officially notified on October 26, 1961, that none of the London members opposed the transfer except Keswick, who wished to go as soon as the time seemed propitious.

Apart from the obvious efficiencies in having the Company run from the country where it transacted 90 percent of its business, tax considerations required the s.h.i.+ft. At the 1965 annual Court, his last, Keswick bewailed the fact that under new British regulations on overseas trading companies, taxes on dividends would increase by about 2800,000 a year, affecting shareholders' pockets in both the United Kingdom and Canada.* Having given his farewell address to the shareholders, Keswick would not allow anyone to tender him a retirement dinner as was the custom with departing Governors. He wrote to Murray that he was remaining on the board, but wanted to leave the Governors.h.i.+p "as quietly and as innocently as possible without any fuss whatsoever."

In Keswick's place arrived Lord Amory, destined to be the Hudson's Bay Company's last British Governor. Recently retired as British High Commissioner in Canada, Derick Heathcoat Amory had spent most of three lively decades in Conservative politics, having been minister of pensions in the post-war Churchill government and chancellor of the exchequer under Harold Macmillan. fie had a distinguished military record that included twenty years in the Devon Yeomanry, where he trained as an expert in airborne

*Company doc.u.ments revealed that in the preceding twenty years the HBC had suffered a tax disadvantage of approximately Y2,500,000 by retaining its United Mngdorn tax residence. If those taxes had been reinvested in the Company at 6 percent, its earnings would have been E3,750,000 higher.

CANADIAN AT LAST 449.

warfare and during the dark (lays of the See, War broke his leg in a parachute jump at th .Nrnhem in the Netherlands. Taken prisoner, A- y was about to have his left leg amputated when the n.a.z.i doctor noted a pin identifying the Englishman as a master of the hunt. The two inen swapped foxhunting stories as the German worked to save the limb.*

Amory lived modestly in a drab sixteen-guinea-aweek bachelor flat at Marshain Court, where he ironed his own s.h.i.+rts and made his own breakfast, although he could have afforded much more as chairman and part-owner of a large textile firm, John Heathcoat & Company. Shy and naturally secretive, he delivered a stern lecture to Roy Hodson of the Financial Times for "sensationalizing" news of his appointment to the HBC Governors.h.i.+p because the story had run under a twocolumn headline.

He loved limericks and could deliver amusing speeches.t Eric Faulkner remembered the first time Amory was asked to speak at a Canadian HBC function: "We'd had about ten speeches already and everyone was absolutely speech-drunk when somebody called on Lord Amory, and to my horror he got to his feet. He had a habit of nibbling at the corner of his handkerchief and he started

*The wound nevei completely healed, and in November 1967 Amory had an emergency hip replacement. While still in hospital, he wrote toMurray: I am now comingto life again with a new hip designed on most modern lines-stainless steel with plastic embellishments. I shall no doubt leave a trail ofsparks behind me as I stride along unless I carry a grease gun for lubrication."

f His favourite was one of his own: There was a young lady of Kent, VvIo knew ven~ well what it meant, When asked out to dine, Given c.o.c.ktails and wine. She knew what it meant, but she went.

450 MERCHANT PRINCES.

in his owlish way to talk about visiting our Montreal store and having had some difficulty disengaging himself from the chap who sold socks. n.o.body knewhow to react; there was a deathly hush, and I thought, 'Oh G.o.d, it's the first time the Canadians are seeinghim. What are theygoing to make of him?' But he went on and on, talking about the sock salesman until some chaps began to realize he was pulling their legs, and there were a few t.i.tters. Soon the whole place was rockingwith laughter. Theymade him go on for twenty minutes and after that, he had the whole top Bay executive in the palm of his hand. It was an extraordinary performance by a cunning old man."

Amory had been put in place because his influence with British politicians would grease the ways for the HBC's transfer. In that transaction, d.i.c.k Murray turned out to be an essential partner. The Canadian Managing Director had first demonstrated his political clout in 1960 when the Diefenbaker government introduced a 15-percent tax on dividends paid by branches of foreign companies operating in Canada. By quietly nurturing his contacts, Murray got the bill altered to exclude companies carrying on trade in Canada before July 1, 1867-an amendment that applied only to the HBC.

Circ.u.mstances were conspiring to accelerate the Company's trans-Atlantic s.h.i.+ft: a 14-percent devalua tion of the British pound to $2.40 made the investment in HBC shares more attractive to Canadian shareholders, and the prospect of British members.h.i.+p in the European Economic Community, now that the Germans sup ported Britain against the continuing French veto, had loosened Westminster's iron grip on the status quo. The Company's three hundredth anniversary, May 2, 1970, was chosen as the ideal symbolic date for patriation.

Peter Wood moved temporarily to London and soon had all of' the Compan ' v's accounting ledgers and sys tems transferred to Winnipeg.

CANADIAN AT LAST 451.

At Amory's request, Joe Links did much of the preliminary negotiating with the Privy Council Office, conferring with lawyers and stock-exchange officials concerning the 92.6 percent of HBC shares then held in the United Kingdom. He recalled stalking the corridors of the Treasury-not his first visit, "but first as emissary of a former Chancellor of the Exchequer-, it made a difference. The question we always asked ourselves was to whom control should be transferred, once permission was granted. To have transferred to a weak board and management would inevitably have resulted in a takeover followed by a break-up of the Companv's a.s.sets, so that it would have ceased to exist. Could tfie Company have continued and prospered without a takeover bid, or fended one off, under the management available before 1970? We shall never know, but it did not seem likely to us. Why, then, did we not find the management we could hand over to, or go to Canada and run the Company ourselves? On this, perhaps, we shall be judged, as well as the wisdom of vesting control in a board of non-executive, part-time directors. As is so often the case with anomalous, unplanned developments, success or failure must be judged by whether they work. The HBC was certainly not a failure. For most of the twenty-five post-war years it was a success. Had we taken a different course it might have been more successful still. But the risk of failure was too daunting to contemplate."

When Lord Amory was taking the final poll on whether or not to go for transfer, he asked each board member for his views, and they agreed-but as Amory went around the table, all eyes were on Keswick, still a director and known for his antipathy to allowing the Company to leave England. The former Governor sat up a little straighter in his seat, tugged at the handkerchief in his sleeve, and in a clear, strong voice gave the verdict: 452 MERCHANT PRINCES.