Robert Maxwell , who has died aged 68, was one of the most mercurial postwar operators not only in the British media but British commerce generally, a self-made individualist who managed - just - to keep a fitful peace with the mores of a British corporate scene notoriously unaccepting of flamboyant personalities. He left his native Czechoslovakia as a youth to escape Nazi persecution of the Jews, had a distinguished war when he was awarded the Military Cross for bravery, set up his own publishing company, Pergamon, shrewdly buying the copyrights of books by academics who wanted reputation more than money, survived being proclaimed in a Board of Trade report as a person unsuited to head a public company and then went on to own the Daily Mirror Group and the New York Daily News.
All this was due to the essence of his assertive character forged in his early years. He was born to peasant parents, Michael and Ann Hoch, in Slatinske Doly, a village near a salt mine on disputed territory near the border of Rumania on June 10, 1923. He always described himself as self-educated. In an obscure period of his life, he acquired at least a smattering of several languages, came to Britain and joined the British Army under a series of aliases - du Maurier and Jones as well as Maxwell - because the War Office insisted that refugee soldiers should have false names in case they were captured.
As he was to do later in life in entirely different contexts, Maxwell agitated to get himself towards the centre of the stage, this time in the form of membership of a crack fighting regiment. He joined the 6th Battalion, the North Staffordshire Regiment in 1943. He landed with his regiment on the beaches of Normandy shortly after the D-Day invasion of the continent and distinguished himself not only by his bravery but by his skills as a fixer, once exciting admiration and envy by returning to the battlelines with bottles of Calvados.
The bravery was real enough. In January 1945, when the war was in its final months, he was on the Maas River in Holland with some other soldiers who charged a block of flats in an attempt to re-take them from the Germans. A few days previously he had been promoted from corporal to the commissioned rank of 2nd Lieutenant. Maxwell charged straight across the Germans’ line of fire, a perfect target. Large numbers of bullets pinged around him, but all missed. For this heroism he got his Military Cross.
When the fighting stopped, there was anti-climax. He was a man built for battle. He interrogated German prisoners at Iserlohn in the Rhineland, then went to the Control Commission, the Allies’ organisation quickly set up to manage the industry, economy and life of the defeated Germans. He rose through the Public Relations and Information Services Control, both as an Army officer and as a demobbed civilian.
His skill as an entrepreneur was finely honed in these circ*mstances. Keeping the permitted newspapers going meant that the various sections of the services had to bid to the Control Commission for supplies, since none were available on the open market. Maxwell emerged as an organiser extraordinary.
At the same time he was a shareholder in a London import-export company set up by a German. It eventually became Maxwell’s company for distributing scientific literature. Maxwell left the Control Commission two years after the end of the war, and started to sell scientific literature to Britain and the US from an office off Trafalgar Square. A deal with the German publishing giant Springer helped establish him in the market. He launched his own Pergamon in 1949.
In 1959 Maxwell began his political career in earnest by being adopted Labour candidate for Buckingham. He won the seat when the Labour Government came to power in the 1964 general election and held it until 1970. His relationship with the House of Commons, given his high degree of self-will, was predictably cool. Becoming chairman of the Refreshment Committee of the House of Commons in 1967, he encountered a past year’s loss of pounds 33,000 and a bank overdraft of pounds 61,000. He brought in professional advisers from Forte, sold off the wine stocks to raise cash and privatised the liquor, a personally characteristic rather than socialist step. He did not produce the profits he hoped for and after disagreements with other committee members resigned in April 1969.
After losing his Parliamentary seat in 1970, he fought twice for Labour at Buckingham in February and October 1974, but his political career, unlike his business career on more than one occasion, did not rise from the ashes, leaving his great energies available for newspaper publishing.
‘Notwithstanding Mr Maxwell’s acknowledged abilities and energy, he is not in our opinion a person who can be relied upon to exercise proper stewardship of a publicly quoted company.’ These words, from the conclusion of the interim report by two Department of Trade inspectors in 1970, were to dog Maxwell for the rest of his business career. Years later, when most people had forgotten the details, he would claim in interviews that a judge had cleared him of all charges. This was disingenuous.
What had happened was that Maxwell had complained about the way in which the inspectors had conducted their investigation, arguing that it was a breach of natural justice that their interim report should have been published. A judge had agreed with him, but the Court of Appeal had overruled the judge and castigated Maxwell for his impertinence in attacking the inspectors. Indeed, Lord Justice Lawton, praised one of the inspectors for ‘the way he dealt with a witness (Maxwell) who tended to be verbose and irrelevant.’
Today, knowing what we do of Maxwell’s business resurgence, the Inspectors’ report still provides fascinating insights into the man’s character. Among those who have worked with Maxwell in the newspaper and publishing business, even those who were his admirers, few could disagree with the following judgement: ‘He is a man of great energy, drive and imagination, but unfortunately an apparent fixation as to his own abilities causes him to ignore the views of others if these are not compatible.’
The DTI Inspectors’ report was the most damaging setback Maxwell ever suffered. But he demonstrated that resilience for which he later became famous, bouncing back within a few years. This quality may have been only one of the reasons why he was nicknamed the Bouncing Czech, but it was certainly a powerful one.
WHAT was the essence of the charges against Maxwell in the Pergamon-Leasco affair? In 1969 Maxwell’s Pergamon opened negotiations with the American entrepreneur Saul Steinberg, whose Leasco Data Processing Corporation was interested in making a bid for Pergamon. At that time, Pergamon (a name which has had many different incarnations under Maxwell’s direction over the years) was the publisher of scientific journals and the owner of a subsidiary, ILSC, which published encyclopaedias. During the negotiations, which lasted several months, Maxwell represented to Steinberg that the encyclopaedia business was extremely profitable. This picture proved false. Steinberg withdrew from the deal, and under the old Takeover Code, the DTI appointed inspectors to investigate the matter.
Steinberg’s company commenced legal proceedings against Maxwell in the US. What the DTI Inspectors found was that Maxwell used transactions between his private family companies and his Pergamon to inflate Pergamon’s share price. In July 1974 it was announced discreetly in the New York Times that Steinberg had collected Dollars 6.25 million from Maxwell and his UK merchant bankers. By 1977 the Director of Public Prosecutions had decided not to bring criminal charges. Maxwell was the fortunate beneficiary of a laxer age in business regulation.
Maxwell later claimed to have turned Pergamon round himself, but a more accurate appraisal would pay tribute to the work of Sir Walter Coutts, the chairman of Pergamon appointed by Grindlay’s Bank after the Leasco deal collapsed. Coutts later wrote that because of the hard work that was done by himself, three independent directors, and the company’s dedicated staff ‘Mr Maxwell was handed on a plate in 1974 a firm base on which to build the business about which he now (in 1986) boasts.’
Sir Walter later offered a scathing analysis of Maxwell’s personality to a couple of Maxwell biographers: ‘Maxwell has an ability to sublimate anything that stops him getting what he wants. He’s so flexible he is like a grasshopper. There is no question of morality or conscience. Maxwell is Number One and what Maxwell wants is the most important thing and to hell with anything else.’
The late seventies and early eighties saw Maxwell cutting a new swathe through the British business world, acquiring the British Printing and Publishing Corporation and turning it round from deficit to profit. He was adept at trimming waste, slashing excess manpower, and releasing locked-up assets. One of the key profit centres in his public companies was that of Treasury transactions, a sophisticated form of gambling in which he used shareholders’ funds to turn a quick profit on international currency dealings and short-term investments in the stock market.
However, Maxwell’s ambition had always been to become a national newspaper proprietor, and 16 years after his first stab at it (his abortive bid for the News of the World), he succeeded in purchasing Mirror Group Newspapers from Reed International for pounds 113 million on June 13, 1984.
This marked the beginning of the most fascinating period in Maxwell’s career, during which he was rarely out of the headlines. Maxwell tried to solve the problem of famine in Ethiopia, he ‘rescued’ the Commonwealth Games (which was later found to be insolvent), he patronised Neil Kinnock and other Labour politicians, he sued Private Eye (successfully) for suggesting that he had tried to buy a peerage, he launched Britain’s first 24-hour newspaper (the London Daily News), he launched The European. He became another Fleet Street legend, notorious for his treatment of editors and journalists as well as print workers.
He took America by stealth rather than by storm, acquiring the prestigious Macmillan Inc. publishing business and the Official Airlines Guide, and later the New York Daily News. His much-vaunted ambition of a few years ago - to build a business empire in the field of media and communications that would be comparable to one of the seven major multinational companies which dominate the world oil market - foundered on an excess of appetite. Although Maxwell often argued that his global strategy was equity-led, not debt-led like Rupert Murdoch’s, it all amounted to the same thing once the share price of Maxwell Communications Corporation began to slide last year.
This year the pressures began to pile up, with criticisms in a BBC Panorama documentary (which inevitably drew forth libel writs) echoing the judgment of the DTI Inspectors in 1970. He had been up to his old trick of using transactions between his private companies, registered in secretive tax havens such as Lichtenstein and Gibraltar, and MCC to bolster MCC’s share price.
There was always something rather ridiculous about Maxwell’s constant need to prove himself. He was criticised and mocked for his sycophancy towards the satraps of Eastern Europe, where Pergamon had done business since the late forties. He published the speeches of Husak, Kadar, Ceaucescu, Brezhnev, Andropov, and Chernenko. A recent interview with Maxwell in the magazine Playboy demonstrated the Walter Mitty-ish aspect of his character. He virtually claimed that he, above all others, had been responsible for persuading the Israeli premier Yitzhak Shamir to show restraint in the teeth of Saddam Hussein’s scud attacks during the Gulf War. When asked whether he was more powerful than most politicians, the former Labour MP said: ‘Yes, except for the two or three highest people in an administration.’
BUT if Maxwell was less powerful than he himself believed, he was nonetheless an effective bully. When two hostile biographies were published in early 1987, Maxwell the litigant went on the rampage, seeking injunctions and firing off libel writs to high-street booksellers. The first book, Maxwell: A Portrait of Power by Peter Thompson and Anthony Delano, was withdrawn. The second, Maxwell The Outsider by Tom Bower, sold out its hardback print run, but got no further. Maxwell even bought the publishing company, Sphere, which had acquired the paperback rights. Yet when Tom Bower and his publishers, Aurum Press, filed a weighty defence to Maxwell’s libel action eighteen months ago, Maxwell decided that discretion was the better part of valour and discreetly allowed the action Maxwell v. Bower and others to go to sleep.
Robert Maxwell will be sorely missed as a public figure. Whatever he did, he always made waves. Private Eye has created a whole mythology around Cap’n Bob, and will be hard-pressed to find a substitute for his elemental personality. However, many of those who had dealings with him, whether as employees or otherwise, were relieved when they could escape his embrace. Lady Coutts, whose husband picked up the pieces at Pergamon in the early seventies, had the best parting shot. Following a dinner at Headington Hill Hall, Maxwell’s home and business headquarters, the tycoon was saying goodnight to his guests in various of the nine languages which he professed to speak fluently. When it came to Lady Coutts, she spoke to him in Swahili, a language that not even the bombastic Maxwell claimed to understand. She said: Kwaheri ashante sana sitaki kukuona tena. Translated, this means: ‘Goodbye. Thank you very much. I don’t wish to see you again.’
