Sir Henry Keswick died on Tuesday, aged 86. Under his proprietorship, from 1975 to 1981, The Spectator recovered, and began the almost continuous growth in reputation and circulation it has enjoyed ever since. The key to his ownership was that he appointed the ideal editor, Alexander Chancellor, a friend from Eton and Cambridge, who was, Henry claimed, the only journalist he knew. Having done this, he sensibly did little more, other than cover the overdraft, which was bigger than the £75,000 price. He was the first-ever owner of the paper who was not also its editor. He gave it the freedom to flourish.
The purchase of The Spectator was part of Henry’s programme for entering British politics. He had been in Hong Kong, working for the family trading company of Jardine Matheson, since 1961. In 1970, he became the taipan and therefore rich. In 1975, aged 36, he decided to return, almost like Clive of India, seeking a country house, a wife (he always had the same woman in mind) and a seat in parliament. The house was Oare, a lovely Georgian house near Pewsey. He saw buying The Spectator as the means to the third of those ambitions. But it went wrong, he told me, when he was shortlisted for a Conservative seat in Wiltshire. At the interview, the chairman asked Henry whether, if selected, he would buy a house in the constituency. ‘Madam,’ he replied, ‘my house borders the constituency, and indeed my arboretum is in the constituency.’ The chairman became nettled: ‘Mr Keswick, I must press you. If we choose you, will you buy a house in the constituency?’ ‘Madam, if you insist, I shall buy a house in every village in the constituency.’ He never reached the House of Commons.
Such rebuffs showed Henry The Spectator would not work the hoped-for career magic. The journalistic success over which he presided meant he was importuned by potential buyers. In 1981, he sold the paper to his friend Algy Cluff for £160,000, plus transferred losses beyond Algy’s worst dreams. In 1985, after a courtship of 14 years, he fulfilled his heart’s desire by marrying his beautiful and perceptive cousin Tessa Reay (née Fraser).
From London rather than Hong Kong, Henry continued, as chairman, to run the trading empire which, under him, became global. He made shrewd use of Jardines ‘paper’, at moments when its value stood unsustainably high, to buy other assets. The Hong Kong base shrunk after the handover to China; the business elsewhere – Indonesia, for example – ballooned. Henry loved boasting that when he joined Jardines, the company had been worth £10 million and when he retired nearly 60 years later it was worth over $40 billion.
I am not qualified to judge Henry’s business achievements, but I found his character fascinating. He was an almost extinct type – the patrician plutocrat – grand, usually benevolent, occasionally autocratic. He was a firm friend and a firm enemy: ‘Nemo me impune lacessit,’ he liked to say. He lived, in the Victorian phrase, ‘at a great rate’, but a rate which he was Scottishly careful he could afford. Forty years ago, my wife overheard him debating whether it would be possible to live on as little as £1 million a year and concluding he could just manage it. He lived like a Victorian magnate. As well as Oare, there was a Georgian town house in SW1, the family estate in Dumfriesshire (whence all Jardines – and hence, by marriage, Keswicks – sprang) and his own grouse moor, Hunthill, in the glens of Angus. There lobster was served to the guns at the shooting lunches on the hill. There were kidneys at breakfast. In London, Henry could be found most evenings from 5.30, playing bridge with his brothers at the Portland Club. In Hong Kong, he had the most magnificent of bungalows, 9 Shek O, from which he could survey the ships as they passed through the straits to China.
Often – as well portrayed in Trollope novels – such possessions seem to weigh down their owners. Not Henry. Vast himself (a friend once saw him eat 12 fried eggs for breakfast) and very tall, he filled his houses and made them and his staff welcoming to guests of all ages. (He never had children himself, but loved their company, and treated his stepson Ned Mackay as if he were his own.) He and Tessa were good at mixing people. The party might include, say, a Japanese politician, Lauren Bacall, a duke or two, George Weidenfeld and any number of cousins. In terms of dress, exact (and frequent) mealtimes, sporting pursuits, Keswick country life was traditionally formal. At Hunthill, it sometimes included a piper playing round the dining table. But in atmosphere it was warm, unstuffy and generous. Henry had a way of organising everything so well that it seemed effortless but was the product of attention to detail.
Also of aesthetic sense. No one was less ‘arty’ or less pretentious than Henry. Scarcely anyone I know had read so few books. Yet he was an aesthetic perfectionist in the subjects he loved – his gardens, his famed arboretum (always fiercely competitive with that of Michael Heseltine), his grouse shoots, and (much helped by Tessa) the appearance of his houses and the paintings which hung in them. He was unusually good at working out the way he wished to live, and living it.
In his last years, Henry became seriously ill, and Tessa died before him, but he maintained his interests in life. When he could not reach Hunthill for the grouse, he was sent photographs of each drive. Gossip was one of his greatest skills. He kept up with it to the end. My last conversation with him was on the phone. He had been desperate to find out who the new editor of The Spectator would be. I knew but had refused to say. Now he rang me in glee: ‘I saw that fellow Jenrick – very good, I thought. He’s married to a Jew. I like Jews: we need them. He told me who the editor is. You were too pompous to say.’
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