Lord Hanson

The Lord Hanson, who died on Monday aged 82, was often named by his contemporaries as the most admired British businessman of the Thatcher era.

A master of the arts of corporate takeover and surgery, he assembled a highly profitable portfolio of businesses on both sides of the Atlantic. Together with Lord White (Gordon White), his business partner for some 40 years until White's death in 1995, Hanson perfected a strategy which seemed, at the peak of their powers in the late 1980s, to be virtually invincible.

Having identified an undervalued company, Hanson would name his bid-price and stick to it. If the bid succeeded, a team of "ferrets" - sharp-pencilled Hanson accountants - would descend on the purchase, strip it of unnecessary costs and sell off superfluous assets.

Pared to the core, the acquired business would be left to thrive under its own management, subject only to profit targets and cash controls from Hanson's head office. Capital expenditure of more than £500 had to be approved by Hanson himself.

In their early years together, Hanson and White were branded as asset-strippers, and their names were linked with the controversial financier Jim Slater. But their judgment stood the test of time when less shrewd takeover practitioners came to grief in the 1970s.

Although Hanson Trust (as the company was then called) took quick profits on some of its deals, it also nurtured for the long-term a collection of solid, unglamorous businesses; these included bricks, sacks and American coal mines, for instance, which could be relied upon to generate cash year after year.

White moved permanently to the United States in 1973 to build the American half of the empire. But the two men remained in constant, almost telepathic, communication, White's genius for takeover ideas complementing Hanson's managerial skills.

Both men were unusually tall, fit and well-preserved, declaring their intention to continue working until their mid-seventies. Hanson, however, was much less flamboyant than his partner in his private life and utterances. Courteous but demanding, sensitive to criticism and intrusion, prone to short temper, he was respected and feared by staff and outsiders.

The bruising takeover of Ever Ready batteries in 1981 was a classic example of Hanson's ability to improve the performance of companies he bought. The company's head office staff was cut from 550 to 75, removing six of its nine layers of management. But the profitability of the battery brand-name, which had been in sharp decline, was revived substantially.

Other British acquisitions included United Drapery Stores and the London Brick Company, while Hanson Industries grew to rank among the largest 150 companies in the United States. Long-term shareholders in Hanson were rewarded with many years of rich returns.

The group's zenith was perhaps reached in 1985-86, when SCM (a conglomerate which included Smith-Corona typewriters) was added to the American portfolio, and Imperial, the brewing and tobacco group, on the British side. The costs of both purchases, $930 million and £2.5 billion respectively, were recouped within a few months by the sale of subsidiary businesses which did not fit the Hanson mould.

Hanson was undoubtedly tough on his managers and autocratic in the boardroom. However, a Mori opinion poll conducted among company directors nominated Hanson as the most impressive industrialist in Britain each year from 1988 to 1992.

When the Hanson stable acquired Consolidated Goldfields in 1989 - its biggest deal yet - it had enjoyed a hugely successful decade, after which he would have been more than entitled to rest on his laurels. With £7 billion of cash resources still at his disposal he showed no inclination to slow down, but the changing national mood at the end of the Thatcher era brought with it a decline in admiration for the model of the ruthless entrepreneur which he represented.

A proposal by Hanson in 1990 to buy Powergen, the electricity generating body, then about to be privatised, evoked a sullen response. In the following year, he met outright hostility when he played the opening gambit in a campaign to take over ICI.

Hanson declared that his three per cent stake in the chemical giant was "for investment purposes" and that he was open to discussion of business co-operation between the two groups. But it was universally assumed that a full bid was likely to follow; it was within Hanson's price range and would have created the largest company in Britain.

The ferocity of the response from ICI and its advisers took Hanson by surprise. There was particular concern, supported by voices from the academic world, that ICI's dedication to research and development would not be sustained under a cost-slashing Hanson management.

A lurid case against Hanson was painted in the press. Openly criticising his own advisers for losing this public relations battle, Hanson eventually withdrew and sold his ICI stake - collecting £40 million profit as he did so.

During the 1990s Hanson's business was increasingly unfashionable - both in its management style and in its low-technology content. There were concerns that Hanson was unwilling to cede power to a successor, and his shareholders were a good deal less contented than they had been in the group's expansive heyday. But a series of reincarnations followed: buying Eastern Electricity in 1995; floating off Imperial Tobacco in 1996; and finally, in 1997, splitting off the energy interests to refocus the rump of Hanson plc as a group of building materials businesses whose investment merits became more evident when technology stocks collapsed at the end of the decade.

Hanson stepped down as chairman to become chairman emeritus - and sometimes expressed surprise that the new generation of managers only rarely consulted him. As the Thatcher era faded into memory his influence in Conservative Party circles, once considerable, also waned; but he found a new outlet for his robust opinions as an occasional columnist in The Daily Telegraph and elsewhere.

James Edward Hanson was born on January 20 1922 at Huddersfield, where his father Robert ran a haulage firm. The business dated back to the 1840s, when Robert's great-great-grandmother had begun carting wool to and from local mills by packhorse. At the time of James's birth, Robert had fallen temporarily on hard times after a disastrous warehouse fire; but by the early 1930s his fortunes were restored, and the family lived in comfortable style. James was educated at local schools.

Having first served as a Territorial with the Duke of Wellington's Regiment at Halifax, he was called up in 1939, and commissioned in the Royal Army Service Corps. For a time he was an announcer on Forces radio. Demobbed in 1946, he joined his father's company.

Robert Hanson, by then a prominent citizen of Huddersfield, passed on to his elder son a no-nonsense approach to business: tight financial control, a habit of repaying his bankers earlier than expected in order the better to persuade them to lend a little more next time, and minimal bureaucracy. When the family company was nationalised in 1948 (the family later bought it back, and Hanson remained its chairman until 1996), James and his younger brother Bill applied those principles to a new haulage venture at Hamilton, Ontario.

Bill was the more dashing and imaginative of the two brothers, while James had a talent for organisation. At 19, Bill had been the youngest major in the British Army; after the war he was a member of the national showjumping team, but he died suddenly, in 1954, of stomach cancer.

James inherited from his brother a friendship with Gordon White, whom Bill had met in the Army. White was then working in his father's publishing business in Hull. As bachelors, James Hanson and Gordon White shared playboy tastes for fast cars, gambling and the pursuit of starlets in London and Hollywood. While White was seen with Ava Gardner and Grace Kelly, Hanson escorted Jean Simmons and was briefly engaged to Audrey Hepburn.

Hanson and White were involved in transport businesses together in the late 1950s, but their first major new venture was in importing humorous greetings cards from the United States. It was not a notable success. In due course this was sold, taking with it the trade name "Hanson-White". Unable to reuse that conjunction, the two partners tossed a coin as to whose surname should prevail. Thus it was that the conglomerate they began to build in 1964, with the acquisition of a fertiliser company called Wiles, carried Hanson's name alone.

James Hanson was knighted in 1976, in the notorious honours list compiled for Harold Wilson by his secretary Marcia Williams (later Lady Falkender) on lavender notepaper. But Hanson detested socialism, and became a fervent supporter of Mrs Thatcher and a generous contributor to Conservative funds; his support for her preferred rescue plan for Westland Helicopters cost his company some £6 million. Mrs Thatcher returned the admiration, citing Hanson's American interests as a model of what British companies could achieve abroad. He was created a peer in 1983.

When in London, Lord Hanson worked long hours in his relatively austere headquarters overlooking the gardens of Buckingham Palace. But later he would spend several months of each year at a second home in Palm Springs, California, whence he continued to run his empire from a poolside telephone.

He enjoyed the trappings of great wealth - his Bentley carried the numberplate JH 1 - and occasionally moved in celebrity social circles, hosting parties for Frank Sinatra and giving the Duchess of York helicopter-flying lessons as a wedding present. But he also placed a high value on family life and privacy.

James Hanson married, in 1959, Mrs Geraldine Kaelin, a New Yorker; she died earlier this year. He is survived by two sons and a stepdaughter.

ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7tbHLnp6rmaCde6S7ja6iaKaVrMBwu8Giq66Zop6ytHuQbW5ubmhpfI270Z1kgZmeqLyvesetpKU%3D