Lord Thomson of Fleet; Guardian obituary
Hyfler/Rosner
The heir to a vast media empire, he preferred collecting art
and sold out to Rupert Murdoch
Geoffrey Goodman
Tuesday June 13, 2006
Guardian
The last time I met Kenneth Thomson, Lord Thomson of Fleet,
who has died aged 82, was towards the end of the year-long
dispute at the Times in 1979. It was a defining moment in
his life as a newspaper baron in Britain. He bore all the
signs of a saddened, perhaps defeated, man, although none of
us then knew just how sad the scene was eventually to
become.
The Times had not been thundering - or even squeaking - for
a year, during which Margaret Thatcher had become Britain's
first woman prime minister. The strike was settled in
November 1979, a few weeks after my interview with Thomson
in his office at Gray's Inn Road, where the Times and Sunday
Times were then housed. Fourteen months later, the news
broke that the Thomson family had sold out to Rupert
Murdoch, a decision taken by Ken Thomson himself, against
much advice from his management team.
He had had enough. The journalists' strike in August 1980,
long after the printers' dispute had been settled, finally
convinced him that the situation was hopeless. He saw the
deal with Murdoch as a swift, clean break from all the
haggling, political wrangling and backstage manoeuvres. He
wanted "out" - just as much as Rupert wanted "in". Once a
conditional agreement was reached in January 1981, Thomson
retreated to his native Toronto to resume the life he had
always preferred.
His father, Roy, the first Lord Thomson of Fleet, had died
in 1976, and there are some who say that Kenneth, who
revered his father, never fully reconciled himself to life
in Britain after the death. In fact it became clear that
Kenneth - the second Lord Thomson of Fleet when he was in
the UK but plain Mr Thomson in Canada - had long ago decided
to pull out. In retrospect, that glazed look of the defeated
man I interviewed revealed more than one realised. The
bitter strike that stopped the Times for a record period was
to prove the Rubicon for Fleet Street. In his bloodstream,
perhaps Thomson even sensed it.
What it did do was hand him the opportunity to re-start his
life in Canada, where the family fortune, created by his
father, was already legendary. Thomson was born in Toronto -
as was his father - the only son of Roy Thomson and his
wife, Edna Alice Irvine. He went to the Upper Canada College
before graduating from Cambridge with a good MA. He served
with the Royal Canadian Air Force during the second world
war, and afterwards started in the editorial department of
the Timmins Daily Press, Ontario, where Roy himself had
started out in 1934, acquiring his first newspaper - the
Timmins Daily Press.
Kenneth worked in virtually every department of the paper,
as a reporter, advertising salesman and general manager, a
process he repeated in a number of other Thomson newspapers
in Ontario before moving into the Toronto head office in the
'1950s, to take charge of the group's Canadian and American
operations.
By then Thomson Newspapers was the most powerful media group
in Canada, owning more newspapers than any other
organisation. This also was about the time, 1953, that Roy
acquired his first UK newspaper, the Scotsman in Edinburgh.
Indeed, in 1954 he moved to Scotland, setting up Thomson
Newspapers HQ in Britain and leaving Kenneth to run the
Canadian empire. Roy then set about taking over a huge
network of British regional newspapers, mainly by acquiring
the Kemsley Group, whose stable included the Sunday Times.
He made successful bids for commercial television
franchises, notably in Scotland, and bought into book
publishing and travel companies, creating Thomson Travel. In
1964 Harold Wilson gave him a hereditary peerage, and in
1967 he acquired the Times. Everything, appeared to be at
his finger tips - and within the grasp of his son Kenneth.
But Kenneth Thomson did not share his father's zeal for
newspaper acquisitions. He was a shy, reserved, somewhat
detached man with few traces of his father's bouncing,
gregarious personality. He cared very much about people and
was an exceptionally intelligent manager; but his real
interests lay in the arts. He began seriously to collect
paintings, art antiques, such as medieval bronzes, reliquary
chests and sculptures, in the early 1960s. When he came to
live in London, he established a close relationship with a
well-known art dealer, Herman Baer. Collecting pieces of
rare art became his passion; most of the Thomson collection
is now in a Toronto gallery.
In 1996 he bid successfully at an auction for the St
Thomas-a-Becket chasse, circa 1170. The price was £4.18m.
But he then withdrew the bid to allow the copper gilt
reliquary chest to remain in Britain. It was bought
eventually by the National Heritage Memorial Fund, to which
Lord Thomson was a donor. It was very much Kenneth's salute
to Britain despite his disappointments.
In his later years, certainly from the mid-1980s when he was
firmly back in Toronto, Kenneth Thomson started to move the
company away from newspapers and conventional media towards
new technology-based communications in Canada and the United
States. He concentrated on educational technology, legal
publishing, scientific information for research and
development, healthcare systems - indeed anything with a new
technology link.
Gradually the old Thomson empire was sold off in packages -
many local newspapers in Canada, as well as Thomson
newspapers in the UK. In 1989 the group disposed of its
interests in North Sea oil; the hugely successful Thomson
Travel organisation was sold in 1998 for more than £1.3 bn.
By 1993 the Canadian base of Thomson newspapers had been
re-structured with new strategic groups formed to re-direct
the company's focus. It was already a very different ship
from the vessel launched by Kenneth's father. One thing the
family retained was the Toronto Globe and Mail, once the
flagship of the newspaper empire and in which the Thomson
Corporation still retains a 20% stake.
Kenneth Thomson was reputed to have been one of the world's
dozen or so richest men. His personal fortune has been
estimated at £9.5bn. Yet to the end he preferred the quiet,
modest life without lavish living. He did not go in for
mansions round the world, yachts or racehorses. He was a
non-drinker and non-smoker, and favoured long walks in the
Canadian countryside. He never took up his seat in the House
of Lords.
His passion for collecting exceptional works of art,
sculptures as well as paintings, never ceased: nor did his
generosity in donating rare works from his collection to
Canadian art galleries. In 2002 he handed over most of his
multi-million dollar collection of European and Canadian
paintings and sculpture to the Art Gallery of Ontario - a
collection that included Rubens' Massacre of the Innocents.
At the time he promised further huge donations and loans to
the Ottawa gallery, and agreed to donate in trust an
estimated 2,000 works, a gift unprecedented in Canadian
history.
Earlier that year Kenneth passed on the family business, the
Thomson Corporation, to his son David, who became the new
chairman of the board. Like his father, David Thomson
possesses his own large collection of paintings by a range
of great artists, among them Constable, Munch, Picasso,
Turner and Rothko.
Kenneth was regarded by some as an eccentric, shy and
somewhat "grey figure". By the standards of Rupert Murdoch,
certainly by those of Robert Maxwell, he was. But when
people joked about his ordinariness, he would respond by
referring to his father: "Even though he spoiled me in a
material sense, he ingrained in me a sense to do things
properly and responsibly."
Kenneth is survived by his wife, Nora, two sons and a
daughter.
· Kenneth Roy Thomson, 2nd Baron Thomson of Fleet,
businessman, born September 1 1923; died June 12 2006.
Charlene
Hyfler/Rosner wrote:
> Lord Thomson of Fleet
> The heir to a vast media empire, he preferred collecting art
> and sold out to Rupert Murdoch
>
> Geoffrey Goodman
> Tuesday June 13, 2006
>
> Guardian
>
> in 1976, and there are some who say that Kenneth, who
> revered his father, never fully reconciled himself to life
> in Britain after the death.
>From what was said on the morning radio programs in Canada, this may be
an understatement. Apparently Ken Thomson intensely disliked Britain
and especially London. One interviewee even used the word "hated", and
not about the Times debacle either. It appears that the only reason Ken
Thomson had anything to do with Britain is because he respected his
father, who loved Britain and wanted his son to live there during his
lifetime. Had it been fully his own decision, he would never have left
Canada.
wd42