Ken Thomson, Globe and Mail
marilyn...@aol.com
A man of small economies and grand generosities
SANDRA MARTIN
Globe and Mail Update
On an ordinary June morning, Ken Thomson arrived at the office with one
of his beloved dogs and sat at his desk surrounded by some of his
favourite Group of Seven paintings on the walls. He got up and walked
toward his secretary Lorraine King's office and collapsed with a fatal
heart attack. It was about 7:45 a.m. In a year when he had lost two of
his closest friends, Steve Stavro, former owner of Knob Hill Farms and
the Toronto Maple Leafs, and art collector John Band, Mr. Thomson died
as he had lived - quietly and without a fuss.
"This is a great loss," Phillip Crawley, publisher and chief
executive officer of The Globe and Mail, said. "I worked for Ken
Thomson for 30 years in two different stints, here and in England. I
have great affection and respect for him both as a man and as a
newspaperman after my own heart. He was a great supporter of The Globe
and Mail."
A man of small economies and grand generosities, Ken Thomson was
Canada's richest man and largest individual philanthropist. When he
inherited the Thomson media empire in 1976, many thought that he was a
pallid version of his father Roy Thomson, First Lord Thomson of Fleet.
In fact, Mr. Thomson focused and refined the company, moving the crux
of its operations back across the Atlantic to North America and
transformed the corporation from a print based media conglomerate to a
web-based electronic provider of information and services. In the
process he increased the company's value exponentially from about
$500-million (U.S.) in 1976 to roughly $29.3-billion.
"Thomson is the Google for the high-end professional user," Richard
Harrington, chief executive officer of Thomson Corp said at the
company's annual general meeting in May, 2005, referring to its range
of deep databases and software products aimed at the medical, legal,
financial and educational industries. A year later, Mr. Harrington was
still watching Google closely, telling the company's annual general
meeting in Toronto that while Google, and other Internet companies,
cater primarily to a broad-based consumer market, Thomson supplies
enhanced information largely to professions. "It's a different
mindset and it's a different business model," he said after the
meeting.
During his tenure, Ken Thomson sold off most of the company's newspaper
holdings, including The Times and The Sunday Times, two prestigious but
fractious and money losing newspapers, and acquired Canadian
publications including The Globe and Mail, a local flagship with a
national reach that had always eluded his father.
Roy Thomson was a gambler and an opportunist who loved making deals, an
extrovert with an ego to match who was in his forties before he
achieved financial success and almost 80 when he joined the North Sea
oil and gas consortium that made him fabulously wealthy.
By contrast, his son Ken was shy, private, extremely modest and much
more focused. He thought of himself as an owner more than an
entrepreneur or an operator. Although he was keenly interested in
business, his job, as he saw it, was to serve as steward of the empire
he had inherited on behalf of the rest of his family and the
shareholders in Thomson Corp. He often expressed pride in knowing how
pleased his father would be if he could have seen how the value of the
company grew under his tutelage.
"Ken truly was a builder," said Geoffrey Beattie, deputy chairman
of Thomson. "In business, people are either traders or builders.
Traders are looking for things and trying to move from opportunity to
opportunity, whereas Ken was someone who saw opportunities, but more in
the context of wanting to stay the course. He was not an impatient guy
because he had tremendous confidence that if you keep doing good
things, more good things will happen."
Shrewdness and the ability to distinguish between owning companies and
running them were the characteristics father and son shared, according
to John Tory, the lawyer who had worked for both of them for more than
50 years. Neither Thomson was a micro-manager; both encouraged
consensus and risk-taking by their employees and that foster loyalty
and commitment in their professional managers.
"He is less of an extrovert than his father, but on the question of
support for professional management, Ken and his father were much the
same," said Mr. Tory. "They both realized that you couldn't do
everything yourself so you had to have good people and to provide them
with really strong support and to trust them."
A case in point was Harold Evans, editor of The Sunday Times in Roy
Thomson's day. "Lord Thomson was not a journalist," he wrote in a
obituary article for his former boss in 1976, "but he was the best
friend journalism ever had." Mr. Evans learned the true value of
those words after Ken Thomson sold The Times Newspapers to Rupert
Murdoch's company News International in 1981. Mr. Evans was made editor
of The Times, but was forced out a year later by Mr. Murdoch.
Stories of Ken Thomson's frugality abound, from watching the parking
meter run out before feeding it more coins, to sorting through the
bargain bins for socks, to pushing a cart up and down the aisles
checking the cost of produce in his local grocery store. Although he
seemed unwilling to spend money on himself - his suits were
serviceable rather than elegant - he was willing to dig deep to
indulge his passion for Canadian and European art.
In the same way that he refined his family's business holdings, he
pruned and buffed his collection of paintings by Cornelius Kreighoff,
the Group of Seven and David Milne, among other artists, and his
assemblage of European ceramics, ivory miniatures and other artifacts.
It was in building this art collection that he created his personal
legacy. "I like business," he once said, "but I feel the same way
about art that my father felt about business." That wasn't strictly
true.
"I remember when we were at about 90 newspapers and he said it would
be marvellous if we could get to 100," John Tory remembered in an
interview. "When we got to 100, we proudly said to him we now have
100 daily newspapers and he said the new goal is 200," he said with a
laugh.
That anecdote illustrated one of the differences between the two men.
Roy Thomson wanted to grow his business; the editorial content of the
newspapers in his portfolio didn't matter nearly as much as the bottom
line. What propelled Ken Thomson as a collector was a visceral reaction
to something that pleased him aesthetically. As time passed he set
about learning more about the artists he admired, studying their
techniques and acquiring paintings that complemented each other, or
demonstrated the range of a particular artist's work. Collecting for
him was more than a hobby, it was a process of discovery and
self-education.
Others have given away a greater percentage of their individual and
corporate fortunes, but his personal gift to the Art Gallery of Ontario
of more than 3,000 works of art plus $70-million (Canadian), is without
precedent in Canadian history. The AGO addition is designed by
Toronto-born architect Frank Geary. "He never chased the art
world," said Mr. Beattie. "He pursued his art privately and
passionately and collected things that meant a lot to him. That is why
the most important part of the AGO project is to embody the life of a
collector. That's different from saying "I have one of these and 12
of those and wait until people see how smart I was and what I did."
Mr. Thomson also amassed an unrivalled collection of ivory and boxwood
carvings, detailed ship models and other unique objects. In 2002 he
bought Sir Peter Paul Rubens's painting "Massacre of the Innocents"
which is currently on loan to the National Gallery in London, England.
"I call it an electrifying painting," he told The Globe in an
interview. "How do you paint a painting like that - with such a
gruesome subject - without it being totally off-putting. Its horror
is obscured by its aesthetics. I find that extraordinary."
"I was very saddened to hear of the death of Ken Thomson," Ontario
Premier Dalton McGuinty told reporters on Monday. "And I first of all
would like to extend my sympathies to his family and his friends. But
let me say that Ontario and Ontarians are the better for his presence
here and we owe him much both in terms of the leadership he brought to
his business and for his tremendous devotion to arts and culture in our
province."
Kenneth Roy Thomson was born on Isabella Street in Toronto on Sept. 1,
1923, the youngest child and only son of Roy and Edna (Irvine) Thomson.
His mother was a farm girl from Guelph who had come to Toronto to work
as a secretary. That's where she met her future husband, then a
salesman for an industrial toweling company. Ken's older sister Irma
(born 1918) died in 1966, his oldest sister Audrey (born July 6, 1917)
is still alive.
His early years were far from luxurious as his father, the son of a
barber, struggled to make enough money to feed his family and to pay
the rent. The Thomsons moved to Ottawa in 1925, when Ken was 2, after
the collapse of his father's auto-parts dealership. His father then got
a job as a salesman of De Forest Crosley radios. They moved again in
1928 (when Ken was 5) to North Bay because Roy Thomson thought he could
profit from the gold discoveries in Timmins and Kirkland Lake. Ken
started school in North Bay. His father was away for days at a time
travelling by train to Cobalt, New Liskeard, Timmins, Cochrane, Sudbury
and Sault Ste. Marie to sell radios, auto parts, washing-machines and
refrigerators.
Susan Goldenberg described Ken Thomson's childhood as lonely in her
1984 book, The Thomson Empire. "He was quiet, not athletic, and his
mother would select the youngsters to attend his birthday parties,"
she wrote.
"The early part of my life was extremely simple," he said in an
interview in Saturday Night in 1980. "We didn't have a great deal of
money. Nobody did. I can remember, for instance, in North Bay a fellow
coming to the door and asking for a sandwich. And, you know it makes me
wonder a bit about my own children. They have only known affluence. But
my father went through quite a few years of learning."
In 1929, the Thomsons moved to a larger rented house in North Bay. Roy
Thomson, ever the opportunist, was away even more often, desperately
making deals in search of a financial stake and being totally
preoccupied when he was home. "He was always busy with various
projects, travelling the north, selling, arranging things. He would
often come home late at night. My mother would try to keep his dinner
warm. We all knew he was a big worker, but it was difficult
sometimes."
Life wasn't all loneliness and watching his father read the newspaper
- "every inch of it." When he talked about his childhood in North
Bay in 2003, he described a spontaneous outdoor life of riding
bicycles, exploring the woods and fishing for pickerel in the summers
and skating on the frozen lake in winter. He credits those halcyon
memories for his later fascination with Krieghoff and the Group of
Seven.
It was his mother who kindled his appreciation in music and painting.
"Art almost bemused my father," he said. "With music, the most
serious thing he liked were the Strauss waltzes. He liked people like
Irving Berlin. But even then, if you were driving in the car, he was
always fishing for news on the dial, even though it was the same news
on every station. You could say he was obsessed with it."
Selling radio parts was hampered by the dismal radio reception in
Northern Ontario. Undaunted, Roy Thomson paid one dollar for a
broadcasting license, bought a 50 watt transmitter on three months
credit and started CFCH, his first radio station in North Bay in 1931.
"I was eight years old and radios were still exciting things. All I
really knew was that something big was going on in town and that Dad
was at the middle of it all." Soon his father had bought radio
station CKGB in Timmins and followed up that purchase by moving into
print and acquiring the Timmins Press in 1934, the depths of the
Depression.
The family moved back to Toronto in 1937 when Ken was 14. By then even
he was aware that his father was "really rolling." He went to Upper
Canada College, the elite private school, as a day boy. An average
student, and definitely not a jock, he was not part of the "in"
crowd. "I didn't give it much of a chance," he said later. I was a
little bit different from the other guys." When he was 16, he worked
as a disc jockey at CFCH for a summer.
He graduated from UCC in 1942 and registered that fall at the
University of Toronto, but dropped out in Dec. 1942 to join the RCAF.
He was 19 when he was shipped overseas. After working as an instrument
mechanic, he was posted to London where he rewrote news articles for an
Air Force magazine called Wings Abroad.
After the war, he took a degree in Economics and Law at St. John's
College, Cambridge University. Back in Canada, he began learning his
father's business from the bottom up, working as a cub reporter at the
Timmins Daily Press in 1947. A year later he went to Galt (now
Cambridge) as an advertising salesman for the Daily Reporter, before
serving as general manager of the newspaper from 1950 to 1953. On
weekends he would drive to the family home his father had bought in
1947 (when Ken was 24) in Port Credit, about 112 kilometres away. This
was the first house the Thomsons had ever owned and it remained the
centre of family activities until Mr. Thomson's mother Edna died in
Florida in 1952. After her death Roy Thomson made the decision to
relocate to Scotland.
Even before he moved to Scotland in 1954, he had begun the English
acquisitions that would include The Scotsman (1953) Scottish television
in 1957 (a franchise that he would later equate with "a licence to
print money") and an interest in North Sea oil and gas. (In 1971 when
Roy Thomson joined the consortium, oil sold for less than a dollar a
barrel; on his death five years later it was close to $30).
Ken Thomson stayed in Toronto and succeeded his father as president and
chairman of Thomson Newspapers. At the time, the company controlled 24
dailies and eight weekly newspapers in Canada and 22 dailies and six
weeklies in the United States.
These were the years when Mr. Thomson made his first forays into
collecting, scouring shops in Chinatown in Toronto for carvings and
curios. He moved on to genre paintings, buying his first Krieghoff in
1950, and then to carved English portrait busts. But it was not until
he met Herman Baer, an antique dealer in London, that his collecting
became more serious.
A 17th-century ivory-and-ebony crucifix in the window of Mr. Baer's
store drew him inside one day in 1959. "Hermann let me hold things in
my hand," Thomson told The Globe in 2003. "That was very important.
He showed me some things, beautiful things, but he told me I was not
yet ready for them. He was showing them, he said, to the Ashmolean
Museum in Oxford."
Two of the objects he cradled in his hands that day - a boxwood
Madonna and Child and a carved ivory depiction of Saint George Slaying
the Dragon, are now in the Thomson collection, as is the crucifix.
It was Mr. Baer who helped Thomson refine his tastes, encouraging him
to delve boldly into his pursuit of ivory and boxwood carvings, baroque
goblets, enamels, miniature portraits and memento mori. When Baer died
in 1977, Thomson made some of his most significant acquisitions from
his estate.
About the time he was acquiring the beginnings of his art collection,
he met Marilyn Lavis, a model whose picture he had seen in an Eaton's
catalogue. They married in 1956 and now have two sons David, who was
born in 1957, Peter, who followed in 1965 and a daughter Lesley Lynn,
now known as Taylor in 1959.
In 1964 Roy Thomson gave up his Canadian citizenship in order to
receive a hereditary British title from the Queen in the New Year's
Honours List. He became the Rt. Hon. Lord of Fleet of Northbridge in
the City of Edinburgh. The next year, Thomson Newspapers became a
public company in Canada and Thomson Travel was created in the United
Kingdom. Two years later Roy Thomson bought The Times of London and
merged that debt-ridden colossus with The Sunday Times, which he had
acquired in 1959. He announced that his son would join the board of
directors as chairman. Ken moved his family to London. Lord
Francis-Williams, who had worked as press adviser to Clement Atlee,
told The Globe in 1967, that: "The younger man is clearly destined to
take over fully, and the sooner we in Britain have a chance to size him
up the better."
Meanwhile Ken Thomson had built up his Krieghoff collection to nearly
20 canvasses and realized that his interest in the painter had become a
passion. In 1966, the same year his father bought The Times, he "made
a decision to go strongly for Krieghoffs. I changed from a casual
acquirer to an aggressive collector."
While the British were checking out Ken, his father was expanding and
diversifying the family's assets. By 1971, through their holding
companies, The Thomson Equitable Corporation and the Woodbridge
Company, the family owned 78 per cent of their British arm, the Thomson
Organization and 77 per cent of their North American company, Thomson
Newspapers, with holdings worth $333-million. "It's done this way so
that the debts of one will never become the obligations of the
other," the elder Thomson explained to The Financial Post in 1971.
Roy Thomson died Aug. 4, 1976 after a stroke. The company, which was
worth approximately $500-million (U.S.), was publishing 110 daily
newspapers in North America. Ken Thomson became Chairman of the
family's interests and the second Lord Thomson of Fleet and
Northbridge. He only used the title when he was in the United Kingdom
and he never sat in the House of Lords. "In London I'm Lord Thomson,
in Toronto I'm Ken. I have two sets of Christmas cards and two sets of
stationery. You might say I'm having my cake and eating it too. I'm
honouring a promise to my father by being Lord Thomson, and at the same
time I can just be Ken," he explained at the time.
"Roy was more the entrepreneur, the tycoon, the guy who saw
opportunities and propelled the business beyond anything else," said
Mr. Beattie. "Ken might have had more of those characteristics if
that is what the situation called for, but the fact is that when Ken
took over after his dad died, there was a reasonably significant estate
which had been left under a certain structure. Ken immediately
identified that the future was going to be about trust and stewardship
and patience and it wasn't about Ken being able to go off with the
assets and fulfill his own dream of being an entrepreneur. These were
his dad's assets. 'Everything we have today,' Ken would say, 'was
because of my father."
Immediately after his succession, Ken Thomson wrote to shareholders
reassuring them that their investment was safe because of the quality
and dedication of the people running the myriad Thomson companies.
"Successful businesses are sustained by people - men and women who
contribute their time, their skill, their energy and their ideas to the
development of a living, breathing, expanding enterprise....Without
them no business amounts to more than a collection of buildings,
machines and paper assets."
Within two years of his father's death, Mr. Thomson began shifting the
company's focus to North America. The International Thomson
Organization was formed with its headquarters in Toronto and two main
operating subsidiaries in the United Kingdom and the United States.
John Tory became deputy chairman. Instead of acquiring newspapers, as
he had done under Roy Thomson, he was seeking out specialized
information companies.
Back in London, Times Newspapers were bogged down in labour disputes
and wildcat strikes. As Mr. Thomson said later, "The labour situation
was hopeless at the time. If you had a chapel [a trade union branch] of
six people and one said he had a headache and wasn't going to work that
night a thousand would join him." Eventually the owners suspended
publication of both The Times and The Sunday Times on Dec. 1, 1978.
The lockout continued for almost a year and cost the company nearly 70
million pounds. As Mr. Thomson said later, "the lockout was a bit of
a disaster. You don't go into something unless you can see how it's
going to come out. We did when we couldn't. Our problem was that we
paid the journalists throughout and so nobody believed us when we said
we would close the papers for good. If we were serious about shutting
down completely then why were we paying the journalists? There was no
realism about our handling of the dispute."
In October, 1980, the company put the newspapers up for sale, saying
they would shut down if a buyer didn't come forward by a pre-arranged
date. The Australian media magnate Rupert Murdoch made a low but
successful offer of 14 million pounds on Feb. 13, 1981. Mr. Thomson
insisted he never regretted selling The Times. "...we had to get on
with our own lives and we did and rebuilt the Company. I'm sure if my
father came back today he would understand..."
The bruising from the sale of The Times was soothed by the acquisition
of FP Publications Ltd. in Canada in 1980 with its flagship newspaper,
The Globe and Mail, as well as the Winnipeg Free Press and the Ottawa
Journal among other titles for $165-million (Canadian). The purchase
brought the company's share of daily English language newspaper
circulation in Canada to about 26 per cent with daily sales topping a
million.
"The purchase of The Globe and Mail and its subsequent development
made up for the loss of The Times. I'd always liked it [The Globe],well
before we bought it, and from the early 1970s I think I've read it
every day," Ken Thomson said later. "How pleased my father would
have been when we bought it. He'd made a sporting bid 25 years before
when he had limited financial resources and he was outbid. We've made
improvements and competition has speeded these up. Of course it's not
perfect and sometimes it makes me mad, but that's what a newspaper is
all about."
The day of the FP purchase, Roy Megarry, then publisher of The Globe
said: "I'm assuming the same kind of motivation and feeling brought
to The Times of London will apply to The Globe as well."
The Thomsons may have been happy with their new newspapers, but many
Canadians were afraid that the country had been chopped into two rival
newspaper chains owned by The Thomson and the Southam families. This
fear became even more acute on Aug. 27, 1980 when Thomson Newspapers
closed The Ottawa Journal and the Southam family shut down The Winnipeg
Tribune, leaving both of those cities with only one daily newspaper.
Radio and television had been eroding print's share of the marketplace
for decades. In the early part of the 20th century, at least 500 towns
in North America had at least two rival newspapers. By 1978 only 35
towns could make that boast. Pierre Trudeau's Liberal government
appointed the Royal Commission on Newspapers in 1980, under the
chairmanship of Tom Kent, a British born journalist and former editor
of The Winnipeg Free Press and a policy adviser to former Prime
Minister Lester Pearson. It recommended that chain ownership in future
should be limited to 20 per cent of national circulation, but a bill to
this effect died on the order paper in 1983. Nevertheless, both Thomson
Newspapers and Southam were charged with two counts of criminal
conspiracy to reduce competition and criminal merger. John Tory and
Southam head Gordon Fisher were named as co-conspirators under the
federal Combines Investigation Act, but were eventually acquitted when
Mr. Justice William Anderson accepted defence arguments that the
closings of The Ottawa Journal and The Winnipeg Tribune were the result
of independent decisions based on the state of the marketplace and not
the consequence of collusion.
Ken Thomson never again purchased a major Canadian newspaper and
instead looked south of the border for new print acquisitions,
eventually becoming the owner of more dailies in the United States than
any other corporate entity. By 1989, Thomson Newspapers had revenues in
excess of $1-billion. To make its financial resources available to the
wider Thomson group of companies, Thomson Newspapers were merged with
its sister company International Thomson Organization Ltd. to form The
Thomson Corporation with Ken Thomson continuing as chairman of both
entities and John Tory as deputy chairman.
The 1990s was a decade of refocusing and restructuring the corporation
into strategic marketing groups. The United Kingdom newspapers were
sold, and the move into the professional and reference fields, that had
begun in 1987 with the purchase of legal publishers in the United
Kingdom, Canada and Australia, continued with the acquisition of West
Publishing in 1996, a company best known for its WESTLAW online
research services and databases. This trend to be global in scope,
electronic in nature and aimed primarily at the business and
professional marketplace accelerated after Richard Harrington became
president and chief executive officer of The Thomson Corporation in
1997. By the turn of the century, Thomson Travel had been sold and so
had all of the community newspapers that had been the original source
of the company's wealth.
In 2002 Ken Thomson stepped down as Chair of the Thomson Corp and was
succeeded by his elder son David. He remained Chair of Woodbridge and a
director of The Thomson Corporation, controlling the family's 69 per
cent interest in the public company in 2005.
Kenneth Roy Thomson was born in Toronto on Sept. 1, 1923. He died of a
heart attack on June 12, 2006. He was 82. He is survived by his wife
Marilyn, his sons David and Peter, his daughter Taylor, his sister
Audrey Campbell and their families.
Veritas
<marilyn...@aol.com> wrote:
Lord Thomson was the largest shareholder in my employer and a man who
turned his father's newspaper empire into a massive international
electronic information provider.