Henry Hatch, distiller
marilyn...@aol.com
HENRY CLIFFORD HATCH, LIQUOR DISTILLER 1916-2006
He followed in his father's footsteps and took a business built on
supplying bootleggers and turned it into a roaring success called Hiram
Walker
RON CSILLAG
Special to The Globe and Mail
TORONTO -- Was Scottish whisky maker Tommy Dewar thinking of Henry
Clifford Hatch when he said "success is merely a matter of buying your
experience cheap and selling it at a profit"?
Cliff Hatch followed in his father's footsteps as head of Hiram Walker,
Canada's second-largest liquor distiller (after Seagram), and made the
liquor trade in this country as respectable as it could get. That
wasn't always easy, given that the Hatch family rose to prominence in
the heyday of bootlegging in the United States.
But through business practices that may now seem quaint, harkening to a
time when a person's word was his bond, Mr. Hatch cemented an
upstanding reputation through tough but always civil competition,
anchored by his deep Roman Catholic faith.
Besides, he sure sold some fine hooch, namely, the ubiquitous Canadian
Club rye whisky, Ballantine's Scotch, Kahlua and Tia Maria liqueurs,
and Courvoisier cognac.
In many ways, Mr. Hatch's career paralleled that of the other great
Canadian liquor barons, the Bronfmans and their signature brand,
Seagram. Mr. Hatch's father, Harry, was archrivals with the Bronfman
patriarch, Sam, but only in business. Cliff Hatch, notes his son,
chaired Mr. Sam's 80th birthday party in 1971.
Mr. Hatch also had kind things to say when the Bronfman family's
Fairview Corp. entered into a 50-50 partnership with the
Toronto-Dominion Bank to build the TD Bank Tower in downtown Toronto.
At the time, he was serving on the bank's board.
Mr. Hatch was remembered as a gentleman both in and out of the
boardroom. A favourite son of Windsor, Ont., where Hiram Walker & Sons
Ltd. still fronts the Detroit River, he gave generously to a variety of
charitable and civic causes. On his retirement, Hiram Walker employed
5,000 people worldwide, and annual profits were $250-million (U.S.).
"He was a wonderful fellow, an industry leader and a good friend," said
Charles Bronfman. "My father and Harry Hatch had a great feud going for
many years, but they built great businesses, so Cliff Hatch and I could
afford to compete as friends. I told him there's nothing I enjoyed more
than switching somebody from Canadian Club to [Seagram's] V.O. and he
laughed and said, 'There's nothing I enjoy more than the reverse.'
Neither of us wanted to put the other out of business. We worked as
competitors, and as very good friends.
"But much more important to me, frankly, he was a fine human being."
The groundwork was laid by Mr. Hatch's father during Prohibition in the
United States. His father had tended bar in some tough saloons in
eastern Ontario and ran a liquor store in Whitby, Ont. Harry Hatch made
his money, though, first by going into the mail-order booze business
and then by coming to the attention of Montreal tobacco-and-liquor
magnate Sir Mortimer Davis, who hired the young go-getter as sales
manager at his Corby whisky plant. Within two years, production went
from 500 gallons a month to 50,000 gallons.
Historian Bill Hunt, author of Booze, Boats and Billions, relates that,
at about the same time, Sir Mortimer paid Mr. Hatch $1 for every case
of whisky he could sell to American bootleggers. Mr. Hatch, his brother
Herb, and future distiller Larry McGuiness recruited a fleet of
fisherman to ferry the liquid gold through the Thousand Islands in an
operation that came to be known as "Hatch's Navy."
Harry Hatch prospered and, in 1923, he and some Toronto investors paid
$1.5-million for the idle Gooderham & Worts, which had been the
country's largest distiller. Three years later, the descendants of
Hiram Walker, a Detroit grain merchant and father of Canadian Club
whisky who died in 1899, sold the family concern to the elder Mr. Hatch
for $14-million. Mr. Hatch merged his companies into Hiram
Walker-Gooderham & Worts, headquartered in Walkerville, Ont., now part
of Windsor, and was dubbed "the king of Canadian distillers."
By the time Prohibition was repealed in 1933, the elder Mr. Hatch had
built the world's biggest distillery in Peoria, Ill., capable of
producing 50 million gallons of whisky a year. In 1937, he acquired
Ballantine's Scotch Whisky, and just before the Second World War, built
a huge distillery in Dumbarton, Scotland.
His son, meantime, had been sent to boarding school in Montreal to
learn French. He was 8. After high school at St. Michael's College
School in Toronto, Mr. Hatch considered studying for the Catholic
priesthood. But, at his father's urging, he became a travelling
salesman, at 17, for the T. G. Bright wine company, which the senior
Mr. Hatch bought in 1933. Four years later, his son moved to Windsor to
begin his ascent at Hiram Walker.
In 1940, the younger Mr. Hatch personally received a British royal
warrant from Lord Chamberlain at Buckingham Palace for Hiram Walker to
purvey its goods in the Royal Court.
Also that year, Mr. Hatch enlisted with the Royal Canadian Navy. He
served in corvettes on convoys that escorted fighting ships across the
treacherous North Atlantic. It was dangerous work: At the height of the
U-boat campaign, as many as half of the ships were sunk.
Mr. Hatch served on three escorts. He was lieutenant commander on HMCS
Napanee and captain on HMSC Drummondville and on HMCS Ville de Quebec.
While leaving Halifax Harbour one day, a semaphore message signalled
him that his wife, Joan, had given birth to a son two weeks earlier.
He saw the worst of war up close but kept a stoic silence, recalled H.
Clifford Hatch Jr. Instead, "his stories about the war were funny. He
never talked about death and horror and the number of men he saw die."
Harry Hatch died in 1946. Author Peter C. Newman relates in his book
The Bronfman Dynasty that, a few weeks later, the Hatch family received
a "sizable" offer for their controlling interest in Hiram
Walker-Gooderham & Worts that was believed to have come from the
Bronfmans. It was turned down flat.
Cliff Hatch, meantime, built on his father's innovations. Brands, for
example, had come to be an important aspect of whisky marketing and,
following Prohibition and the Second World War, consumers restored
their loyalties to Canadian Club and labels such as Imperial. In the
area of merchandising, Hiram Walker was the first to gift-wrap its
liquor.
Unlike the generation that succeeded him, Mr. Hatch never attended
university, save for a six-week executive training course in New York
in the 1950s. He was crowned company president and CEO in 1964, and
among his first tasks was the acquisition of Courvoisier cognac.
He also engineered the purchase of the company's most profitable brand,
Kahlua coffee liqueur. Company policy was to buy fewer labels and
concentrate on marketing them.
Of course, tasting was important. Mr. Hatch would sample the goods
personally, "always before lunch because that's when your taste buds
are most active . . . about 11 o'clock in the morning," says his son,
who also became president and CEO of Hiram Walker-Gooderham & Worts.
Mr. Hatch became company chairman in the late 1970s, and, in 1980, he
initiated the merger between Hiram Walker Gooderham & Worts and
Consumers' Gas Co. of Toronto to fend off a rival's bid for the liquor
concern. A corporate shuffle in 1982 returned him as president and CEO
following the $630-million (U.S.) acquisition of oil and gas properties
in the United States from Davis Oil Co. of Denver. Hiram Walker
stumbled badly when it was discovered that the properties held much
less proved and probable oil reserves than originally thought.
Mr. Hatch announced his retirement in 1984. But, when the Reichmann
family of Toronto launched a $3-billion hostile takeover bid in 1986
for the renamed Hiram Walker Resources Ltd., the company sold the
liquor subsidiary to Allied-Lyons PLC, based in Britain. Mr. Hatch
finally retired in 1987.
Today, Hiram Walker is owned by the French firm Pernod Ricard as a
result of that company's acquisition last year of Allied Domecq, and
the various brands have been parcelled out. Hiram Walker & Sons Ltd. on
Riverside Drive in Windsor still produces and bottles Canadian Club,
sold in more than 150 countries, and several other labels, but it's all
under contract to Kentucky-based Jim Beam. Its latest offering is
pomegranate schnapps.
Mr. Hatch left several major legacies in Windsor, despite having moved
back to Toronto in 1994 to be closer to his children and grandchildren:
He was founding chair of the Greater Windsor Community Foundation,
which has supported the Basilian Fathers and the Art Gallery of
Windsor. The Joan and Clifford Hatch Foundation has donated substantial
sums to women's legal aid, Scouts Canada, and L'Arche Canada. And the
Joan and Clifford Hatch Wildflower Garden commemorates the couple's
contributions to the city's riverfront and parks system.
In a particularly long struggle -- from 1938 to about 1980 -- Mr. Hatch
was involved in efforts to remove rail lines from Windsor's waterfront.
Like his own father, Mr. Hatch was a taciturn man who shunned the
limelight. He made no public statements on the demise of the company
his father founded. He never missed Sunday mass. "My father was very
old-fashioned," said H. Clifford Hatch Jr. "He believed that good
business was good for both sides. He believed his word was his bond. He
always believed in never doing anything in the short term that would
hurt the business in the longer term. And he believed that people made
a big difference."
Henry Clifford Hatch was born
in Toronto on April 30, 1916,
and died there on Sept. 23, 2006, of cancer. He was 90. His wife, Joan,
died in 2004. He leaves four children -- Cliff, Gail, Mary and Rick --
nine grandchildren and three great-grandchildren.
Hyfler/Rosner
<marilyn...@aol.com> wrote in message
>
> Like his own father, Mr. Hatch was a taciturn man who
> shunned the
> limelight. He made no public statements on the demise of
> the company
> his father founded. He never missed Sunday mass. "My
> father was very
> old-fashioned," said H. Clifford Hatch Jr. "He believed
> that good
> business was good for both sides. He believed his word was
> his bond. He
> always believed in never doing anything in the short term
> that would
> hurt the business in the longer term. And he believed that
> people made
> a big difference."
Dying breed.
Nice obit, much thanks.