Lord Haslam of Bolton; Guardian obit
Hyfler/Rosner
A managerial giant of British industry whose career began and ended with
coal, he had no time for the brash methods of Thatcherism
Geoffrey Goodman
Monday November 4, 2002
The Guardian
Lord Haslam of Bolton, who has died of cancer aged 79, was a former chairman
of British Steel (1983-86) and British Coal (1986-90), and deputy chairman
of ICI (1980-83). With his death, British industry has lost a managerial
giant whose combination of ability, experience, humanity and wisdom bridged
the gap between the last years of Great Britain Ltd and today's
technological society.
When he retired from British Coal, he declared: "This job has been the most
daunting I have done. I have had to use everything I have learned so it's
been a fulfilment of experience." He had come full circle, starting and
finishing his working life with coal.
Bob Haslam was the great grandson of a miner, born and brought up in pre-war
Bolton, Lancashire, where his father owned a small firm of painters and
decorators. He was educated at Bolton School, where he excelled at sport
rather than academic subjects. He captained the cricket team and was
obsessed with his local football club, Bolton Wanderers, once playing for
Wanderers' reserve team. In spite of winning an open scholarship to
Cambridge, he failed the Latin examination and went to Birmingham
University, where he studied mining engineering.
In 1944, the new graduate joined Manchester Collieries as a trainee. For
three years he worked in various Lancashire pits, spending 18 months at the
coal face, along with many of the Bevin boys. It was physically very tough
but Haslam looked back on that period as one of his finest experiences. "It
was a bit like being in the army during the war," he said.
When the pits were nationalised in 1947, Bob Haslam joined in the
celebrations. He regarded it as the beginning of a new and hopeful era and,
in July of that year, he received his colliery manager's certificate.
However, in the managerial turmoil of the period his promotion was blocked
and the young Haslam became frustrated. Sitting in a Liverpool pub one
evening, he struck up a conversation with a stranger, which ended with the
stranger suggesting he could find a job for Haslam at ICI.
Haslam joined ICI as a technical service engineer in 1947. He stayed for 36
years, the last three as deputy chairman. Losing out to John Harvey-Jones
for the chairmanship, then the most prestigious job in the British private
sector, the gentle, softly spoken, ever generous Haslam was philosophical.
He was the junior of the three deputy chairmen, had been in America at the
time and was, as he said: "late in throwing my hat in the ring. No hard
feelings..." That was very much Robert Haslam's style.
He would certainly have been fully justified in expecting the top job, and
Harvey-Jones had nothing like his experience and business acumen. Haslam had
been chairman of the important ICI fibres division (1974-83) and chairman of
ICI Americas Inc (1978-81) before being appointed deputy chairman of the
main company in 1980. He had also held key jobs in ICI's personnel section -
including that of director of personnel for the whole group at one time. In
addition, he spent 10 years with the company's Nobel explosives division as
a senior engineer and planner, working in mines all over the world.
In 1952, during a time of political turmoil, he was travelling in Egypt to
advise on the demolition of the coffer-dam behind the new Aswan scheme.
Tension was high and when the plans that Haslam was carrying were mistaken
for a blueprint to blow up the Aswan dam, he was thrown into jail.
This was not his only brush with drama. When David Lean was making the film,
Bridge on the River Kwai (1957), he sought out Bob Haslam to advise on
explosives and bridge-building. Lean took Haslam to Ceylon (now Sri Lanka),
where the film was being shot, and had him produce a model bridge and advise
on construction and destruction. Thereafter, among his close friends Bob
Haslam was known as "the man who really did build the Kwai bridge".
When he left ICI in 1983 to become a non-executive director with Cable &
Wireless, and then to hold similar non-executive posts with Tate & Lyle, the
sugar group, as well as British Steel, Bob Haslam was 60. Instead of gliding
down to retirement, as some observers speculated, Haslam was about to launch
on yet another phase in his remarkable career.
He took on two chairmanships in tandem - Tate & Lyle and British Steel -
both of them during the early Thatcher years, a time of great industrial
change. He divided his week between the two spheres: one a key role in the
private sector, the other one of the most difficult and challenging jobs in
the public sector. At British Steel, he followed in the footsteps of the
hugely controversial Sir lan MacGregor, who had been imported by Margaret
Thatcher from the United States to prepare nationalised steel for
privatisation. Bob Haslam presided over the rationalisation of the steel
industry, closing plants and running down the manpower - the legacy of
MacGregor. It was Haslam's first encounter with the brash MacGregor
"culture" and it was alien to his own managerial temperament which, while
commercially skilful and realistic, was always based on conciliation, care
and charm.
The two men were never allies. When Bob Haslam later succeeded MacGregor to
the chairmanship of British Coal, after the miners' strike of 1984-85, he
told me: "I have no time for MacGregor or his methods."
Haslam, who had been knighted in 1985, took over a coal industry embittered,
demoralised and mortally wounded. There were 170 pits remaining with some
165,000 miners - soon to be halved and then still further reduced.
Haslam privately regretted that it had fallen to him to preside over the
declining years of a once great national industry. The energy secretary at
the time, John (now Lord) Wakeham tried to persuade Bob Haslam to stay in
the job a little longer; but he declined. An earlier energy secretary in the
Thatcher government, Peter (now Lord) Walker described Haslam as "one of the
most outstanding nationalised industry chairmen I've come across".
Bob Haslam was made a life peer in 1990. He is survived by his second wife,
Elizabeth Sieff, whom he married in 1996, and two sons from his first
marriage to Joyce, whom he married in 1947 and who died in 1995.
· Robert Haslam, Lord Haslam of Bolton, industrialist, born February 4 1923;
died November 2 2002