James Sherwood
Buccaneering container fleet magnate who revived the Orient Express and created a luxury hotel chain
JAMES SHERWOOD, who has died aged 86, was the Anglophile American who revived the Orient Express and created a chain of luxurious hotels; bought Sealink from British Rail; campaigned against a Channel Tunnel, then sought to build one; and set high standards with the GNER rail franchise until his Sea Containers conglomerate hit the buffers in 2006.
A “quiet tyrant” of great charm with imposing build and striking blue eyes, “JBS” lived with his wife Shirley, a botanist and research scientist, in a moated Oxfordshire manor, and boasted “the best view in London” from his Thames-side office in Sea Containers House. He established Harry’s Bar in London with Mark Birley in 1979, tried in 1981 to buy The Times, and for a time owned The Illustrated London News, which his wife edited for a period.
Though Sherwood appreciated the fine things of life he was not a social animal, reputedly turning away royalty from his home; P&O’S Sir Jeffrey Sterling reckoned him “as subtle as a boatload of bricks”. While Margaret Thatcher rated him, Sherwood – who retained his American citizenship – received no formal recognition from Britain, though his wife was appointed OBE after endowing a gallery of botanic art at Kew.
Sherwood’s great entrepreneurial achievement was to found Sea Containers, one of the world’s largest container fleets and leasing businesses, worth in its prime $2.5 billion. But his heart – and even more his wife’s – was in the Orient Express, from the moment in 1977 when he bought two pre-war Wagons-lits at auction in Monte Carlo.
With his wife finding marquetry artists and weavers and rescuing Lalique panels from junk shops, Sherwood spent
$31 million restoring two trains to their former glories: a set of Wagons-lits (one a former Wehrmacht field brothel) for the Venice Simplon-orient Express from Calais to Venice, and a rake of Pullman cars for the leg from Victoria to Folkestone.
The original Orient Express had last run, as a dingy shadow of its former greatness, in 1977, between Paris and Vienna. Five years later Sherwood launched his train, complete with piano bar, for the 36-hour journey from London to Venice (where he had bought the Hotel Cipriani from the Guinness family) at a fare of £295. (At the Cipriani, Elizabeth Taylor confided to him that she had left a 33-carat Krupp diamond in the Ladies’.)
Westerners occupied one end of the train, Japanese the other. After passengers pilfered £100,000 worth of ashtrays, coathangers and towels, a shop was opened in between.
Other destinations followed, notably Budapest – passengers assembling in Emperor Franz Josef ’s waiting room – and further luxury trains: the Northern Belle and Royal Scotsman in Britain, the Eastern & Oriental Express from Bangkok to Singapore and, controversially, the Road To Mandalay river cruise in Burma.
Sherwood acquired (but did not always retain) some 50 of the world’s grandest hotels: the Cipriani; the Copacabana Palace in Rio; the Grand Hotel Europe in St Petersburg; La Residencia on Majorca (from Richard Branson); the Lodge at Vail; the
Manoir aux Quat’ Saisons in Oxfordshire; the Mount Nelson in Cape Town; Reid’s Palace on Madeira; and the Turnberry, refurbished for the 1986 Open Championship.
After Laura Ashley’s death in 1985, Sherwood took on her two hotels near Washington. He ordered an immediate change of decor, saying her wallpapers “make me vomit”.
His empire at various times included Sealink, Hoverspeed, the Isle of Man Steam Packet Company and ferries on the Adriatic, the Baltic, the Hudson and the Aegean (mainly high-speed catamarans). There were container depots and factories, a marine engineering company, fruit plantations in West Africa and South America, GNER, the 21 Club in New York … and thousands of containers.
Sherwood’s other great love was his cats. He insisted his chauffeur bring them to meet him whenever his jet landed at Luton, and he named his Seacat catamarans after them.
James Blair Sherwood was born on August 8 1933, the son of a Kentucky lawyer. Graduating in Economics from Yale in 1955, he served as a lieutenant with the US Navy before joining the United States Lines at a time when the age of the ocean liner was ending and the container revolution dawning; Sherwood, in Le Havre, had special containers made to convey high-value goods from Switzerland to America without pilferage.
In 1962 he joined Container Transport International, and three years later he started Sea Containers, with a 50 per cent stake. A leasing operation that pioneered container designs suited to intermodal freight, it was incorporated in Bermuda and in 1968 was floated on Wall Street; its headquarters were in London – from 1985 Sea Containers House.
Sherwood leased containers to the Pentagon during the Gulf War, and formed a container partnership (Geseaco) with General Electric.
As Mrs Thatcher began privatising, he bought several BR hotels and in 1984 paid £66 million for Sealink, taking on 37 ferries. Travelling incognito, he found dirty ships, slovenly crew and indifferent food. He cut manning on the Folkestone-boulogne route and abandoned services to the Channel Islands overnight, stranding 1,000 holidaymakers.
His hopes of floating Sealink on the stock market were threatened by negotiations between Britain and France over building a Channel link, so Sealink and its competitors launched a campaign against the project.
“Flexilink” went for the jugular, urging the governments to block all the schemes submitted, fighting them in the courts, trying to sabotage the raising of capital and launching a poster campaign depicting rats, juggernauts and garlic-breathing Frenchmen swarming from the tunnel. Within months, it turned a Gallup poll majority of 50-37 for a link into 51-36 against.
In October 1984, a day before the deadline for bids, Sherwood brazenly launched his own scheme: the £2.5 billion Channel Expressway, a tunnel with rails set into a roadway and “swept” of traffic every so often to let trains through. By claiming to have influential support, Sherwood attracted it, and was soon claiming to be the front-runner.
Of nine schemes submitted, the Transport Secretary Nicholas Ridley was tempted by Channel Expressway, but the French preferred Euroroute’s bridge. Then President Mitterrand told Ridley France would go for what became Eurotunnel if Ridley pulled the plug on Sherwood, who had no French business backing.
Flexilink resumed its campaign, but was dealt a mortal blow by the sinking of the Herald of Free Enterprise in 1987. When the tunnel opened, Sherwood demanded £100 million to cover redundancy costs, saying he had been duped into thinking ministers opposed the project.
The bankruptcy of several clients, and losses by Sealink, which had made a profit under BR, led to Sea Containers losing $49.8 million in 1987 and selling its container ships. Sherwood talked of transferring Sealink’s ferries to the Bermuda flag to cut costs – alarming the MOD, as they were part of Britain’s strategic reserve.
Sealink returned to profit, then was caught in the wash of a 13-week strike against P&O by the National Union of Seamen. When Sealink staff struck in sympathy, Sherwood went to court and had the NUS stripped of £2.8 million in assets. A slanging match with Sterling culminated in Sherwood saying he hoped the union would win.
In 1989 Sweden’s Stena Line took an 8 per cent stake in Sea Containers, and with Tiphook bid for Sealink. Seacon fought them off, Sherwood selling assets worth £261 million before the offer was raised to £718 million, and accepted.
In 1990 Sherwood claimed the Hales Trophy after the jet catamaran Hoverspeed Great Britain crossed the Atlantic in three days, seven hours and 52 minutes, nearly three hours faster than the United States in 1952.
When rail privatisation began, he bid for the South-west and Great Western franchises before being awarded the East Coast main line in 1996. For what he christened “the route of the Flying Scotsman”, Sherwood launched GNER, headed by Christopher Garnett, former commercial director of Eurotunnel.
Investing £17 million in customer service, Sherwood observed: “We have to try and break the communist approach to running a railway.” Garnett raised standards to a level not seen since the 1930s, helping out himself if he found a buffet short-staffed.
GNER put on more trains from King’s Cross to Leeds and Newcastle, and business boomed. But when the franchise was relet, Seacon outbid Virgin with a price that proved suicidally high. Revenue fell short after the 7/7 terrorist attacks, and through competition from low-cost airlines.
In 2006 Seacon itself ran into trouble as its partnership with GE turned sour. Sherwood left the company and that October it filed for bankruptcy protection; it was wound up in 2010. The Department for Transport cancelled GNER’S franchise; National Express took over, but before long it, too, was in trouble.
Sherwood kept the chair of Orientexpress Hotels, winning a boardroom struggle with his stepson Simon. The company (with 38 hotels and the luxury trains) was incorporated in the US with Sherwood the main shareholder; in 2011 he became chairman emeritus. Renamed Belmond, Orient-express Hotels was latterly sold to the French luxury brand LVMH for $2.6 billion. Sea Containers House went in 2012 to a rival hotel chain.
A director of Save Venice and an honorary citizen of the city, Sherwood championed proposals for a structure made of glass to replace the wooden Arsenal bridge.
James Sherwood married Dr Shirley Cross in 1977; she and his two stepsons – who took his name – survive him.