Sir Michael Edwardes: SA-born UK trade-unions buster 1930-2019
Eastern Cape boykie laid ground for Thatcher’s hardline approach
● Michael Edwardes, who has died at the age of 88, was a pugnacious and abrasive South African who in the 1970s and ’80s became the highestprofile, most controversial business leader in the UK.
He turned round the bankrupt stateowned carmaker British Leyland, revolutionised the country’s industrial relations, taught prime minister Margaret Thatcher how to face down militant trade union bosses and led the largest hostile takeover bid in UK corporate history on behalf of Harry Oppenheimer.
Edwardes was born near Port Elizabeth on October 11 1930 and went to St Andrew’s College in Makana, where he was a ferocious scrumhalf nicknamed “Tickey” because of his 1.6m height.
His father Denys ran a business in the motor trade and raised him tough. When he lost an outboard motor while fishing on the Krom River, his father marooned him and his friend there until they dredged it up eight days later.
Edwardes went to Rhodes University, got a law degree and started a small grass-cutting business. In 1951 a friend of his father’s in the battery business suggested he join the Chloride battery company in Britain.
He was sent to reorganise the company’s interests in Rhodesia, returned to the UK as a director and was made chair in 1974. He increased its profits five-fold.
This caught the eye of the Labour Party, which asked him to become CEO of British Leyland (maker of Jaguar, Mini, Land Rover, MG), which was losing hundreds of millions of pounds and was seemingly in terminal decline. Edwardes demanded to be made chair, which was quickly agreed.
He arrived in November 1977 with a psychologist who put top management through a series of tests, which was unheard of at the time. He fired 20% of them, reassigned 50% of the rest to new jobs and halved the board.
He cut the workforce by 50%, closed 19 of 55 facilities and forced through pay rises of 8% below inflation by going over shop stewards’ heads and appealing directly to workers on the factory floor, which was also unheard of.
“One advantage of being a colonial is that I’m not weighed down by all that class nonsense,” he said. “I find it quite easy to walk on a factory floor and communicate with people.”
He told line managers to stand up to union leaders.
“Act firmly and you’ll be backed,” he said. “Repercussions? Yes of course there will be, but I give you my word you will not be let down.”
Militant union bosses who’d enjoyed untrammelled control until Edwardes arrived reviled him as “the poison dwarf”.
He was knighted in 1979, the year Thatcher became prime minister. She admired his confrontational style with the unions but clashed with him when he refused her demands to sell off the profitable parts of British Leyland.
When his contract ended in 1982 he left, saying he wanted to earn proper money, and wrote a bestselling autobiography, Back from the Brink.
In 1988 Oppenheimer hired him to mastermind a takeover of Britishowned Consolidated Gold Fields by the Anglo American and De Beers-controlled Minerals and Resources Corporation, Minorco, the Oppenheimer family’s chief overseas investment arm.
The attempt was fiercely resisted by Gold Fields and regulators in Europe and the US, who feared the takeover might lead to a Johannesburg-based cartel in gold and strategic minerals, leave Oppenheimer in control of a third of the world’s non-communist gold production and tighten apartheid SA’s grip on strategic minerals essential to the US defence and space industries.
Oppenheimer was accused by Gold Fields of wanting to use Minorco to evade anti-apartheid sanctions. He and Edwardes accused Gold Fields, “which has been very active in SA and which has certainly not been in the forefront of opposition to apartheid policy”, of “insufferable” hypocrisy.
For the best part of two years the battle was front-page news in the top UK and US papers. Minorco chair Edwardes was the public face of the fight along with Oppenheimer himself, and revelled in it.
The takeover bid finally failed when a US judge refused to allow it on antitrust grounds. Edwardes said he felt no bitterness.
“I relish a good challenge and a bit of a fight if that is what it takes,” he said. “You could say I’m a bit of a scrapper.”
Edwardes married Mary Finlay, the daughter of the managing director of Safmarine, in 1958.
They divorced in 1988 and he married his long-time business assistant, Sheila Witts.
He died at his home outside London after suffering from Parkinson’s disease. He is survived by Sheila and three daughters from his first marriage.