Sir Owen Green
Low-key businessman who transformed BTR into a leading British industrial conglomerate
SIR OWEN GREEN, who has died aged 92, was chief executive and chairman of BTR, which he drove by a long series of acquisitions to become one of the leading British industrial conglomerates of the 1980s; but he did so in a disciplined, frugal and low-key style that was in marked contrast to the more flamboyant takeover players of his era.
BTR had its origins, by Green’s account, as “a small group of old established companies cobbled together mainly in the 1930s in an unfashionable industry, rubber, in which the conditions of work, the pay, the morale and the profitability each merited the other”. At its core were businesses such as the Leyland and Birmingham Rubber Co, founded in 1898, and the India Rubber Guttapercha and Telegraph Works Co, which descended from a late 18thcentury maker of waterproof cloth.
Having for some years been a subsidiary of the US tyre maker BF Goodrich, the group emerged in 1934 as an independent public company, British Tyre & Rubber – shortened to BTR when it eventually ceased production of tyres.
An accountant by training, Green joined BTR as its finance director in 1956. He was managing director and chief executive from 1967, and chairman from 1984 to 1993. The business of which he took the helm suffered, he said, from a surfeit of “industrial intellectuals and functionaries” and “that well recognised recipe for disaster, the two societies: patricians against plebeians”.
One of his first moves was to slash the number of senior managers from several hundred to 100, based in a drab office near Vincent Square in London. During one of their later takeover battles, Green’s team would be dubbed “the number-crunchers from Pimlico”.
He also delegated power to the leaders of the group’s component businesses, relying on what he called “the authority of competence” while discouraging “rank and privilege”. Central management was exercised through rigorous targets for profits, sales and cost control, with consistent growth as the aim.
Over many years BTR’S shareholders benefited accordingly, but it was Green’s belief that “the freshness, the novelty and the excitement” of business growth created a more powerful motivation for BTR executives than any share- or cash-based incentive scheme.
It was for his relentless pursuit of growth through takeovers that Green was best known, and comparisons were often made with other conglomerate builders such as the glamorous, jet-setting Lords Hanson and White – but the contrast with Green’s quiet lifestyle and self-effacing personality could not have been greater.
During the 1970s and early 1980s, many companies were acquired by BTR at home and abroad, chiefly in the mundane field of industrial products from which Green’s team were expert in extracting value. In 1983 the group’s profile rose higher with an aggressive bid for Thomas Tilling, a rival Londonbased conglomerate with interests from building materials to insurance, publishing and Pretty Polly underwear.
During spirited exchanges between the two boards (both resorting to full-page “knocking” ads in the national press), Tilling’s boss told shareholders that BTR stood for “Bust Tilling and Run”, while the BTR side drew attention to the luxuriousness of Tilling’s head-office mansion, Crewe House in Curzon Street. BTR’S £654 million offer prevailed, and Crewe House was sold (for the then huge price of £28 million) to become the Saudi embassy.
Next, in 1985, came an acrimonious battle to gain control of the debtridden Dunlop tyre company. Green was forced to triple his initial offer to £101 million before securing the deal; the component parts of Dunlop were then gradually sold off. In 1986 he returned to the arena with a
£1.2 million bid for Pilkington, the world-leading glass manufacturer – but, in the face of political and union opposition, he withdrew rather than pay the substantially higher price that would have been required to win.
BTR’S last major deal of the Green era was the 1991 takeover, for
£1.5 billion, of the Hawker Siddeley aircraft company. Over the course of his long tenure, BTR’S profits had risen from £400,000 to over £1 billion; but by the time he retired in 1993 the conglomerate model – and the ruthless pursuit of value through cost-cutting and what was labelled asset-stripping – had fallen out of fashion.
Critics said Green had relied too heavily on acquisitions and clever accounting to maintain his pace of growth. A downturn of BTR’S fortunes, and a radical reduction of its portfolio, followed in the mid-1990s under his successors; in 1999 came a merger with the engineering group Siebe (best known for inventing the sealed diving helmet) to form what became Invensys, a software and industrial controls business within which little of Green’s BTR survived.
If hindsight took some of the shine off Green’s reputation as a manager, he was nevertheless widely admired for his stance on the rising trend in corporate executive pay – which had kicked off in the early 1990s with huge salary increases for privatised utility bosses. Green believed corporate chiefs who had risen through the hierarchies of established companies should show personal restraint, especially when workers’ wages were under pressure – and should not claim rewards akin to those of genuine entrepreneurs. He set a firm example by taking a salary rise of just £804, to a comparatively modest £217,616, in his final year as chairman of BTR.
Owen Whitley Green was born at Stockton on Tees on May 14 1925. On leaving school he served with the RNVR from 1942 to 1946, and after demobilisation he joined the small London accountancy firm of Charles Wakeling & Co, qualifying in 1950.
In his later years Green was also a director, from 1988 to 1993, of The Spectator – where he was an unassuming presence at a board table of grandees assembled under the proprietorship of Conrad Black – and a trustee of the Natural History Museum. He was knighted in 1984, and received the gold medal of the British Institute of Management in the same year.
He once defined his recreations as “bad golf and good reading”. He married, in 1948, Doreen Spark, who died in 2006; he is survived by their son and two daughters.
Sir Owen Green, born May 14 1925, died June 1 2017