Lord Macfarlane of Bearsden
Industrialist who came to the rescue of Guinness in the wake of the Distillers takeover scandal
LORD MACFARLANE OF BEARSDEN, who has died aged 95, was a doyen of the Scottish business establishment and a leading patron of Scottish arts; having built his own successful conglomerate in the packaging industry, he took on the challenge of chairing Guinness in the aftermath of financial scandal.
Norman Macfarlane had the reputation of a tireless fixer and networker, and a pillar of entrepreneurial probity – his name regularly appearing in lists of the most influential people north of the border. But by his own account, the tough decisions he was obliged to take at Guinness also briefly made him “the most hated man in Scotland”.
Under the leadership of Ernest Saunders, Guinness had won a takeover battle for Distillers – the Edinburgh-based maker of Johnnie Walker whisky and Gordon’s gin – with a deal worth £2.7 billion in April 1986.
Saunders had seduced Distillers’ directors and Scottish investment institutions with a list of promises, including making Edinburgh the headquarters of the new group, which he cynically failed to keep; it also transpired that an illegal operation had taken place to support the price of Guinness shares during the bid, and that payments of £25 million had been made to parties involved – several of whom in due course faced criminal charges alongside Saunders.
In January 1987, following DTI raids and a highly critical auditor’s report, Saunders was sacked and the historic brewery company was left in disarray. Ministers and the Bank of England agreed on the then Sir Norman Macfarlane as the man to step in.
Having been drafted in as a non-executive director in September 1986, he became stop-gap chairman on Saunders’s departure and was confirmed in post in April 1987. One consolation for such a poisoned chalice, he told his wife, was that the company’s portfolio included the Gleneagles golf course – “and I can get the tee-off times I want”.
Macfarlane applied his formidable energy and resolve to the task of restoring Guinness’s credibility in the City, rebuilding internal morale, rationalising the group’s structure, appointing new top managers – and recovering as much as possible of the missing £25 million, if necessary by making personal phone calls to its recipients.
If it was true that he made himself temporarily unpopular in some quarters by refusing to fulfil Saunders’s broken promises – the head office did not move north, for example – he made up ground by announcing new investment in spirits brands and a broad programme of Guinness sponsorship for Scottish sport and arts.
Macfarlane handed over the Guinness chair to his chief executive (Sir) Anthony Tennant in May 1989, but remained joint deputy chairman until 1992: Tennant explained to the press that “we’re keeping both our opening batsmen, they’re just changing ends.”
Macfarlane was also chairman of the Guinness subsidiary United Distillers until 1996 – and after Guinness and Grand Metropolitan merged in 1997 to form the drinks giant Diageo, he was its honorary life president.
Norman Somerville Macfarlane was born in Glasgow on March 5 1926 and educated at the city’s High School. His father Daniel had a business supplying carbon paper and typewriter ribbons. His older brother Richard – whom he recalled as his hero
– was an RAF Flying Officer navigator with 617 Squadron on the Dambusters raid in May 1943, but was killed in action over Belgium later that year.
Richard’s death prompted Norman to join up as soon as he left school; he was commissioned into the Royal Artillery in 1945 and served in Palestine until he broke his neck in a diving accident and was shipped home to spend a year in hospital.
Having contemplated his future during his recuperation, he decided not to join his father’s business but to use his £200 Army gratuity to strike out on his own in the commercial stationery trade.
His first target market was Glasgow’s newly developed Hillington Park industrial estate, where he would collect orders in the morning and deliver them by van in the afternoon – while also completing a course in business administration at the city’s Commercial College, where he met his future wife Greta. At first she found him “very bossy and arrogant”, she said many years later; she in turn caught Norman’s eye as “a cheeky wee thing”.
A business breakthrough came when he acquired from the makers of Sellotape a machine that manufactured self-adhesive tape with print on one side. At a time when whisky distillers such as Johnnie Walker were beginning to package bottles in individual cartons rather than crates, he was the first supplier of branded tape to seal the cartons.
He went on – backed by a fellow Glaswegian and kindred spirit, the merchant banker (Sir) Angus Grossart – to float on the London Stock Exchange in 1973 and to make a series of acquisitions in the plastics and packaging sectors.
By the early 1980s Macfarlane Group was making profits of £1 million a year; today it has sales of more than £200 million a year and profits of more than £10 million. Norman Macfarlane was its chairman until 1998 and thereafter life president.
He was also deputy chairman of Clydesdale Bank, and a director of General Accident and Edinburgh Fund Managers. Among many other business-related roles he was chairman of the Glasgow Development Agency and a member of the CBI’S Scottish council.
Alongside all this, Macfarlane was a ubiquitous patron of every aspect of Scottish arts. He bought his first paintings on a trip to Paris with friends in the late 1940s and became a noted collector of the works of the Scottish Colourists.
For many years, it seemed, no board or development committee in the artistic sphere was quorate without his presence: inter alia, he was vice chairman of Scottish Ballet, a director of the Scottish National Orchestra, president of the Royal Glasgow Institute of the Fine Arts, a governor of Glasgow School of Art, a trustee of the National Heritage Memorial Fund and the National Galleries of Scotland, and honorary president of the Charles Rennie Mackintosh Society.
Asked in the early 2000s to raise £5 million for the refurbishment of Glasgow’s Kelvingrove Museum and Art Gallery – which he called “the best building in Scotland” – he conjured up more than £13 million.
He also chaired the governors of the High School of Glasgow, was a member of the court of Glasgow University, and a deputy lieutenant of Dunbartonshire. He was three times Lord High Commissioner of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland. Knighted in 1981, he was raised to the elite Scottish order of Knights of the Thistle in 1996.
Macfarlane declared himself a “tremendous” admirer of Margaret Thatcher – he was also an occasional golfing partner of her husband Denis – and was rewarded with a Conservative life peerage in 1991. He retired from the House of Lords in 2016 having attracted unaccustomed flak in the Scottish press for claiming £6,000 of attendance expenses without having spoken or voted during the 2014-15 sitting.
In 1953 he married Marguerite (Greta) Campbell, who survives him with four daughters and a son.
Lord Macfarlane of Bearsden, born March 5 1926, died November 4 2021