James Sherwood obituary
James Sherwood, who has died aged 86, was a rambunctious business opportunist who parlayed a fortune made in the unglamorous world of shipping containers into life with the rich and famous by reviving the Orient Express and building up a chain of exclusive hotels. An American, he chose to run his business empire from London, where he constructed a headquarters building overlooking the Thames and mixed in Mayfair society.
Although he was reckoned personally to be worth £60m by 2004, his eclectic Sea Containers business empire, shaped by whim as much as by strategy, was collapsing under its debts when he was forced to step down in 2006. But his hotel interests blossomed and amounted to over 40 highclass establishments all over the world by the time he died.
He was an early beneficiary of the privatisation of British Rail, acquiring Sealink ferries and the prime East Coast mainline franchise. He showed his political colours by having the assets of the National Union of Seamen sequestered in a 1988 ferry dispute, though he protested that he did not want to destroy the union. At the handover to his company GNER, he insisted: “We have to break the communist approach to running a railway.” Said one commentator: “He has the habit of saying the wrong thing at the wrong time.”
Sherwood was born in Pennsylvania and brought up in Kentucky, the son of William, a patent attorney, and Florence. After studying economics at Yale, he spent four years in the US Navy Reserve as a cargo specialist. This led to a job with the United States Lines’ luxury transatlantic liners.
Posted to Europe, Sherwood devised a plan to capitalise on unused cargo space. He shipped luxury goods, normally expensively airfreighted, in containers, at high rates, and soon found himself regarded as a container expert. He recalled: “It was all entirely bogus but that is how it began.”
Sensing the speed of the shift to containerisation, he borrowed $100,000 with two friends and set up his own container leasing business, Sea Containers, in 1965. He moved into specialised and refrigerated containers, and bought his own ships. At its height the company was valued at $3bn.
It was a maverick progress. He plunged enthusiastically into the London social scene, though some coldshouldered him as a pushy American. A journalist manqué, in 1975 he published James Sherwood’s Discriminating Guide to London.
He bought the Illustrated London News, starting a glossy publishing business. He talked of bidding for the Times. Then, Sherwood suddenly bought his favourite Cipriani hotel in Venice for Sea Containers. Reputedly challenged in the boardroom, he retorted that if the company would not purchase it, he would buy it himself.
He described it as one of his “frivolous ventures”, but later claimed it was diversification because the container business was maturing. Coincidentally he was collecting vintage railway carriages with his wife, Shirley Cross, a bioscientist, whom he married in 1977. When rolling stock of the disbanded Orient Express came up for auction, Sherwood conceived the idea of recreating the service, relaunching the Simplon Orient Express to Venice in 1982 after he and Shirley had spent years and millions tracking down the original rolling stock.
Financial analysts joked about “Sherwood’s toy box”. But coupled with the Cipriani, it primed a new leisure and property business with a worldwide network of top quality hotels offering what Sherwood called “fizz” and incidentally providing him with an entree to high society in every continent. His British aspirations were advanced with the launch of Harry’s Bar in Mayfair, which was jointly owned with the impeccably establishment figure of Mark Birley.
Sherwood was a powerful presence, famous for long detailed memos from meetings or lunches instantly bashed out on the typewriter that always accompanied him and retyped by his secretaries. Autocratic and demanding, he bubbled with ideas. He travelled for seven months a year. “Can’t you tire of the good life?” one interviewer asked him. “No, you cannot,” Sherwood replied.
His businesses had complex structures to minimise tax and protect his voting power. In 1984, following new US tax requirements, they split into two – shipping and leisure. He remained president of both. In 1988, he entered the ferry business with the purchase of Sealink, the British Rail ferry services privatised by the Thatcher government. But the Channel tunnel loomed, and in a typically erratic sequence he first campaigned against it, then lobbied for his own version, before threatening legal action against the government, claiming it must have known that the tunnel was planned when it sold Sealink.
He competed energetically with P&O and Stena, matching staff cuts and introducing fast catamaran ferries. He extended his ferry interests to New York, Scandinavia, Australia and the Mediterranean. But in 1989, Stena bought into Sea Containers and launched a year-long takeover battle. It ended with Sealink sold to Stena and much of the container business to Tiphook.
Sherwood and his extraordinary collection of interests survived. In 1996, he added UK railways with the successful formation of GNER. But as container rates fell and his haphazard collection of ferry services struggled for profitability, the company declined. He stepped down from Sea Containers with company borrowings at $1.2bn and its ferry interests were sold. In 2006 the company invoked Chapter 11 protection against bankruptcy and had to surrender the GNER franchise, unable to meet its guarantees. In 2007 Sherwood retired as chairman of the still profitable Orient Express Hotels, but remained a director.
His assorted properties included the 80-acre Hinton Manor in Oxfordshire and an Italian vineyard. His interest in modern art was exercised as a trustee of the Guggenheim Foundation and his support for the arts in Venice included a plan for a glass bridge over the Arsenale canal. He was made an honorary citizen of Venice in 1995.
He is survived by Shirley, an expert collector of botanical drawings, who established the Shirley Sherwood Gallery at Kew Gardens in 2008, and her sons, Simon and Charles, from her previous marriage; they adopted his surname.
• James Blair Sherwood, businessman, born 8 August 1933; died 18 May 2020