The Strode Venturer (4 page)

I was passing
The Times
building then and the sight of it reminded me that I had met one of their correspondents at the time of the Oman war. But when I went in and inquired for him I was told that he was in Southern Rhodesia. I had never been in a newspaper office before and seeing the copies of the day’s paper spread about and people looking through them I realized that here was a world whose function was to record the news, to record it permanently in print. “How far do your records go back?” I asked.

“You want to look something up?” the man at the desk asked. “We’ve all the back issues. If you’d care to give me the date, sir?”

“I can give you the year. It was 1931.”

“And the subject?”

“Strode & Company’s acquisition of the Bailey Oriental Line and anything you have on the death of Sir Reginald Bailey. That was 21st December, 1931. There might be an obituary.”

He nodded and reached for the phone. It was all much easier than I had expected and in less than quarter of an hour I was seated at a table with several bound volumes of
The Times
stacked beside me and a list of references. What precisely it was that made me want to rake over the past I don’t quite know, but once started, I sat there reading on and on, fascinated by the picture conjured up by those faded columns of print. It was all there—the cut-throat competition for freight as world trade slumped, the news that two of the largest shareholders in Bailey Oriental, one of them my father’s own brother, had sold out to Henry Strode,
and then the long-drawn-out struggle for control with my father pledging his credit to the limit and beyond in a wild and reckless attempt to buy back control in the open market. Mostly the story was confined to the financial pages so that much of it was written in terms that were difficult to follow, but I understood enough of it to read between the lines and realize what my father must have gone through. Only in the final stages did it spread over into the general news pages. This was when Strode began to unload and the market in Bailey Oriental collapsed overnight. He had timed it so that he caught my father over-extended, with short-term loans falling due and a large block of shares he couldn’t pay for. The result was bankruptcy. Three months later, in the issue of 23rd December, I found the obituary. He’d died at sea, in one of his own ships. He was given ten lines, that was all; ten lines written in such a way that I was reminded of the letter from Strode I had found amongst my mother’s things. Both the obituary and that letter implied something that was never stated.

I returned the volumes to the desk and went out into the sunlight, down to the river where I leaned on the warm stone of the embankment parapet, staring at the barges slipping down on the ebb, feeling once again as I had felt as a child when I came home to Sheilhaugh to find my mother gone suddenly haggard. Henry Strode had been a monster, and yet even he had been touched by remorse when the bombs began to fall and with half the City in flames he had had to face up to the possibility of death.

The thick river water ran sludge-grey to the sea and clouds sailed the South Bank sky, dirty white and cold looking. But it was warm under the bare black trees where I was sheltered from the north-east wind. I walked all the way to Westminster trying to get the sour taste of what had happened out of my system. But long before I reached the shadow of Big Ben I had discovered that the sour taste belonged to the present, not the past, for if it hadn’t been for Henry Strode I’d have inherited a shipping line and from what I’d seen and heard that morning I knew I could
have run it a damned sight better than Strode’s sons. I knew, with that inner certainty that comes of experience, that I had it in me, that it was bred in me, and the bitterness I felt didn’t only rise from the fact that this would have satisfied Barbara. It stemmed from my own frustration—the same frustration that I had suffered in the Navy as I watched our ships and our power decline. Standing in Parliament Square, looking across to the Palace of Westminster, I realized that what had happened to the Navy and in a much smaller way to the Strode Orient Line was all part of the same thing, part of the malaise that had gripped the country since the war.

I turned abruptly on my heels and went into the nearest pub for a drink.

That afternoon I saw the Employment Liaison Officer at one of the Admiralty’s outlying offices. He was sympathetic, but not hopeful. I was a Commander TAS—Torpedo Anti-Submarine—in mine-layers; it wasn’t the sort of background to give me ready access to employment in industry in present conditions. He advised me to wait six months until the economy had had time to recover. Meantime, he would put my name on the books and if anything suitable turned up.… I went back to the dreary little hotel, had a bath and after an early meal spent the evening alone at the theatre. I had friends in London, of course, but they were naval friends and couldn’t help. Besides, I wasn’t in the mood for company and though I was tired when I finally got to bed, I still found myself thinking of the Strode-Bailey affair, of the disparity between the Strode I had met and the Strodes who now ran the business. It was some time before I got to sleep and long before that I had made up my mind to attend the meeting in the morning.

I
ARRIVED
at Strode House just before twelve. The commissionaire took my hat and coat. “The meeting, sir?” He directed me to the bronze doors of what Billings had
called
the counting house, one of which stood open. There was a small table there and in attendance beside it, dressed in black jacket and pin-stripe trousers, was the man I’d seen in George Strode’s office the previous day. “Name, please?” And then he recognized me. “Mr. Bailey?” There was surprise, almost a note of relief in the way he said my name. “Your initials, please, and the address.” He wrote it down on a single sheet of paper that contained barely half a dozen names and as I started to move on through the door he grabbed hold of my arm. “After the meeting, you won’t leave, will you? I’m sure the chairman …” He checked himself. “If you’d just have a word with me first.”

His manner was so strange that I hesitated. But then somebody else arrived and still wondering at his agitation I passed through into a room with an ornate ceiling and marble floor that still contained the mahogany desks and counter that revealed its original function. A big table had been placed across the far end of the room below the picture of an old stern-wheeler. Seven men were seated behind it, the two Strode brothers together in the centre, and facing them was a close-packed audience of some thirty men. There were no women present and as I slipped into one of the few vacant seats I thought they had been able to gauge the attendance very accurately. The list outside, presumably for unexpected shareholders, suggested that the meeting had been packed in advance by shareholders known to be friendly to the board.

I turned to the report, a copy of which had been waiting for me on the seat. It was printed on glossy paper with the House flag embossed on the cover in blue and gold, and I had just turned to the balance sheet when the man who had been on the door came hurrying down the central aisle to lean across the table and whisper to George Strode. For a moment they were both of them looking in my direction, and then the chairman nodded and his assistant went back to the door, leaving me wondering whether their interest was due to my name or to the letter I had written.

To avoid any appearance of having noticed Strode’s interest I tried to concentrate on the balance sheet, but the mass of figures meant very little to me, though I did notice that the cost of the fleet was not given, only the written-down value, which as Latham had said was just over a million. The profit and loss account gave the measure of the company’s difficulties with an operating deficit on voyages completed to 31st December of more than seventy thousand pounds. On the back cover were listed the ships the company owned, each name beginning with Strode—
Strode Seafarer, Strode Trader, Strode Glory
, a total of seventeen of them. Inserted in the report was the chairman’s statement and I had just begun to read this when the man himself rose to start the proceedings by calling on the secretary to read the notice convening the meeting. George Strode had put on weight since the picture of him in the boardroom had been painted. His face had thickened, become coarser, and the small, rather moist eyes now protruded from fleshy pouches. Yet there was nothing soft about him. He was a massive, broad-shouldered man with thick black hair and black eyebrows just starting to bush out, and he looked fit.

As soon as the secretary had finished he called on the auditor’s representative, and all the time his eyes moved restlessly over the assembled shareholders as though searching out the opposition. If he was nervous, this was the only sign of it he gave for he had the sort of features that expressed nothing of his feelings. His voice, too, was expressionless as he got to his feet again and said, “The report and accounts of your company, together with my review of the year, have been in your hands now for almost a month. I take it, gentlemen, that your time is as precious as mine and that you will not expect me to read them through to you. May I take them as read then?” There was no dissenting voice. “Very well. But before I put the motion of acceptance of the accounts to the meeting it is my custom at these yearly gatherings of our shareholders to inquire if there are any questions you wish to put to your board. I
may say,” he added with a disarming smile, “that I don’t necessarily undertake to answer
any
questions you put to me. It is not always in the interests of shareholders….”

But the opposition was already on its feet and for over ten minutes we were given a review of the decline in the company’s fortunes by a man who might have been a clerk, he was so lacking in any presence and his voice so flat and monotonous. Like most of the other men present he was dressed in a city suit, white collar, blue tie, a strangely anonymous figure whose speech was so full of figures I could barely follow it as he read from a mass of papers he shuffled out of a battered brief-case. Before he had managed to give any substance to his complaint Strode, by surprised raisings of his eyebrows, by puzzled, sometimes even amused glances at his fellow directors and at the body of the hall, had managed to attract to himself the sympathy of the majority of those present. Timing it to a nicety, he rose to his feet whilst the other was still speaking. “If you’d care to put your question, Mr. Felden …” This was, of course, a query as to what the directors proposed to do about the deplorable state of the company, and Strode snapped back at him, “You asked me that last year.” He was at ease now, quite confident he had the meeting with him and prepared to bull-doze his way through any opposition. “My answer, I am afraid, must be the same. It is not in the interests of the company …”

“I am sorry, Mr. Chairman, but I am not prepared to accept that as an adequate reply on this occasion.” The same flat monotone, but a certain hardness had crept into Felden’s voice.

“Well, you’ll have to.” Strode turned to the rest of us. “I am sure you will appreciate, gentlemen, that my attitude here must be dictated by the interests of the company and the shareholders as a whole. Shipping, as you know, is going through the worst slump in its whole history. We operate in a competitive field and to reveal all the various ways in which I and my fellow directors are endeavouring to meet …”

But Felden cut him short. “You have fobbed your shareholders off with this same nonsense for five years now.” His choice of words as much as the sudden lift of his voice had its impact and I felt myself warming to this dry little man who looked so inoffensive, but who was doing just what I would like to have done. “As you know,” he went on, “I represent a considerable shareholding …”

“A bare seven per cent, Mr. Felden.”

“I understand and I do not expect to be successful in moving a motion at this gathering.” He glanced pointedly round the room with a thin smile. “Nevertheless it is my duty, as representing I think by far the greatest shareholding present—and that includes your directors—to sound a note of warning.” He had turned and was facing the meeting. “The present market valuation of the company’s shares is now so reduced that it represents no more than the cash in hand. In other words, anybody acquiring your company by purchase of shares at the current price of two shillings per one pound share gets the Strode Orient fleet for next to nothing. This is a classic take-over situation and still our chairman refuses to take us into his confidence and tell us how he and his board propose to improve the position of the company so that the market valuation of its shares more adequately reflects the value of its assets.”

“Those remarks, Mr. Felden, would have been better addressed to me than to the body of the meeting.” Strode’s voice was calm, still apparently unperturbed. “What you have said is very much to the point and both I and my board are fully aware of the need to increase the profitability of the company and so improve the value of its shares. This will happen, never fear. The freight market is at times a very volatile one and for all you or I know the turn-round may happen this current year. But—and this I do ask you to consider very seriously—the dangers to which you refer, which in any other company might be very real, only confirm my view that it is not in the company’s interests for me to reveal our intentions or to make our policy public.”

Felden nodded briefly. “Then perhaps, Mr. Chairman,
you would answer this question: Have you, or have you not, received a bid for the company?”

“I have not.” Strode said it with emphasis. And he added, “I am glad you put that question. A rumour has been circulated by people who have not the best interest of the company at heart and I welcome this opportunity of refuting it. There has been no take-over bid for your company. And I would add that, even if there had been, there is no chance of it succeeding.”

“Because Strode & Company hold two million shares?” Felden asked.

“Exactly.”

“But that, sir, does not give Strode & Company absolute control. With four and a half million Strode Orient shares in issue, Strode & Company’s interest is just under forty-four per cent.”