|
Sir Malcolm Field
Late Welsh Guards
|
After a third of a century running the newsagent and bookseller WH Smith, Sir Malcolm Field faced his biggest challenge in the debris of a hotel near Charles de Gaulle airport outside Paris in July 2000. Investigators found that a burst tyre had crashed a chartered Air France Concorde supersonic airliner, killing 109 people on board and four on the ground. Field, chairman of the Civil Aviation Authority, had to sign the formal decision to suspend the Certificate of Airworthiness for all British Concordes. Flights restarted after extensive fleet modifications in November 2001.
He was criticised for a delay of three weeks before acting, but insisted he had followed the correct procedure by waiting for the joint French/UK investigation team to recommend suspension. ‘We have acted in a responsible, prudent way’, he said. Nevertheless, he admitted that it was the 70th time a Concorde tyre had burst since the planes started flying in 1976, on seven occasions rupturing fuel tanks.
Jeremy Hardie, a WH Smith colleague, said: ‘He was not susceptible to fashion or the last person he spoke to. He could take the tough decisions.’ A Times profile said he had ‘a rare ability to put his foot down without appearing to step on anybody’s toes’.
During Field’s 14 successive years as WH Smith’s managing director and chief executive, he and his longstanding chairman, Sir Simon Hornby (a former Grenadier), grappled with the fact that the newsagent was a prisoner of its dominant market shares in its historic areas of books, stationery and music. An apparent reluctance to innovate prompted Private Eye to nickname the company ‘WH Smug’. The pair agonised over how to break free of the moniker, but were restricted by their relative lack of knowledge about other types of retailing. ‘We realised that the public don’t shop in one shop’, said Hornby, ‘so in order to raise our share, the most rational thing was to become our own competition’.
They bought a clutch of bookshops and put them under the Waterstones brand, adding Our Price, Virgin Music, Virgin Megastores and Paperchase to extend the music and stationery sales. All were sold a few years after Field stepped down. The magazine Management Today said: ‘Its reputation as a conservative company in the old family mould, caring for its employees but deprived of real leadership and vision, has much to answer for. Nevertheless, WHS has identified and seized opportunities’.
Expansion, however, did not stop there. They bought an American newsagent chain, took the group into DIY with Do It All and, most controversially, launched two of the UK’s earliest cable television channels, Lifestyle and Screensport, in 1986. Unfortunately, with the arrival of Sky Television in 1990 the WH Smith challenge wilted, and the company closed both channels in 1993. Field’s successors pulled out of the US in 2003, before another management team returned there in 2018.
Field also had to deal with the early stages of the sharp growth in shoplifting. A regular churchgoer, he had a simple answer. ‘I’m a great believer in not putting temptation in people’s way’, he said. The magic bullet on his watch was the arrival of Epos (electronic point of sale) machinery in 1991. ‘We now know exactly what we should have in the store’, he said. ‘So we know which products have been stolen and how many’. He also introduced simpler remedies, such as adjusting product displays and till positions.
By 1995, WH Smith was under increasing pressure from supermarket newspaper and magazine sales, and its biggest shareholders decided that Field had been immersed in the company culture for too long to lead an effective fightback. He stepped down at the end of that year.
Malcolm David Field was born in London in 1937, the elder son of Stanley and Constance Field (née Watson), who both worked for Watson and Sons, the family’s newspaper and magazine wholesaling firm. Stanley was a wartime major in the British Army, serving in the 51st Highland Division in north Africa under General Bernard Montgomery. Field’s brother, Richard, who was ten years younger, went into insurance with Prudential and Legal & General. They were brought up in Bounds Green, north London. Malcolm attended Norfolk House preparatory school in nearby Muswell Hill, and then Highgate School. He excelled at history, English literature and football, and was a keen Arsenal fan.
He did National Service as a second lieutenant with the Welsh Guards in Germany and Cyprus and commanded 20 troops fighting Eoka, a guerilla organisation that wanted the end of British rule in Cyprus and a union with Greece. Despite dreaming of a football blue, he turned down a place at the University of Cambridge in favour of a management traineeship with the paint and chemicals group ICI. He left after only two years, frustrated that he had not advanced more quickly, to join Watson and Sons, which WH Smith bought in 1962. He stayed there for the next 34 years, with a break to attend the London Business School soon after it opened in 1964.
His first marriage, to Jane Barrie in 1963, was dissolved in 1970. Through mutual friends he met Anne Cleveland, an A&E sister at St Mary’s Hospital, Paddington, and they married in 1974. They had a daughter, Joanna, who is in hospitality and sports sponsorship. That marriage was dissolved in 1982. Field was married for a third time in 2001, to Anne Charlton, an interior designer, artist and sculptor he had met at a dinner party. Joanna and his third wife survive him.
Field first met Hardie in 1976 across the desk at the Monopolies and Mergers Commission investigation into newspaper distribution. ‘I was really quite nervous’, he said. ‘I had to sit in front of this imposing panel with hordes of bureaucrats behind them, one or two of them sound asleep but others writing furiously’. Hardie remembered: ‘Malcolm came over as truthful and straight, which is exactly what he was’. The commission found that the wholesalers were not acting against the public interest, a verdict confirmed by a further inquiry in 1993.
For ten years, while running WH Smith, Field was on the board of the Navy, Army and Air Force Institutes (Naafi), which provides bars, restaurants, supermarkets, cars and other services to UK armed forces around the world. He took a string of company directorships, including at Scottish & Newcastle Breweries, the insurer Phoenix Group, the stockbroker Evolution Beeson Gregory, Sofa.com and Wyevale Garden Centre. From 2003 to 2006 he was non-executive chairman of Tube Lines, a consortium responsible for the Jubilee, Northern and Piccadilly line stations and track.
Field was a trustee of the Shakespeare Schools Foundation, advised the Helen Hamlyn Trust, chaired the Devon Garden Trust and was on the boards of the Royal College of Art, Highgate School and Exeter Cathedral. He was knighted in 1991 for his contributions to WH Smith and the Naafi.
His passions were modern art, theatre, ballet, opera, golf, tennis and cricket. He belonged to MCC and the Garrick and Vanderbilt clubs. He and his third wife Anne spent years on a 60-acre landscaping project around an 18th-century domed Robert Adam orangery, which they restored as their Devon country home. ‘I must have planted a thousand magnolias and azaleas’ Field said.
Sir Malcolm Field died on 30th December 2024, aged 87.
With thanks to The Times |
|
