The Strode Venturer Read online

  I wasn’t really listening to him. I was thinking of what had happened to the Strode shipping empire since Henry Strode had died and what it meant to me. Eighty thousand! And now, even if I could find a way round the agreement, those shares were worth less than my gratuity. “Any point in going to the meeting to-morrow?” I asked.

  “The meeting? Oh, yes, I forgot to tell you. The market is expecting the chairman to face some awkward questions. Could be some fireworks, in fact. Apparently one of the big institutions purchased a large block of Strode Orient shares when they were marked down on the death of the old chairman and they’ve been stuck with them ever since.” The phone rang and when he’d answered it he pushed the Ex Tel card across to me. “Henry Strode died in 1955 and the price of the shares in that year ranged from a low of forty-two shillings to a high of fifty-eight and six. Even around the low they must have paid more than twenty times the present price. That’s not a very good record for an institution.” He got to his feet. “I’ve got to go and deal for a client now. But I should go to the meeting if you’ve nothing better to do.” And he added as he held the door open for me, “Practically all our shipping companies are the same; they’ve been too bloody slow to move with the times. They’ve stuck to the small general-purpose tramp and let the Swedes and the Norwegians with their big specialised bulk carriers grab the much more lucrative long-term charter business. But the Strode Orient Line has been about the slowest of the lot. If you go to the meeting you’ll see the sort of management you’ve got.

  “The trouble with meetings,” he went on as we waited for the lift, “is that the chairman doesn’t have to answer any questions put to him by shareholders. It’s only when shareholders get together with sufficient voting strength to push the old directors out and get their own men in that the fur really begins to fly. Directors love their salaries, you know. Or perhaps I should say in these days of high taxation that, like politicians, they love the power and advantages of their position—the chauffeur-driven car, the big office, expense accounts, the ability to make and break people, to order others about. Those they cling to like limpets.” He laughed as we went out into the street. “So would I. And so would you if you had the chance. It’s the only way to live well in a country where the State dominates. The Russians discovered it long ago, and when all’s said and done the power of the State is now so great that the gap between our brand of capitalism and Russia’s brand of Communism is closing all the time.” We had reached Throgmorton Street and he paused. “Do I gather you’ve left the Navy?”

  “In the process of leaving,” I said.

  “Well, get yourself with one of the big institutions, or better still with a small one that’s growing.” He glanced round, seeming to savour the bustle of the street. “Whatever they say about the City, it’s still a huge dynamo with its tentacles reaching out to every corner of the globe. If you’ve the right contacts …” He smiled and left it at that. “Well, sorry I couldn’t be of more help to you.” A quick pat on the arm and he was gone, moving quickly across the street and up the steps into the Stock Exchange.

  The sun had broken through now and patches of blue sky showed between the buildings. I walked to the Bank and on down Queen Victoria Street. Here I was in an area of new office blocks and the sense of power and wealth that surrounded me was very strong. I felt suddenly alone and without purpose in a world that had its own built-in dynamic drive. I had always heard it said that a human being could feel lonelier in London than in any city in the world and now it was beginning to be true for me. It was natural, I suppose, that at that moment my thoughts should have turned to Barbara, now some eight thousand miles away. I wondered if she realized how she’d driven me to this and how much she was a part of the loneliness I felt.

  When a marriage goes wrong it’s difficult not to blame the other partner. You see their faults so clearly. You never see your own. How much was I to blame? Again, I didn’t know. She’d been barely twenty when I’d rushed her into marriage in 1949. I hadn’t stopped to consider how glamorous Ceylon must have seemed to a young and very vital girl straight from the austerity of post-war Britain. We were in love and it was so marvellous that that was all that had seemed to matter. It was only later that I began to realize that the vitality that had attracted me to her in the first place was not just physical, but an expression of a furious energy that conditioned her whole mental approach to life so that she grabbed at it with both hands like a child unable to resist forbidden fruit. She wanted the stars as well as the moon. The excitement and novelty of having children had satisfied her for a time, but after that … God knows what she had been up to in the long periods when I was away at sea. I hadn’t dared inquire too closely. The satisfaction of sexual appetite can be a useful palliative to some women when ambition is thwarted and abundant natural energy frustrated. It wasn’t altogether her fault, but I couldn’t help thinking with envy of some of my fellow officers. The strength they drew from a happy marriage was something I had never had. And now in a last desperate effort to deal with the problem I had abandoned a career for which I had been trained all my life. I was feeling very bitter as I walked towards Blackfriars, drawn inevitably towards the river, the one link in this city with the world I knew and loved. I’d see the children. That was something, at any rate. John was at prep school near Hailsham and Mary at a convent school in the same county. Hostages to the future and in a sense my only sheet anchor. Now that I was away from Barbara she didn’t seem to matter so much. But these two did and I felt I couldn’t fail them.

  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.r />
  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.

  2. THE STRODE VENTURER

  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 �
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  “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.”