As a TV drama brings Robert Maxwell back to life, Andy Wood recalls the time he had dinner with the tycoon who built up a multi-million pound empire only to plunder his companies' pension funds
ROBERT Maxwell was a Labour Member of Parliament representing South Bucks from 1964 until 1970. It just so happened that a union colleague at Peckham Road, Ray Cross, had been Maxwell's constituency agent for his period at Westminster.
It was Ray who arranged my first meeting with Maxwell during October 1974. It took place at Headington Hill Hall, Oxford, the home of Pergamon Press, which Maxwell had founded in 1949.
I'm not altogether sure, more than 30 years on, what I had expected from Maxwell. At the time it was a question of getting to know as many influential individuals as I could. I was not aware that he had been described by a Department of Trade report as "not a person to exercise stewardship of a publicly owned company". I was, however, aware of his wartime background.
He was born Jan Ludwik Hoch on June 10, 1923, the son of an agricultural labourer in the Carpathian mountains. When Germany invaded Czechoslovakia in 1938, he joined the Czech resistance. He was captured, escaped and fled the country. His mother died in Auschwitz and his father was killed by the Germans. He enlisted into the British Army, was commissioned as captain before hostilities ended and was decorated for gallantry. After the war, he decided to publish scientific journals and set up Pergamon Press.
At our Oxford meeting, I explained to Maxwell my concept for an educational trust in the name of Jim Conway, General Secretary of the Amalgamated Engineering Union, who had been killed in the DC10, Paris air disaster in March 1974. Maxwell agreed that his solicitors would handle an application for charitable status. That they did and I suppose I should be grateful. The Stockton-based Jim Conway Foundation became a registered educational charity.
It was not until November 1982 that I next saw Robert Maxwell, at a retirement bash at the European Parliament's London offices. He had taken control of the UK's largest printing group, the British Printing and Communication Corporation (BPCC), renaming it Maxwell Communications Corporation, just a couple of months earlier and most people at the jolly were chatting in groups and generally enjoying themselves.
He was standing alone, glass in hand, and looking somewhat out of it. I don't know whether he was persona non grata or was not generally known, I suspected perhaps the latter. Anyway, I excused myself from the group I was with, approached the man and reintroduced myself. He seemed relieved that he was no longer a lonesome stranger and I was rewarded with an invitation to dinner at the BPCC's Maxwell House in Worship Street.
My visit to Worship Street was during the following February. Maxwell's Filipino staff were pouring what appeared to be pint-sized gin and tonics. I remember very little about dinner, except that we had sirloin steak, a rather good claret and my host asking me if I was born British, to which I replied in the affirmative.
His response was that he chose to be, which, presumably, made him better than me. Following dinner, Maxwell, by this time well inebriated, indicated that he wished to show me something. He took me through to where I assumed the sharp end of the business took place. We looked through a window, he was swaying to such a degree - or perhaps it was me - that I thought he was going to dive through it. "You know what?" he said. "What", I responded. "See those bastards down there?" We could see dozens of men working down below us. "Yes." "Well we can see them, but they can't see us, brilliant or what?" Maxwell had a one-way window installed so that he could watch his employees, unobserved, whenever he wished. I left shortly after that and never saw Mr Maxwell again. Within months, he owned the Mirror Group of newspapers.
During the late 1980s, Maxwell took over Hazel, Watson & Viney, a printing works in Aylesbury, where my uncle had been employed. Historically, it had been a traditional, paternalistic company, with a social club, playing fields and many other extra-curricular activities for its employees. What did Maxwell do? Sell off all of the employee social assets for development and then, I believe, closed the works, the land on which it stood went much the same way as the playing fields - and this guy had been a Labour MP.
It was in November 1991 when Maxwell's house of cards collapsed. On the fifth of that month he mysteriously disappeared from his yacht (it was his love of sailing which begot the nickname Cap'n Bob) and drowned.
His companies were bankrupt and he had abused their pension funds. He had committed fraud, tax evasion and numerous counts of laundering finances. On July 2, 2003, The Sunday Times carried an article suggesting that Robert Maxwell may have been spying, against British interests, from as early as 1946, an activity that could have continued well into the Cold War period.
* Andy Wood, of Stockton, was an apprentice fitter at ICI, Billingham, when he became involved in the Amalgamated Engineering Union (AEU). In 1966, he became assistant to the union's General Secretary, Jim Conway, and set up a charity foundation in Conway's name when he was killed in an air crash.
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