by Ann Wroe
This was the forerunner of tankers of up to 500,000 tons. Shipping oil became one of the fastest ways to make money. After a few voyages the ship had paid for itself.
Although the Niarchos name is identified with ships (and, as it happens, his name means “master of ships”) much of his fortune was later diversified into property and elsewhere. At the time of his death the man who had once owned some 80 tankers, more than anyone else, was reckoned to have no more than Greece’s 15th largest merchant fleet. Because of his canniness he was able to survive the shipping slump in the 1980s.
One of his soundest investments was in paintings. Like other self-made tycoons, Andrew Mellon for instance, Mr Niarchos liked to load up with blue-chip art. He owned Manets, Cézannes, Picassos,Renoirs, and numerous others, modern but not too modern, that filled a warehouse. These expensive tokens of graciousness will now move to other owners until, to the dismay of dealers, they end up in museums, as the Mellon collection did. He had the other toys of the rich: a private jet, several yachts, one of them said to be the most beautiful in the world, and numerous racehorses. He was an impressive host: he introduced pheasants into his Greek island so that guests could have something to shoot at. He was married five times. The competition on the high seas that existed between Mr Niarchos and another Greek shipowner, Aristotle Onassis, seems to have extended into their private life. His fourth wife, at 56, was Charlotte Ford, aged 24, of the motor family. Shortly afterwards Mr Onassis was deemed to have outshone him by marrying Jacqueline Kennedy.
He will be missed, by a vast audience perhaps not much interested in tankers, even supertankers, but which was fascinated by this man who went shopping on a princely scale. Rich people, captains of industry, are commonplace. Tycoons are rarer. n
Duke of Norfolk
The duke of Norfolk, an English survivor, died on June 24th 2002, aged 86
Many thousands of words have been written during the past couple of weeks about a soldier who inherited the title of the duke of Norfolk and with it the duties of earl marshal and chief butler of England. Readers of The Times were offered some 2,200 words. Newspapers catering for less patient readers made do with snappy accounts of the duke’s soldierly habit of cleaning his own shoes. Perhaps that was enough to make a point. The more distant you were from the world in which the duke moved, the more peculiar it seemed.
The duke himself seemed aware of his title’s growing irrelevance. He was perhaps the least ducal of the 17 holders of the title created by Richard III in 1483 (or possibly only 16; there is some dispute among the archivists). Succeeding by death, the duke said, was “a poor way of getting on” and he was prouder to have made his way to become a general. The duke upset some fellow members of the House of Lords by agreeing that those with inherited seats should no longer be involved in lawmaking, although he retained his own seat, as did the member who had the duties of the Lord Great Chamberlain.
His rebelliousness had its limits. Like many associated with archaic institutions, the duke was a charming contradiction. He epitomised old values, country, family, faith, without being stuffy about it. Tradition, he said, was one of the reasons that the country had not had a revolution since 1688 and had not been successfully invaded since 1066. That was a very British thing to say. Whatever its merits as an argument, it expressed a sentiment that drives the enormously popular history programmes on British television and perhaps also drove the royal feeling that unexpectedly swept the country when the Queen Mother died in March, moving those of a republican mind to silence. For anyone seeking to explore, if not to understand, the appeal of “this sceptred isle” – a long-running programme on BBC radio – the career of the country’s premier duke was at least worth a look.
At birth he was merely the Honourable Miles Francis Fitzalan-Howard, “honourable” being a politeness conferred on the child of a lord. In what he called the “wavy line of the succession” he later became Lord Beaumont, then Lord Howard, and finally, when a distant cousin died, found that he had become the duke of Norfolk. “I was never sure what I would be called next,” he said. “Miles” usually sufficed.
At the age of 22 he joined the Grenadier Guards (raised in 1656). Two years later, at the start of the second world war, his mother made the sign of the cross on his forehead and he went off to France in command of an anti-tank platoon. He had an exemplary war, serving on the battlefields of Europe and North Africa. He gained a reputation for, in Hemingway’s phrase for bravery, showing grace under fire. He stayed on in the army after the war until 1967 when he worked part time for Robert Fleming, a merchant bank with family connections.
In his army days he had bought a house in Oxfordshire, and preferred it to the edifices he eventually inherited in 1975 as duke of Norfolk, particularly Arundel Castle in Sussex, the ducal seat, nearly 1,000 years old, brimming with history, but mostly comfortless. More agreeable was his duty as earl marshal, choreographing the annual opening of Parliament by the monarch, a ceremony largely unchanged since medieval times.
Everyone agreed that he brought a soldierly efficiency to the event, in which he had to walk backwards before the queen without tripping. When his scarlet uniform became a bit tatty he asked Denis Healey, the chancellor of the exchequer in the then Labour government, if it wouldpay for a replacement. Mr Healey nodded through the expense. The two men had first met fighting in Italy in the war.
He possessed robes that had been made for his great-great-grandfather when a ban was lifted in 1829 on Roman Catholics sitting in Parliament. The survival of the Howard family in Protestant England dating from Henry VIII is regarded by historians as an example of tenacity and by many Catholics as miraculous. Some ancestors went under the axe, including Henry Howard, a Tudor poet much admired by the duke. Philip Howard was believed to have been poisoned and was made a saint. The duke was said to keep a book of prayers in his jacket. “We are like the British infantry in defence,” he said. “We never give in.”
These days the politics of Christianity arouse little general interest in Britain. “We are all so ecumenical and love each other,” the duke said. “I am terribly ecumenical myself.” He disagreed with the Vatican’s opposition to birth control, but so do many Catholics. “Has every wife got to have eight children like my mother?” he said, and his listeners agreed. He enjoyed an argument but didn’t much care for parties. What he mostly liked was working in the open, repairing walls, managing woodland. “I wish I was thinning trees,” he was heard to say at a dinner party. He told of a party he had given for European royals who stayed on until three in the morning. “You might have thought some people hadn’t got palaces to go to,” he said. n
Patrick O’Brian
Patrick O’Brian, captain of the sea story, died on January 2nd 2000, aged 85
You are, perhaps, trying to pass on to a friend your enthusiasm for the stories of Patrick O’Brian. So what are they about? They are sea stories, you say, set at the time of Britain’s wars with Napoleonic France. But more than that, much more. Umm. Well, at least you tried. It may be that one day your friend, finding himself desperate for something to read, will pick up “Master and Commander”, the opening book of Mr O’Brian’s sea saga, and find himself enveloped in the story of Jack Aubrey as he sets sail in his first command, the tiny warship Sophie. The danger is that your friend will become an addict, devouring one after another all the 20 Aubrey novels with a fanaticism that excludes work, family life and other such humdrum matters, and then reading through the whole lot again. Why on earth did no one mention Patrick O’Brian before?
Under the O’Brian spell you move into an unfamiliar but entirely convincing world. Quite likely you start with no special interest in the British navy in the age of sail. But who could have predicted the appeal of Tolkien’s fantasies? How many Londoners were lured to the first night of a play about a Dane who could not make up his mind? Mr O’Brian was among the illustrious line of writers who turned words into the nearest thing we have to a time machine.
The reader shares what Mr O’Brian called “the closed environment of a ship at sea, at sail, proceeding for months, perhaps for years, and its magnifying effect upon human relations”. Such ships were the deadly machines that made Britain the master of much of the world in the 19th century, but they were also complex societies whose smooth functioning depended on civility and friendship, and, an unlikely ingredient in adventure stories, music. Starling Lawrence, a writer who did much to introduce the stories to American readers, sees in Mr O’Brian’s world an element of wish-fulfilment. Despite the hardship of navy life, you are in a place “where the sails are white and the air is clean”. Another writer, Amanda Foreman, one of the many women in thrall to the stories, says that in them, not far away from the fears in men’s hearts, “is the vision of an ideal existence”.
Patrick O’Brian not only re-created another time; he re-created himself. For years his acquaintances had no reason to doubt that he was what he said he was: an Irishman, born in Galway to a Roman Catholic family; educated at home by a governess; fluent in Irish and other languages, among them Latin. But when he became famous it emerged that his real name was Richard Patrick Russ, the son of an English doctor who specialised in the treatment of gonorrhoea; and who was the son of a successful Jewish furrier who had emigrated to England from Germany. Richard Russ had been educated at a minor boarding school in Devon.
If there was deception, it was of the most innocent kind. It is clear from his novels that Mr O’Brian was half in love with Ireland. He provided Captain Aubrey with a seagoing companion called Stephen Maturin, a partly Irish surgeon every bit as interesting as Aubrey himself. Maturin is an intellectual, a linguist, a graduate of Trinity College, Dublin, which, late in his
life, gave Mr O’Brian an honorary degree. O’Brianologists, of which there are many, are convinced that, deep in his imaginings, Mr O’Brian saw himself as Maturin. They point to Maturin’s real job as a spy; Mr O’Brian was said to have worked for British intelligence, although the details are obscure.
Like Maturin, he was interested in how battles, especially sea battles, had shaped history. Lepanto, in 1571, ended the Turkish threat to the West; the defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588 permanently damaged Spain’s moral influence; Britain’s victory over the French fleet on the Nile in 1798 ended Napoleon’s plan to invade India. The raw vividness of the Aubrey novels owes much to Mr O’Brian’s sources, the logbooks and other contemporary accounts of navy life that fired his imagination. He said that in writing about that time “it is difficult to avoid understatement”. Nelson, when the youngcaptain of a small ship, boarded and captured two far more powerful enemy ships. “So very often the improbable reality outruns fiction.”
He denied he was a romantic, an unbelievable claim for a novelist to make. Still, in the routine of his life he was a realist. He lived for most of his working life in Collioure, in southern France, because it was cheap, at least in the early days when he was poor. Several pre-Aubrey novels sank without trace, and Mr O’Brian and his wife Mary lived on his earnings as a translator; he may not have known much Irish, but he had far more useful French.
The Aubrey novels were not immediate bestsellers. That most enduring source of publicity, personal recommendation, gave them a fair wind. The publication of each new story became an event. Well into his 80s Mr O’Brian was content to continue to be the obedient recorder, in fine handwriting, of the exploits of Aubrey, by now an admiral. He thought he had another 20 years or so of useful life, and was working on the 21st Aubrey novel. His death means that the saga is not finished. But no work of art ever is. n
Sir Mark Oliphant
Marcus Laurence Elwin Oliphant, scientist, died on July 14th 2000, aged 98
Like many of the scientists who helped to make the atomic bomb, Mark Oliphant expressed dismay when it was used to destroy Hiroshima and Nagasaki. During the cold war years he was labelled a “peacenik”, the contemptuous term used to describe those who questioned the morality of using nuclear weapons. In 1951 the United States refused to give the Australian a visa to attend a nuclear physics conference in Chicago. When the British tested 12 nuclear weapons in 1952−57 in the Australian outback, he was the most qualified Australian to join the team monitoring safeguards at the tests, but he was not invited.
He was never a security risk, and his brilliance as a scientist was never in question: he was knighted in 1959, when Australia still had such honours. What mostly annoyed the politicians and soldiers who constituted the nuclear establishment was Sir Mark’s outspokenness. He scoffed at the American obsession with security. He recalled that when the bomb was being developed in the 1940s, the Americans gave false names to the eminent scientists being gathered from abroad, in case the enemy got wind of the project. “I became Michael Oliver, Niels Bohr became Nicholas Baker. We kept the same initials. It was so silly.” In fact, the general principles of the atom bomb were already well known in the scientific community, and Klaus Fuchs, a German refugee working on the project, was passing on the finer details of its manufacture to the Russians.
Mark Oliphant was popular with ordinary Australians. He was the underdog standing up for what he believed. His avuncular manner and unpredictable chuckle made him the antithesis of an aloof scientist. At the age of 95 he turned up at his old university in Canberra to protest against the federal government’s meanness to academe. Anyway, few Australians wanted nuclear bombs on their territory. They cast a wary eye across the Pacific where the French were doing their best to blow up the island of Mururoa with their own bombs. “The French are like a bandit with a sawn-off shotgun,” said Sir Mark. That’s telling them, Olly.
It has to be said that Mark Oliphant and his like-minded colleagues seemed to be content to work on the bomb, knowing that it would be capable of mass destruction. It was only later that they publicly expressed misgivings. In the chilling words of Robert Oppenheimer, the atom scientists’ leader, “The physicists have known sin.” Sir Mark said it was necessary to build the bomb before the Germans did, a justification also offered by Albert Einstein, who helped to persuade America to make the bomb. But Sir Mark added this candid observation: “I learned during the war that if you pay people well and the work’s exciting they’ll work on anything. There’s no difficulty getting doctors to work on biological warfare, chemists to work on chemical warfare and physicists to work on nuclear warfare.”
For Mark Oliphant, the most exciting time of his early career was when he won a scholarship to Cambridge to work with Ernest Rutherford, a New Zealand-born physicist, in whose Cavendish laboratory British scientists first split the atom. This was a golden period for Cambridge. At one time in the 1930s eight Nobel prize-winners were working in the Cavendish, then the world’s leading centre for experimental nuclear physics. Sir Mark later became professor of physics at the University of Birmingham. His laboratory produced the magnetron, an invention that greatly improved the efficiency of radar. The magnetron helped Britain to track and sink German submarines in the Atlantic; and the Americans used it decisively against the Japanese fleet.
Back home in Australia after his wartime adventures, Mark Oliphant turned his mind to creating a scientific elite in a country more famous for its fine wool and champion cricketers. In the fledgling capital, Canberra, he founded the Research School of Physical Sciences at the new Australian National University and helped to establish the Australian Academy of Science. Both institutions are now world-class.
He said the country should develop an atomic energy programme to develop its vast open spaces as a hedge against the day when fuels like coal and oil, which Australia has in abundance, would run out. He believed that nuclear power, driving desalination plants, could transform deserts into farmland. It hasn’t happened. Australian lethargy defeated Sir Mark’s enthusiasm. Nor did he have much luck with his plan to build the world’s most powerful accelerator for nuclear research. The project ran out of money and was mocked as a “white Oliphant”.
After Sir Mark retired fr
om science he was appointed governor of South Australia, his home state, in 1971. No figurehead, during his five-year term he spoke out on the issues that worried him: the environment, racism, the importance of the family, themes that stayed with him for the rest of his life. One of his last pieces of writing was a reflective pamphlet, which he distributed to friends. He wrote, “Lord, let now thy servant depart in peace.” n
Harry Oppenheimer
Harry Frederick Oppenheimer, voice of reason, died on August 19th 2000, aged 91
Visitors from democracies to white-ruled South Africa would, if they were important enough, usually be received by the prime minister and then, to protect their reputation for fair-mindedness, meet Harry Oppenheimer. In 1960, Harold Macmillan, Britain’s prime minister, had a talk with Mr Oppenheimer on the eve of his speech to a dismayed South African parliament: “The wind of change is blowing through this continent.” In 1982, Mr Oppenheimer’s guest was Henry Kissinger, America’s ever-travelling fixer, then in South Africa to observe that the wind was gathering strength.
The Macmillans and the Kissingers of the world felt at ease with Harry Oppenheimer. After enduring a government lecture on white supremacism, it was comforting to dine with Mr Oppenheimer in his splendid home in Johannesburg with its Goyas and Degas and other emblems of good taste; and hear his liberal-minded views delivered in quiet Oxford English. The answer to racial oppression, he said, lay in financial prosperity. In a growth economy, new, well-paid jobs would be open to blacks, who would join the middle class. Apartheid would hinder such a development. It had to go.