DENMARK: Plum the Great

Say “Plum!” to a Dane and he will think of butter—vital Danish export.

Eccentric Harald Plum has long been Copenhagen’s butter Croesus. The boom of a cannon across the harbor came to mean merely that he was through business for the day and had sailed out to Plum Island, to chomp voraciously through a rich dinner topped with pastry and champagne.

Plum’s first coups were not in butter but small arms. During the War he sold some thousands of Danish recoil rifles, grew vain, secretly published an anonymous biography of himself crammed with pictures of Balkan and European royalties, implying that all had received him whereas many had not.

With neutral shipping at a Wartime premium, Denmark’s Plum created Det Danske Transatlantiske Dampskibs-Sels-kab (Danish Transatlantic Steamship Corp.). Part of the huge profits he used after the Soviet Revolution to finance the anti-Bolshevist campaigns of “White Russian” General Yudenitch and Admiral Kolchak. Their failures cost him dear. In 1924 his Trans-Atlantic Corp. crashed for a stupendous loss to shareholders in which the Danish Landmansbank alone dropped 200,000,000 kroner ($53,600,000). Incensed, the Danish Government started to probe Plum.

The probe was never completed. Plum celebrated his escape with a statue. Grotesque, it rises on Plum Island, symbolically depicting the God Thor victoriously wrestling with demons of the underworld.

One day last week Harald Plum, wrestled less successfully with his nerves. His butter companies (Crown Butter and Le Brun) were, he knew, verging on insolvency, due to too great and rapid expansion. More than once in such crises Harald Plum had fiddled with the pistol which he always kept at hand. He claimed that the touch of cold steel soothed him, reminded him that his first millions were made in guns. Last week the pistol went off and Harald Plum crumpled, wounded but not dead.

The shot came a few minutes before banks were due to open. That morning the doors of Plum’s comparatively small Folkebank (capital $1,600,000) remained locked. Cousin Bretteville Plum, the bank’s Managing Director, scouted the police theory that Tycoon Plum had intended to commit suicide. Stock of the Folkebank dropped only 15 points. Hours dragged by, with Plum the Great unconscious.

Soon the Nordisk Trust Co.—exclusively financed by U. S. capital of Danish-American extraction—also suspended payments. Nordisk is a heavy shareholder in Folkebank, which in turn has large holdings in Crown Butter and the other Plum butter company, Le Brun.

As the day wore on Plum the Great recovered consciousness, called for his secretary, dictated what was afterward variously described as a “statement” and a “confession,” then called in members of his family and tried to explain what steps they could take to save the Plum companies. At last he demanded what had been done with his pistol, was told that the police had taken it, seemed vexed. Since his doctor prescribed sleep he was left alone. Stealthily he rose, painfully dragged himself to a cupboard where he had secreted another pistol. Merciful, the second bullet brought Death to Harald Plum.

With the morrow came the real Plum crash. It appeared certain that the Plum butter companies will have to go through liquidation, though many believed that Cousin Bretteville Plum may be able to save the Folkebank and Nordisk. Hard hit was one of the oldest and reputedly shrewdest brokerage firms in Copenhagen. Claus L. Smidt, which presently suspended business, announcing that it had stood guarantor for a loan of $267,700. which Crown Butter had received from the internationally famed and potent Hambros Bank.