BUSINESS ABROAD: More for Santa Clore

BUSINESS ABROAD More for Santa Clore

From West End club to Soho pub, the most talked-about man in London last week was Charles Clore, a self-made Cockney millionaire who is Britain’s boldest, fastest-rising corporate raider. Without a warning to management, Clore called in the press, bid $56.8 million to buy from individual stockholders the No. 2 British brewer, Watney Mann (five plants, 3,670 pubs, book value $73.6 million). His offer boomed all brewery stocks and sparked scathing anti-Clore attacks from the press and Laborites in Commons.

Competition for TV. On an island where beer is thicker than water, the popular furor over Clore centered on his plan to sell more beer by breaking down the class barriers in Britain’s 69,749 pubs. With the new prosperity and equality and all that, the average Briton today quaffs only three pints of beer weekly, v. six pints in 1900, while sales of costlier wine and spirits have scooted up merrily. Clore figures the only way to fizz up the beer industry is, as his aides say, “to brighten those hideous Victorian gin palaces to match social equalization.” Each pub now has two bars, separated by partitions. One is patronized by the middle class; the other (where beer costs a penny a pint less) is the standup, sawdusty domain of the workingman. Clore would abolish these inequities, add carpets, tables, beer gardens to the second-class bar. By turning the pub into one homey, egalitarian watering place, he aims for it to compete better with home TV.

Tankard traditionalists exploded. Said Columnist Cassandra in the Daily Mirror: “Clore is striking at the heart of British pub life, in which you can pick your friends, your class relationships, and change them every ten minutes if you wish to.” Pub crawlers also got in a froth over Clore’s idea to prettify the saloons to lure more women. Sniffed the Sunday Empire News: “The ordinary Englishman is not much interested in women.”

Challenge for the Clan. Tense, stocky Charles Clore, 54, is the first outsider ever to challenge the clubby, clannish old families who dominate British brewing through a tangle of interlocking directorates. Born in London’s seamy Whitechapel district, son of a small textile merchant who later pioneered in Israel, Clore got scant schooling. He went to work in the family business at 15, turned his first speculative profit at 21 by buying South African rights to the first Tunney-Dempsey fight films and selling them immediately. Investing wisely in real estate and stocks (e.g., in South African gold shares that appreciated thirtyfold in a few years), Clore ran his fortune into millions, started to prowl around for sluggish old companies.

In a brilliant series of takeovers, usually after a fight, Clore burst into banner-lines in 1953. He bought control of Brit ain’s biggest independent shipyard, Furness (89,000 tons last year), and Britain’s biggest manufacturer of hosiery-making equipment, Bentley Engineering Co. Then he scooped up control of Britain’s biggest shoemaker, J. Sears & Co., for $9,520,000, promptly sold Sears’s undervalued assets for $12.6 million and leased them back. With the cash, Clore had Sears buy Furness and Bentley from him. Clore cleared a profit of $11,760,000 on the whole works, garlanded all these companies into Sears Holdings Ltd. Then, often trading Sears nonvoting stock, he gained control of key manufacturers of structural steel, air-conditioning and electronics items.

Old-school-tie British businessmen at first scorned Clore as a marauder. But he soon got profit with honor by putting stagnant assets to work, boosting efficiency all around. Under Clore income rose more than eightfold to last year’s pretax $19.3 million, and assets advanced from $30 million to close to $150 million. Meantime, Clore moved onto 83 corporate boards. He also built up a $60 million real estate business that has closed a fifty-fifty deal with Conrad Hilton to build a 25-story, 500-room luxury hotel. Says Clore simply: “We build up our companies.”

Champagne forthe Cockney. For control of Watney’s, Clore offered $8.40 per share to the 13,000 holders of Watney Mann stock. Investors immediately bid up the market price from $7.20 to $10.50, figuring that the anti-Clore beer barons would try to outbid him and that Clore would then boost his price.

In the midst of battle, Clore last week relaxed by giving one of his famed lavish parties, which the British press calls “Santa Clores.” At the Dorchester Hotel, he sipped champagne (his lips never touch beer) with the top names of British peerage and beerage (including a Watney and a Mann), plus the Maharajah of Jaipur, Kim Novak, Jean Paul Getty, Roz Russell, Aly Khan, Stavros Niarchos. Happily, Clore reminded one and all that he has never lost a battle—or a war.