Dalgety: The romance of a business

by Wynford Vaughan-Thomas

96 pages, Hardcover

Published January 1, 1984

About the author

Lewis John Wynford Vaughan-Thomas, né Thomas, CBE was a Welsh newspaper journalist and radio and television broadcaster. In later life he took the name Vaughan-Thomas after his father.

Reviews

[Tim Pendry · Rating 3 out of 5]

Official company histories are never entirely to be trusted - after all, whoever pays the piper (in this case, Wynford Vaughan-Thomas, a solid journalist and broadcaster of the third quarter of the last century) plays the tune - but this 1984 history of Dalgety is short, readable and informative.

Dalgety, broadly speaking an agricultural and manufacturing services combine, was to go through a radical transformation after this book was published, largely as a result of being battered by the BSE crisis in the cattle sector yet survived by shifting into biotech and merging to create Genus PIC.

But that is an entirely different (if equally interesting) story. This book is the story not of transformation into biotech but of the opening up of Australia and New Zealand by British entrepreneurial capitalism, a remarkable story in itself if one denigrated by 'wokes' today.

As such the book is a nice introduction, from one perspective, of that earlier process and how power was drawn back into the City of London from the colonies to become part of the successful core of British imperial progress - the triumph of capital.

Indeed, what is remarkable is that a major business on the other side of the globe was run so effectively at such a distance by men most of whom never set foot in the colonies once the system was established.

The pattern is like that of the empire itself. An early phase of pioneers, entrepreneurs and conquerors giving way to a managerial operation run from London by surprisingly tiny numbers of people who could do their business within a few square miles in Britain's largest city.

In the end, of course, the imperial system was unsustainable although Dalgety seems to have been acute in turning itself into a business multinational in which the bulk of profits would come not from the colonies but from servicing the heartlands themselves.

The anti-imperialist might speak of economic exploitation (and abstract theory would agree, less abstractly so in the case of India or potentially China) but the total long term improvement of the condition of the people globally required such exploitation.

Australia is now a second rank power in its own right and fully independent. New Zealand will never be a power but it is secure. Neither would exist if it was not for the engagement of men like Dalgety alongside the settlers.

Their descendants are coming to terms with the crimes against the indigenous peoples and that is the problem with economic development - it is a messy affair whether under capitalist or socialist regimes. Stalin simply truncated the process of many decades into a few years.

People make mistakes and we are dealing not with some master plan by very clever people but the actions of tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, of people struggling to survive and improve their condition. Blunders like the introduction of the rabbit to Australia were inevitable.

Once Frederik Gonnerman Dalgety, the Scots-origin founder of the company, had agreed to go public on the London Stock Exchange in 1884, the story becomes perhaps less interesting and is treated more cursorily by Vaughan-Thomas but the achievement was real enough.

When you know the later story, you see a pattern of creativity that could outlast many crises, of which BSE was only the last, perhaps was encoded into the DNA of the organisation despite occasional bouts of weak management outside the centre.

To go from wool merchanting through the vicissitudes of that market (notably the great Australian drought of 1895-1903) thence into agribusiness and then into biotech suggests that the best of Western capitalism is nothing if not flexible.

We have to hope that this DNA of flexibility and creativity exists in contemporary corporations in the wake of the current pandemic because it is clear that the asinine IP waiver by the American populist Left is likely to compound healthcare problems rather than solve them.

Dabbling with capitalism is never a good idea especially from a country that cannot manage to build a decent national health service. You replace capitalism with a strong state machine (as in China) or you manage it but otherwise let it run its own course. Anything else is counter-productive.

Not perhaps a master work of history (lacking the necessary depth and objectivity), the book is nevertheless a good short read with excellent illustrations of nineteenth century Australian and New Zealand history and it was produced to a very high standard in its own slip case.