Consolidated Gold Fields: a centenary portrait

by Paul Johnson

Hardcover

First published March 1, 1987

About the author

Paul Johnson works as a historian, journalist and author. He was educated at Stonyhurst School in Clitheroe, Lancashire and Magdalen College, Oxford, and first came to prominence in the 1950s as a journalist writing for, and later editing, the New Statesman magazine. He has also written for leading newspapers and magazines in Britain, the US and Europe.

Paul Johnson has published over 40 books including A History of Christianity (1979), A History of the English People (1987), Intellectuals (1988), The Birth of the Modern: World Society, 1815—1830 (1991), Modern Times: A History of the World from the 1920s to the Year 2000 (1999), A History of the American People (2000), A History of the Jews (2001) and Art: A New History (2003) as well as biographies of Elizabeth I (1974), Napoleon (2002), George Washington (2005) and Pope John Paul II (1982).

Reviews

[Tim Pendry · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have to declare an interest here. Consolidate Gold Fields was subject to an aggressive takeover bid in 1988 from Minorco and I was on the defence team. The bid was unsuccessful but, exhausted, Gold Fields fell by consent later that year to Hanson.

This book, published in 1987, was given to me as part of the 'learning curve' of mounting a defence but, frankly, takeover bids were then such intense affairs, played within a particular ritual game in which the actual business of the target was ancillary, that I put the book to one side.

I only found the book again very recently 'in a box' I was clearing out, one of many that I had let fester in a loft and whose contents I felt I should send to the dump or have shredded if sensitive. This time, over three decades later, I decided to read it.

I now find that I have read what I think is the finest 'corporate biography' I have come across. Part of its quality lies in the author, the centre-right intellectual Paul Johnson, and part in the exceptionally open, transparent and highly intelligent approach of those who commissioned it.

What is not in the book and I did not know until recently was that Gold Fields (as we called it) was instrumental in the fall of apartheid through the secret talks it sponsored between the South African Government and the ANC on its estate in Somerset.

This would be in character because, although it smacked at times of upper class 'noblesse oblige' and a slight tendency to patrician arrogance, its senior management were liberal and rational. Rudolph Agnew, the Chairman, was very impressive.

The book becomes valuable because, although it has its necessary 'longeurs'to describe its mining and manufacturing activities, it is also a clear and honest account of how mining finance developed in an imperial context and how capitalism has shifted and adapted over long periods.

Johnson is in favour of capitalism but not in a hectoring or polemical way. He simply lays out the background and the facts. He positions it as, quite simply, rational and adaptable, the basis of the 'good life' that we all take for granted (at least in the West).

The general reader can learn lessons from this book on how top level capitalist enterprise works, the amount of risk involved and its critical role in the creation of the great new 'white-led' colonial enterprises in South Africa and Australia and in the further development of the mighty US.

There is no racism in this book (except by the light of those who argue that simple dominance is racist). It becomes clear that it was in Gold Fields interest to train and educate black workers and that tribalism and white trades unions were more problematic than capitalists in this respect.

It came to exist through capitalist ruthlessness but probably nothing would have happened, or another ruthless capitalist would have taken its place if not. It was maintained through rational management and negotiation and an unusual degree of decentralisation.

Highly sensitive to politics, even in the late 1980s, it was adapting to environmentalism with more enthusiasm on the part of managers than you might expect - in fact, both 'greening' and health and safety/working conditions were improved because they made good business sense.

Johnson writes well. He did not just sit in his den and write from papers provided by managers. He travelled across a global mining empire and gives long extracts from his diaries which sometimes do not hide the different prespectives of different parts of the whole. He asks tough questions.

The economics of mining and the nature of mining finance are well covered as well as the cultural differences between parts of the empire which might suggest that Agnew's unusual decentralised strategy was partly forced on him by reality.

More interesting still, Johnson teased out and the managers allowed to be published serious internal debates on strategy and reasoned criticism of prevailing senior management opinion. This is possibly unique, at least in my readings of the closed world of the corporation.

The book is sumptuous in its use of illustration. Johnson introduces personnel at every level of management although the actual workers below that level are observed rather than given a voice. This is still very much a hierarchical environment even if a British and liberal one.

As we finish the book, noting that the company (though its components still trade today) was to fall victim by consent to a financial conglomerate, there is a sense of Gold Fields representing a form of British capitalism whose adaptability was not sufficient to final purpose.

Something constructed to duck and dive and take risks within a free-booting imperial environment might always have found increasing difficulty under a global capitalism that was getting bigger than the British Empire had ever been. But it died with honour.