86 Saturday December 18 2021 | the times
Register
Sir Christopher Hogg in 2004Christopher Hogg regularly cycled to
the office insisting pedal power kept
him in touch with the outside world.
“One can too easily become cosseted by
chauffeurs and secretaries,” he said. In
1992 The Sun, fed up with “John Major
and his motley crew in Westminster”,
proposed Hogg for prime minister. “He
has charm and knows how to delegate,”
the paper’s City pages trilled. “He also
has the great talent of picking the right
people for the right job.”
It was a view shared by others in the
City. Hogg, a veteran of conflicts in
Cyprus, Suez and the boardroom, was a
figure of quiet civility. He led Cour-
taulds, the textiles and chemicals behe-
moth, through a deep recession with
£100 million of write-offs, the closure of
plants and a reduction in the share-
holders’ dividend to zero. He then split
the company into two well-run busi-
nesses, textiles and chemicals, diluting
his power but boosting efficiency. “I do
really care more about being part of a
successful whole than being The Great
I Am,” he insisted, while rather under-
mining his case by remaining chairman
of both enterprises.
He was said to hold the record for
firing more people than any company
except British Steel and British Ley-
land. Margaret Thatcher expressed
concern when he closed the company’s
north Wales sites, with the minutes
from one of their meetings reading:
“The prime minister hoped Sir Christo-
pher would accept that Courtaulds,
who had been major employers in the
area for many years, had wider obliga-
tions to the local community.”
Described as intimidating, intelli-
gent, fair and logical in the extreme,
Hogg could appear aloof and unwaver-
ingly highbrow. His bland woollen
tank-tops may have been worthy of a
suburban grandfather, but his near-fet-
ishisation of modesty was disconcert-
ing to those more accustomed to the
shrieking ties of Sir John Harvey-Jones.
“The Hogg school of management is
serious, thoughtful and tough,” Chris-
topher Fildes wrote in The Spectator.
Others noted his control freakery. “I
never submitted a paper to him without
it coming back covered in comments,” a
former protégé once remarked.
Hogg went on to acquire an illustri-
ous portfolio of chairmanships. At
Reuters he oversaw the transformation
of a news-gathering agency into one of
the world’s most successful technology
companies. GlaxoSmithKline was
more of a challenge, with Hogg appear-
ing out of touch in 2003 when he cham-
pioned a £22 million package for Jean-
Pierre Garnier, the company’s chief
executive, that was rejected at a share-
holder meeting.
Yet bad press did not bother him. He
simply returned with a revised pro-
posal. “I don’t think I can walk on
water,” the emotionally reticent Hogg
admitted in a Guardian interview in
- “I know that there are periods
when everything goes swimmingly
well, and other times when people
throw rotten eggs. But it doesn’t pay to
be too media sensitive.”
Christopher Anthony Hogg was born
in East Sheen, southwest London, in
1936, the second of four children of An-
thony Hogg, who ran the theatrical
publishing house Samuel French, and
his wife Monica (née Gladwell). He
credited his management style to his
parents. “They delegated the manage-
ment of my life to me from a young age,”
he said. From being a “boringly good
schoolboy” at Marlborough College he
did National Service with The Para-
chute Regiment, where he learnt his
leadership mantra: “Horses first, men
second and officers last.” As a young
subaltern he led 20 men into action
from the back of an aircraft. “It was very
tough,” he mused. “I went straight into
terrorist warfare in Cyprus for a year.”
He then parachuted into the Suez
Crisis. “I’ve seen action; I’ve been shot
at; I had a very violent military service,”
he said, adding that he took five years to
recover. “Why do people not talk about
their war experiences? Because, if
they’re honest with themselves, they
know they were just bleeding terrified a
lot of the time. They’re absolutely at the
edge of keeping control over them-
selves and losing control over them-selves. You just don’t like that feeling.
You also don’t like the thought that if
your government puts a gun into your
hands and says ‘Go to it’, you do. You
recognise sadistic instincts. You
recognise how wafer-thin is the veneer
of civilisation.”
On demobilisation he spent six
months in Canada and then developed
his punting skills at Trinity College,
Oxford. He read Classics but switched
to English after discovering The Lord of
the Rings. “I was exploring the shores of
the great sea of language, legend, his-
tory and religion, in which Tolkien was
so deeply immersed to the benefit of his
books,” he said. By the 1960s he had
progressed to popular psychology
books, later alarming boardroom col-
leagues by confessing that he wanted
“intimacy, awareness and spontaneity”
in his life.
In his final year at Oxford he met
Anne Cathie, a flatmate’s friend. They
were married in 1961 and she became
an academic. The marriage was dis-tha was different,” she said of a role that
tests the mettle of the best ballerinas.
Tallchief and her husband, George
“Youra” Skibine, were the golden
couple of postwar European ballet, ap-
pearing with various incarnations of
the Grand Ballet du Marquis de Cuevas.
Life with the ballet had an unpredicta-Obituaries
Sir Christopher Hogg
Intimidating but civilised captain of industry who hired as well as he fired
solved and in 1997 he married Miriam
Stoppard (née Stern), the television
agony aunt and former wife of the play-
wright Sir Tom Stoppard. “In some
ways I grudge all the time I spend apart
from her,” he told The Sunday Times.
“We have a wonderful time together.”
She survives him with two daughters
from his first marriage, Catherine, who
leads a private life, and Cressida, who is
chairwoman of the property company
Landsec.
From university Hogg won a Hark-
ness Fellowship and took an MBA at
Harvard University. After a year teach-
ing at a Swiss business school he spent
three years with Hill Samuel, the in-
vestment bank, learning not to be
frightened by large sums of money. “It
taught me about the City and the view
they have in the City that they are at the
centre of the earth,” he mused. “I sym-
pathise with that. They’re not right, but
I understand it.”
Enthused by Harold Wilson’s “white
heat of technology” revolution, he was
seconded to the Industrial Reorganisa-
tion Corporation, a state merchant
bank created to help desirable mergers.
Sir Frank Kearton, its chairman, was
also chairman of Courtaulds and per-
suaded the young Hogg to “come and
try textiles”, though he ended up selling
paints. Soon he noticed that the com-
pany was merely painting over the
cracks. “I could see we were in an enor-
mous mess,” he recalled. “I thought the
situation was more serious than my col-leagues.” Those colleagues made him
chief executive in 1979 and chairman by
the end of the year. In 1990 he oversaw
its break-up into Courtaulds PLC and
Courtaulds Textiles Ltd.
His ability to spot talent could some-
times backfire, such as in 1993 when his
protégé Martin Taylor, a former Finan-
cial Times journalist who had taken
over from him as chairman of Cour-
taulds Textiles seven months earlier,
was appointed chief executive of
Barclays, meaning that Hogg had to
return to the post.
Hogg went on to be chairman of
Allied Domecq from 1996 to 2002, in-
curring the City’s wrath for the sale of
3,500 pubs. Meanwhile, he was collect-
ing non-executive directorships includ-
ing in 1992 at the Bank of England,
where he was mentioned as a possible
governor. He also brought his board-
room experience to the National
Theatre, where he became chairman in
1995, and in 2006 he became chairman
of the Financial Reporting Council.
Describing himself as “a loner”, he
took part in solitary pursuits such as hill
walking. Hogg was not someone to
dwell on the past and could be dismiss-
ive of others who did. “The golden rule
is look forwards and outwards, not in-
wards and backwards,” he said.Sir Christopher Hogg, industrialist, was
born on August 2, 1936. He died from
complications of surgery on December 7,
2021, aged 85Three years in banking
taught him not to be
frightened by large sums
Marjorie
Tallchief
Native American prima ballerina who, like
her sister, became an international sensation
Marjorie Tallchief made a fine Myrtha
in Giselle at the Empress Theatre,
London, in 1949, with one critic observ-
ing “her steely points, smooth bourrée
and noble leap”. It was a part she had
earlier perfected in Boston. “I had done
movies and light operas and I could do
fouettés standing on my head, but Myr-