the times | Wednesday February 23 2022 53
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Actor who played the bigot
in Love Thy Neighbour
Jack Smethurst
Page 54classes together. She survives him
with their sons, Mike, a chartered
accountant, and Giles, an IT manager.
In 1956 Dixon joined Rowntree in
York, promoting the company’s brands
in ways that seem somewhat dated
today. After Eight adverts, for example,
featured manicured housewives above
captions such as: “A woman’s place is in
the home, eating After Eight and
looking beautiful.” It was the late 1970s
before they began to focus on the dark
green-and-black packaging and the
elegant ormolu clock showing two
minutes past eight o’clock, a design
based on a clock that once sat in the
boardroom.
He was promoted to marketing
director for the UK confectionery
business and in 1969 was sent on the
advanced management programme at
Harvard Business School in Boston.
Around that time Rowntree merged
with John Mackintosh, which brought
not only Rolo and Quality Street to the
sweet jar, but also the permeance of
Methodist morality that chimed with
Rowntree’s Quaker roots. “The direct
Quaker involvement stopped here a
long time ago,” Dixon explained. “But
the attitudes and traditions have not...Obituaries
Ken Dixon
Pragmatic chairman of Rowntree who was unable to prevent the York-based confectioner being swallowed up by Nestlé
ALAN HOWARD/THE TIMES
Ken Dixon snapped a stick off his daily
two-bar KitKat and answered the
phone. By the end of the call he might
have felt he needed something stronger
than coffee to go with it. It was 8.30am
on April 13, 1988, and the stock exchange
had spotted unusual activity in the
shares of Rowntree & Co, the venerable
York-based confectionery company of
which he was chairman.
Representatives of Jacobs Suchard,
the Swiss manufacturer of Toblerone
chocolate bars, had been calling
Rowntree’s institutional shareholders
and offering a 30 per cent premium if
they sold immediately. Dixon later
discovered that they had been quietly
acquiring Rowntree stock since mid-
March, but neither he nor the company
had received any formal approach. By
9.15am, Jacobs Suchard owned 14.9 per
cent of Rowntree, a notch below the
15 per cent permitted under City rules.
There had long been speculation that
Rowntree was ripe for a takeover, but
no one had anticipated such a daring
dawn raid. Dixon, who in 1962 had
overseen the introduction of After
Eight chocolate wafer mints, hit back,
describing the move as “wholly unwel-
come” and concluding in withering
tones: “Jacobs may need Rowntree, but
Rowntree does not need Jacobs.”
Five months earlier he had sat down
in Paris for a more genial chat with
Helmut Maucher from
Nestlé, another Swiss
rival. Nestlé had
not previously
engaged in
anything as un-
seemly as a hos-
tile takeover and
while Maucher
was interested in
acquiring Rown-
tree, Dixon had made
clear that any such
move would be resisted.
The pair had parted on good terms.
When Maucher learnt of Jacobs
Suchard’s share-buying spree, he feared
that Rowntree could fall into the hands
of his Swiss competitor. Looking out
over Lake Geneva from his office, he
telephoned his Rowntree counterpart:
“Our offer to help remains open, Mr
Dixon, and I urge you to reconsider our
proposals. Please keep in touch.” Dixon
again politely declined.
Two weeks later Nestlé decided that
Rowntree was too sweet a prospect to
ignore and Maucher made a “white
knight” bid, valuing Rowntree at
£2.1 billion. Dixon remained implacable.
“We have the best brands in the world
and we are perfectly capable of
exploiting them ourselves,” he declared.
“We see no advantage in joining
together with anyone.” Local share-
holders, many of them Rowntree
employees, echoed his sentiments, with
one suggesting that they would sooner
sell York Minster than Rowntree. “I
don’t want £10 a share, even £20,”
another said. “Rowntree belongs in
York, not in Zurich.”
Support was strong. According to The
New York Times, not since Ivar the
Boneless led the Viking invasion in 866
had the residents of York put up such
fierce resistance to foreign marauders.
The Yorkshire Evening Press mounted
a “hands off Rowntree” campaign,
gathering
15,000 signa-
tures and bussing
1,500 people to London to
lobby parliament; the city’s lord
mayor flew to Switzerland to deliver the
same message in person to executives
from Nestlé and Jacobs Suchard; and
there were Rowntree rallies, with free
KitKats provided.
Yet as the tug of war continued,
Dixon may as well have been sending
chocolate soldiers into battle: Jacobs
Suchard acquired more shares; Nestlé
increased its offer; and Rowntree’s
stock soared in value, tempting some
small shareholders to sell. Dixon, who
spent his rail journeys between York
and King’s Cross reading Jane Austen,
sought help from Margaret Thatcher,
the prime minister. How could a British
company be taken over by a non-EEC
rival when Swiss law would not permit
a similar move in the other direction?
Files released years later suggest that
within Downing Street the company
was regarded as “just a lot of pinkos”, an
opinion derived from the activities of the
Rowntree family trusts, which were, and
still are, independent from the company.
Even Rowntree’s own brand of Black
Magic could not save the company and
the government’s refusal to refer the
takeover to the Monopolies and
Mergers Commission (MMC) was the
final blow. “The best Rowntree can do
now is extract as much cash as they can
from the Swiss,” one analyst said.
In late June, Nestlé won control in a
deal that valued Rowntree at £2.55 bil-
lion (about £7.27 billion today). “It is a
sad day for me that the long traditionA Rowntree production line in Norwich
and Dixon as chairman in 1988.
After Eights were central to his careerWe think very hard about our people; it
is something that hangs in the air from
the past.”
Many of the brands he worked on
dated from the 1930s, including KitKat,
Smarties and Aero. “One of the fasci-
nating things of this business is that one
can establish brands with very long
lives — if you look after them,” he told
The Observer. The key, he added, was to
keep costs down but advertising and
investment up. The latter involved
everything from transport to advanced
sweet-wrapping machinery. “If you
don’t feed your money back, you don’t
hold your place in the market,” he said.
Dixon was as good as his word. Not
only did he invest in plant and people,
he also went on a buying spree.
Between 1983 and 1987 the company
spent nearly £400 million on acquisi-
tions, many of them in the US and
Canada, including the Canadian
confectioner Laura Secord. Nor was he
opposed to initiating takeover bids,
including one for Huntley &
Palmer in 1981 that failed when
it was referred to the MMC.
According to European
Management Journal, by
1987 Rowntree was
operating 25 factories in
nine countries and
employing 33,000
people. Its head-
quarters remained in
York, where it had
been founded in 1862
by Henry Isaac Rown-
tree. Under Dixon, who
had succeeded Sir
Donald Barron as
chairman in 1981, Rown-
tree was the city’s largest
employer with 5,500
workers, many of them
second, third or fourth genera-
tion employees who enjoyed the
company’s paternalistic traditions of
employee and community welfare.
After the company was sold to Nestlé
Dixon spent a year on the new board,
later taking similar positions with Bass,
Legal & General, Yorkshire-Tyne Tees
TV and British Rail. He enjoyed fell
walking, gardening and sailing his
dinghy in Ireland and the Lake District,
and he also retained a link to the Rown-
tree name, serving from 2001 to 2004 as
chairman of the Joseph Rowntree
Foundation, which undertakes research
aimed at tackling poverty.
Dixon’s main preoccupation, how-
ever, became education. He chaired the
council of the University of York from
1990 to 2001 and became one of its most
significant benefactors, providing
financial support for the Ken Dixon
drama professorship, the Dixon drama
studio and the Ken Dixon economics
lecture. He likened the university’s con-
tinuing development to a transatlantic
sea voyage, saying: “We know where we
are going, but the route isn’t fixed.” Sir
Ron Cooke, the former vice-chancellor,
recalled that when presented with a
proposal that did not sound right,
Dixon’s disarming response would be:
“Have another After Eight and let’s talk
it through.”Ken Dixon CBE, chairman of Rowntree
1981-89, was born on August 19, 1929.
He died on February 10, 2022, aged 92and successful history of
Rowntree as an independ-
ent company is ending,” said
Dixon pragmatically, sucking
on a fruit pastille. “But there
comes a point when you have to
face facts.” Nevertheless, there was
still time for levity and at the height of
the takeover battle Rowntree released
Britain’s first blue Smartie, a reflection,
perhaps, of the mood in the boardroom.
Kenneth Herbert Morley Dixon was
born in Stockport in 1929, the younger
of two sons of Arnold Dixon, a shipping
merchant with the family business, HC
Dixon and Sons, and his wife, Mary (née
Jolly); his brother, Graham, became
principal research scientist at Shell UK
and died in 2000. Their father’s work
took the family to Shanghai, whereyoung Ken was educated at the Cathe-
dral School. In the early 1940s mother
and sons moved to Australia, where he
attended Cranbrook School, Sydney,
though his father was interned in a
PoW camp in Shanghai until 1946.
Returning to Britain he did National
Service with the Royal Signals, taking
part in the Berlin airlift, before studying
economics at the University of
Manchester. He joined the marketing
department of Calico Printers
Association, where he met Patricia
Whalley. They were married in 1955
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