Boat International - June 2018

http://www.boatinternational.com | June 2018

PHOTOGRAPHY: GETTY IMAGES; CARLO BORLENGHI

On board

with

SIR

LINDSAY

OWE N-

JONES

He was the Englishman

who turned L’Oréal into

a cosmetics giant, and

the sailor who helped

make Wally famous.

David Edwards meets

a very dashing knight

IT WAS LOVE AT FIRST SIGHT and the

beholder was 10 years old. Lindsay Owen-

Jones was on holiday with his family and the

life-changing vision of beauty was France,

and all its romantic allure. “It was discovering

that there was another world out there where

they drank wine instead of beer and had all

kinds of wonderful things including pretty

girls,” he says. “I can put it down to a memory

of a tiny hotel in Bénodet, on the south coast

of Brittany, called Hotel du Phare, and there

was a drop-dead gorgeous waitress and

suddenly I was having a really good time.”

If you didn’t know the story of Lindsay’s

remarkable subsequent life, his impeccable

pronunciation of Bénodet and Hotel du Phare

would be a hint that that first taste of France

would be much to the young English boy’s

liking. He would go on to make France his

home and become something of a national

treasure by turning one of its best-known

companies, L’Oréal, into a global superpower,

becoming Sir Lindsay and receiving the

Legion d ’Honneur in the process.

Sir Lindsay’s account of his first foreign

holiday reveals more than just a love of all

things French. The first detail he recalls is the

vehicle they travelled in. “We had a Humber

Hawk, with a roof rack full of stuf, and an

overdrive so you could drive it flat out for hours

and hours and hours, which my father did.” He

was already mad about cars, and racing cars

in particular. “Even at six or seven I was really

into motor racing. I would listen to the radio