Richard Hall
Joseph Conrad described one of his villains as a “papier-mch Mephistopheles”. That was the image of Tiny Rowland, who has died aged 80.
His secretive nature and mocking smile seemed to fit perfectly with Edward Heath’s descriptive tag: “An unpleasant and unacceptable face of capitalism”.
Despite his Old Etonian airs, Rowland was born Roland Walter Fuhrhop and had been a Scharfuhrer (troop leader) in the Hitler Youth before his family moved to Britain in 1934.
He was interned during World War II. When he emigrated to the then Rhodesia, he dealt in dodgy gold mines, and progressed to dispensing “special payments” to sleazy presidents who gave him rewarding contracts.
But Rowland was a curiously vulnerable tycoon. His creation, the 2-billion London and Rhodesia Mining and Land Company (Lonrho), was snatched from him in 1993 by Dieter Bock, a German property developer brought in to resolve debt prob-lems. And there was Rowland’s bitterness that Mohamed al Fayed had acquired Harrods, the prize Rowland most desired.
Rowland was litigious to extremes. His legal battles with Al Fayed, with oil companies, with fellow directors, with former partners all cost Lonrho many millions.
In the end, the 60 000 once-doting small shareholders could stand such eccentricity no longer. At the last annual general meeting Rowland attended, he was a sad figure, staring at the new Lonrho directors on a platform he had dominated for more than 30 years.
His behaviour was so contradictory and enigmatic that many of those who tried to penetrate his facade imagined there must be a big secret within. In later years, it was generally accepted that he worked for British intelligence in post-colonial Africa. He played a key role for Margaret Thatcher in putting together the Lancaster House conference which settled the future of Zimbabwe.
Rowland loved political intrigue, and tried to back winners in Africa. But he often got it wrong, bankrolling Joshua Nkomo in Zimbabwe and supporting Unita leader Jonas Savimbi in Angola’s civil war.
At one moment Rowland would appear to be a lackey of the United States, at another he would praise Colonel Moammar Gadaffi, declaring: “The Libyans are just retailers in terrorism; the Americans are wholesalers.”
Rowland could be ruthless: upon the death of Kenya’s Jomo Kenyatta, all relations of the newly buried leader were sacked from their Lonrho posts, and Rowland turned towards President Daniel arap Moi. He gave him a stretch of farmland for Moi University.
These instincts were inherited from his father, Hamburg-born Wilhelm Fuhrhop, who in 1906 married, in what seems to have been a shotgun wedding, an Anglo-Dutch girl, Muriel Kauenhoven. The Fuhrhops sailed for Calcutta. Business flourished, but when World War I began, they were interned as aliens. In a well-guarded cantonment east of Goa, Rowland was born on November 27 1917 and christened Roland Walter.
After the war, the Fuhrhops made their way back to Hamburg, with two Indian servants – one of whom is reputed to have given Rowland, who grew taller than 1,8m, his nickname. He went to the Heinrich-Hertz Gymnasium where he enrolled in the Hitler Youth.
In 1934 the family migrated to London. Muriel Fuhrhop was the driving force behind the move – she may have been partly Jewish.
At 18, Rowland joined his father’s import- export business in London, then joined an uncle’s shipping company. His hobby was driving fast cars; he liked Mercedes.
In September 1939, Rowland’s brother Raimund joined the Wehrmacht. Military life was more humdrum for Rowland. He became a private in the Royal Army Medical Corps. There was no risk of his meeting his brother on the battlefield in World War II.
Rowland spent three menial years in army hospitals in Scotland. His father was once again interned, this time in the Isle of Man, and Rowland was to join him, in the notorious Peel camp for high-risk Nazi sympathisers.
Why this happened remains unclear. He always claimed that he went absent without leave, was arrested, sent back to Scotland, then taken under guard to Peel.
Some say he was committed to Peel for showing pro-Nazi sympathies, but there is no credible evidence of that. It is far more likely that he went there to become an informer, as the price of being near his mother, who was dying of cancer. Certainly he was suspected by fellow detainees of being a spy.
Towards the end of the war he was transferred to the island’s civilian camp and was with his mother when she died. Shortly after the war he lived in Mayfair, dealing in cars and importing oranges from Algeria.
In 1948 a friend suggested that prospects looked splendid in Rhodesia. Rowland left Britain, taking his favourite Mercedes and leaving behind a large unpaid tax bill.
After 10 years of farming and dealing with mining prospects, Rowland was spotted by an aristocratic entrepreneur named Angus Ogilvy, who had interests in Southern Africa. A new guiding hand was needed for Lonrho, which owned vast tracts of Rhodesia and held a healthy share portfolio in Britain.
Rowland fitted the bill, but there was a large question mark over the background he had reluctantly disclosed to Ogilvy. A senior Lonrho director was Sir Joseph Ball, a former member of M15 and deputy chair of the secret spy-hunting Home Defence (Security) Executive during World War II. If Sir Joseph raised no objection, Rowland must have been clean.
In 1961, Rowland was made joint managing director, alongside Sir Joseph’s languid Old Etonian son, Alan. Rowland looked north from Rhodesia, and saw newly independent Africa up for grabs. He moved boldly in, treating the continent like one vast car- boot sale.
The results were slow at first, then spectacular. By 1973, Lonrho’s pre-tax profits were hitting 20-million; by 1980, they were 120-million. His personal life was just as promising. The Honourable Ogilvy had in 1963 married Princess Alexandra, the queen’s cousin. A few years later, Rowland gave up a long-time mistress and married Josephine Taylor, the daughter of a former business partner. She was less than half his age.
The Ogilvys and the Rowlands had flats in Park Lane. They often met, in dressing- gowns for breakfasts. Angus Ogilvy was on Lonrho’s board, together with the Honourable Gerald Percy, all paying court to Rowland.
But the idyll did not last: in 1973, the great Lonrho boardroom battle erupted, over the mounting debts created by Rowland’s more grandiose African schemes.
When Ogilvy resigned from the board, Rowland wrote to him furiously: “I will crucify you!” The rebels had wanted Percy as the new supremo, but Rowland won – with the backing of Lonrho’s small shareholders.
For Rowland it seemed like a victory, but he was no longer welcome in the better sort of boardroom. He grew paranoid, surrounded himself with sycophants, travelled compulsively, showed signs of megalomania, and launched interminable lawsuits. The profits kept rising, but so did the debts.
One venture of Rowland’s later years was the purchase of The Observer in 1981. He was greeted with hostility, allowed to interfere editorially, and left the paper even weaker than when he had acquired it.
Although his invective made adversaries cringe, Rowland’s behaviour too impetuous for him ever to have stayed the course as a giant of capitalism. He was a unique opportunist, whose charisma faded with the years.