A teenage gambler won big at Lewes and quit Eton to become a tycoon
At 16, James Goldsmith turned a £10 three-horse bet at Lewes racecourse into £8,000, told his Eton housemates that a man of his means should not remain a schoolboy, and left. He went on to become one of the boldest corporate raiders of his era, spotting value others missed and fighting critics in court.
Born in Paris on 26 February 1933, he descended from the Goldschmidts, a Frankfurt Jewish banking dynasty that rivalled the Rothschilds; his father, a hotel owner and former Conservative MP, had anglicised the name. In 1940 the family fled the Nazi invasion on the last overloaded ship out, leaving hotels behind, and settled in the Bahamas. At school in Canada young James ran a business trapping rabbits, skunk and mink.
His early ventures were chaotic and several times nearly bankrupt. Taking over his brother Teddy's Paris business, which sold a rheumatism remedy, he staged a publicity stunt with an arthritic racehorse that sent staff numbers from two to more than a hundred. He won the British rights to Alka-Seltzer, brought low-cost generic drugs to Britain, and co-founded Mothercare with Selim Zilkha before selling out. In 1965, backed by Isaac Wolfson, he built Cavenham Foods, and in 1971 won a bitter fight for Bovril, selling off the dairies and ranches to recover nearly all the £13 million cost.
He read balance sheets closely. Crown Zellerbach carried its timberland at just 12.5 million dollars, yet that land alone exceeded the company's roughly 900 million dollar market value, so his raid left him with vast forests at almost no net cost. A failed 1986 bid for Goodyear still netted about 90 million dollars. Anticipating the 1987 crash, he sold up and retired to Mexico, though raiding continued. Tabloids called him an asset stripper, which he fiercely denied.
Controversy followed him. Knighted in Harold Wilson's 1976 resignation honours, he pursued Private Eye through a string of lawsuits, including a rare criminal libel case, after it falsely linked him to the Lord Lucan affair. In 1994 he became a Member of the European Parliament for a French constituency and founded Britain's Eurosceptic Referendum Party. He died on 18 July 1997.
Source: James Goldsmith
