IT was autumn in 1984 and the days were growing shorter. Dick Reger had retired, and the small retirement party at Unilever House had come to an end.
He must be glad to live a quieter life in the South of England. However, his best days must have been in Cameroon, where he had led a plantation company for many years.
I guess like many planters who are used to daily walks in the field, he was not at ease working in the head office, but he soldiered on.
An exception was Leslie Davidson, who was the chairman of the plantations group. Unlike his peers, he decided to be different. After his promotion from Malaysia, he grew a beard, left his company Jaguar at home and cycled through the streets of London to the office from his house in Hampstead.
After taking off his bicycle clips, he would shower in the bathroom provided for workers.
In the changing room, he could hear conversations about the head office and their bosses. They did not know him. He was a person who could elicit remarks and would later enjoy re-telling this news.
Eventually, he bought a house across the Blackfriars Bridge and walked to work, not missing much that went on around him. I would hear him as he came up to the first floor, whistling a Scottish tune, greeting good mornings. As the office space of the senior managers had no doors, he could see who had not come in.
He had a big corner office, and he had personalised the room with wooden masks from Africa, among his other collections.
Davidson worked closely with the main board director, Thomas Thomas, a man from Kerala, and who was previously the head of Hindustan Lever. He was fiercely protective of us in the team.
At Unilever, the structure was such that a special committee was at the top, comprising three of the most senior directors while the rest of the main board managed their respective portfolios.
Although the plantations were in many countries, they accounted for only around 3% of Unilever’s business. The main business started with Sunlight soap. The founder, Lord Leverhulme, built a factory in 1887 in Liverpool at a place he would call Port Sunlight.
He was among the first to make soap from vegetable oils. He built more brands under the banner of Lever Brothers and went into food products, such as margarine.
He acquired more companies and expanded overseas. By 1930, he had merged with Margarine Unie of Holland, and that explained the change of name to Unilever and the number of British and Dutch managers on the board, and why the Special Committee inevitably had a Dutch director.
In my earlier days on the plantation in Kluang, I found that the main board directors were invariably nice and polite.
Some would tell jokes they had picked up from various countries. However, their demeanour would show when the results were not as expected.
In the case of Thomas, who became the director with the added responsibility for plantations, he was a fierce man and did not engage in small talk.
The team at the head office saw to it that the system worked smoothly, including the hundreds of thousands employed at all levels from directors to workers.
The Personnel Division had departments that were responsible for new appointments, titles and remuneration. They set hardship allowances for expatriates based on factors such as cost of living and safety risks, and they also monitored the exchange rates so they would not lose out on their home pay. A magazine covered what went on in the group.
The training department sent fast-track management staff to attend courses at the Unilever training centre at Kingston upon Thames or to universities and colleges so that promotions could be done in-house as much as possible. I found that some employees took pride in having worked for the company for three generations.
When the business began to expand, the founder was concerned about the supply of vegetable oils for the soap factories and food companies. This was how the plantations group began.
In the South Pacific in 1902, he bought a company with coconut plantations on many islands, shipping the copra to Sydney for processing coconut oil.
In 1981, I went to head the business in the Solomon Islands. The managers reporting to me included a British, an Australian, a New Zealander and a Belgian, among senior Solomon Islanders.
The head office on Banika Island still maintained some old traditions. For example, a manager who wanted to invite a visitor had to get my permission. I was pleased to do so and allowed that practice to continue.
My office cubicle was one among five in a row, with the rest occupied by the heads of finance, engineering, human resources and personnel. My secretary, Shirley Ansell, worked among the others in an open space, and she would come in to take dictation and send letters or telexes to the operating units. The tea lady would come by at 10am.
I would read the letters and reports with figures that would come in from all the plantations. I was familiar with those in Malaysia and Solomon Islands. The other plantations, such as in Nigeria, had their history and traditions, just as they had in Cameroon, Ghana and Zaire, which is now called the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Each country’s issues may include political stability and a lack of hard currency to allow imports of machinery and harvesting tools. The crops included oil palm, copra, rubber, tea and cocoa, and cattle.
Davidson had a big part later in expanding the business in Malaysia, and he acquired oil palm plantations in Thailand and Colombia.
None could match the size of the plantations in the Congo, which started in 1911. The country is seven times the size of Malaysia. The land concession was in the hundreds of thousands of hectares but only some areas were turned into plantations.
I went through the figures and the names of people who were there, a few of whom I knew from my days in Malaysia.
When winter arrived, I began wearing many layers of clothing, with a muffler, a hat to keep my ears warm and a pair of thick gloves.
Yet, the wind would get through them, and I began to think of making my first visit.
I told my secretary to make the flight arrangements to my destination as she had done previously for Reger, who was the head of plantation operations before me. I was ready to visit the Congo and wondered how I was going to be received.
The writer has extensive experience in the management of oil palm plantations. Comments: letters@thesundaily.com
