Francis D'Arcy Cooper

Francis D'Arcy Cooper (born November 17, 1882 in London , † December 18, 1941 ) was a British manager. Cooper was chairman of the board of directors of Lever Brothers from 1925 to 1941 .

Life

Cooper was a son of Francis Cooper (1845 / 46-1893) and his wife Ada Frances b. Power. He was educated at Wellington College. From 1910 onwards, Cooper worked for the London auditing firm Cooper Brothers & Co. , which his uncle had co-founded. He took part in the First World War from 1914 to 1918 with the Royal Field Artillery as a lieutenant. In August 1916 he was seriously wounded in the Battle of the Somme. After the war, Cooper became a senior partner at Cooper Brothers & Co.

The company Lever Brothers was one of the most important customers of Cooper Brothers: Cooper achieved the special esteem of the board of directors of Lever Brothers when he succeeded in convincing various banks in the early 1920s to convince the company - which at that time was having an adverse effect Acquisition of the Niger Company found itself in a very difficult economic situation - to grant generous credit.

Because of his achievements, Cooper was invited to join the Lever Brothers Group in 1923. what he did. He was then hired in April 1923 as a director at Lever Brothers and at the same time appointed deputy chairman of the company's board of directors. Following the death of Lord Leverhulme in 1925, Cooper was appointed as the new Chairman of the Board of Directors, a post he held until his death in 1941.

During Cooper's activity as CEO of Lever Brothers, the merger of the company with the Margarine Unie group to form the new company Unilever was completed. This is how one of the largest corporations in Europe came into being. While he continued to serve as CEO of Lever Brothers, he held a director position in the Unilever Group, where he was considered the de facto decisive personality of the entire group. Cooper also introduced the separation of company ownership and control at Lever Brothers by ensuring that the management of the company was the sole responsibility of the manager in charge.

In October 1933 Cooper visited the German capital Berlin , where he and Paul Rijkens, representing Unilever, met with the German Chancellor Adolf Hitler , from whom he received an assurance that the property of foreign companies in Germany would not be affected for as long as they would not relocate their production facilities within the national territory. In the years that followed, Cooper did not see National Socialist Germany as a threat either: he considered a merger of Germany and Austria to be desirable, as this would create a larger, homogeneously structured, inherently duty-free, economic area and the number of tariff restrictions in Europe would increase would decrease by one in total, which would make his company's operations much easier. At a shareholders' meeting on May 13, 1938, he declared that the annexation of Austria to the German Reich was not a cause for concern, as this development would reduce the likelihood of war in Europe.

In addition to his work for Lever Brothers / Unilever, Cooper was director of subsidiary The Niger Company Ltd. , Mac-Fisheries, Ltd. , the Phoenix Assurance Company , director of the Industrial Export Council, vice chairman of the Permanent Hops Committee, chairman of the executive committee of the Board of Trade Industrial Export, member of the Royal Commission on the Distribution of the Industrial Population.

From 1940 to 1941, Cooper traveled to the United States on behalf of the British government to conclude an Anglo-American trade agreement.

In June 1941, Cooper was raised to hereditary nobility as a baronet.

After his death, he bequeathed The Drovers country estate in Sussex (which covered more than 1,000 acres) to the British National Trust.

Cooper had been with Evelyn Hilda Mary born in 1913. Radford married.

literature

• Dictionary of Business Biography , Vol. I, 1985, pp. 781-785.
• Who was Who. A Companion to Who's Who. Containing the Biographies of Those Who Died During the Period , 1967, p. 248.