Jock Campbell, Baron Campbell of Eskan

John "Jock" Middleton Campbell, Baron Campbell of Eskan (born August 8, 1912 , † December 26, 1994 in Nettlebed , Oxfordshire ) was a British entrepreneur and social reformer. From 1952 to 1967 he was President of the Booker Brothers, McConnell and Co (later Booker-McConnell ) company in British Guiana . In 1957 he was beaten to a Knight Bachelor and in 1966 was promoted to life peer . From 1950 to 1985 he was President of the Commonwealth Sugar Exporters Association , Chairman of the Board of Directors of the New Statesman and Nation newspaper, and First President of the Milton Keynes Development Corporation .

Family background

John Campbell senior, the great-great-grandfather of Jock Campbell, laid the foundation stone for the family fortune at the end of the 18th century. He was a shipowner and trader in Glasgow and made his living in the slave trade . The trading houses in Glasgow had years of experience in “supplying” North American plantations with slaves and were now increasingly involved in trading with the West Indies in the Caribbean , where the sugar industry was booming. In the 1780s, herring and coarse linen were the main British imports to the Caribbean.

John Campbell Sr. and his company benefited from this flourishing trade. The slave plantations along the coast of Guiana , which were owned by the Dutch at the time , were supplied . The company also increasingly bought plantations in Essequibo (colony) from planters who had ruined themselves financially. Jock Campbell later stated that buying these plantations through foreclosures his ancestors became owners of slaves. He himself abhored slavery, and indeed these misdeeds of his own family spurred him on to his own reformist ideals. In the House of Lords on May 5, 1971, he said , “ Maximizing profit cannot and should not be the only purpose, nor should it be the primary purpose of doing business, ” and expressly distanced himself from the business practices of his ancestors.

In the 20th century, the Curtis, Campbell and Co company had established itself in the planter aristocracy of British Guiana; she owned the Ogle Plantataion in Demerara , Albion Estate on the Atlantic coast in Corentyne District and a port in Georgetown . When Jock Campbell's grandfather died in 1919, he left £ 1 million and his grandfather William Middleton Campbell , who had also been President of the Bank of England from 1907 to 1909 , £ 1.5 million, all of which came from Guiana sugar production.

Jock Campbell himself, described in an obituary as a fun-loving and original man, was married twice; from his first marriage he had two sons and two daughters.

Childhood and youth

Jock Campbell was born in 1912, "born with a silver spoon in his mouth, " as he later said himself. At the age of three he was sent to the seat of his mother's family, who came from the Irish aristocracy, at Glenstal Castle in Ireland , in order to keep him safe from the bombs of the German zeppelins . After the war he returned to his parents' house in Kent . During his school days he fell ill with polio , but overcame the disease by doing a lot of sport. He later attended Eton College and Oxford University .

In British Guiana

In 1934, Jock Campbell first traveled to British Guiana to take over the family's estates. Initially, he worked in Georgetown Harbor, handling complaints from traders whose goods had been damaged or stolen. After a few months he visited the plantations that belonged to his family and was shocked by the conditions under which the workers there worked and lived.

An anecdote tells of his experiences there. While the workers lived in small and dirty barracks, the mules were housed in a large, clean building. When Jock Campbell asked why that was the case, the plantation manager replied: “ Mules cost money, sir! "(German:" Mules cost money, sir! ")

As a result of his experiences, Jock Campbell, who was a member of the Fabian Society , invested considerable energies in improving the conditions on the sugar plantations in the coming decades. First he urged his father and uncle to take over the Booker Brothers, McConnell and Co company , in order to become its president after the takeover in 1934. Bookers was then a state within the state that owned almost all of the sugar plantations in the colony and dominated the entire economic life there, so it was called “Booker's Guiana”. As the new head of this state, Jock Campbell began to implement his reforms. During the war, he played a leading role in drafting the Commonwealth Sugar Agreement , which among other things set quality standards that improved living conditions for the people in the sugar-producing countries, including the 60,000 Bookers employees .

In British Guiana, Campbell transformed the sugar industry into a modern enterprise; Local employees were hired up to the highest positions. The factories were modernized and sugar production increased from 170,000 to 350,000 tons. The first container port in the Caribbean was built so that the sugar no longer had to be loaded in sacks, as was previously the case.

The wages of the workers were greatly increased; the old residential buildings were demolished and instead 15,000 new houses were built in 75 settlements with roads and water supply. A medical service was set up for the workforce and their families so that the malaria could be successfully combated. The settlements were given community centers and welfare, sports and library facilities were offered. In addition, school and vocational training were greatly expanded, so that over time almost the entire sugar industry, which had been divided into small decentralized units, was run by Guayans.

Jock Campbell's adversary in British Guiana was the socialist politician Cheddi Jagan . Jagan, the son of Indian immigrants and plantation workers , studied medicine. He won the sugar workers' trust and the first elections, and became Prime Minister in 1953. Campbell offered to cooperate with Jagan, but the latter took the position that the sugar industry should be nationalized after Guiana became independent from Great Britain . Britain dispatched troops on charges of Soviet links with Jagan , and after 133 days in office, Jagan resigned as prime minister.

The Booker Prize

Jock Campbell left Guiana in the 1960s. While playing golf, he and his friend and neighbor Ian Fleming agreed that Bookers should market the James Bond books for him because the films were successful but the books were not selling well. The two also agreed to initiate a literature prize with part of the profit from the book sale. The Booker Prize has been awarded annually since 1969 for the best novel published in Great Britain from the Commonwealth and Ireland. Booker later acquired rights to the works of other important authors such as Agatha Christie , Dennis Wheatley , Georgette Heyer , Robert Bolt and Harold Pinter .

Fonts

• Jock Campbell et al .: Britain, the EEC and the Third World . Praeger Publishers 1972

literature

• Frederick Errington / Deborah Gewertz: Yali's Question: Sugar, Culture and History . The University of Chicago Press. Chicago 2004. ISBN 0-226-21745-0
• J. Slinn / J. Tanburn: The Booker Story . Jarrold Publishing. Andover 2004. ISBN 0-7117-3439-9 .
• Clem Seecharan Jock Campbell: the Booker Reformer in British Guiana 1934-1966 . Ian Randle Publishers. Jamaica 2004

Individual evidence

1. ^ ^{A b} Alastair Campbell A History of Clan Campbell (Vol. 3, p. 282), Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004. ISBN 0-7486-1790-6
2. ↑ John Middleton Campbell, Baron Campbell of Eskan on thepeerage.com , accessed September 11, 2016.
3. ↑ ^{a b c d e} Lord Campbell of Eskan on independent.co.uk v. 4th January 1995
4. ^ Ian McDonald: Jock Campbell on www.landofsixpeoples.com v. February 6, 2005
5. ↑ The Suspension of the British Guiana Constitution - 1953 (Declassified British documents)
6. ↑ Jock Campbell, Ian Fleming and the Booker Prize on guyanachronicle.com v. December 8, 2012