CHapter 1
Beginnings
1 Clare College, Cambridge.
2 Hill Samuel was formed in 1965 when M Samuel & Co, a bank controlled by the founding family of oil company Shell, merged with Philip Hill Higginson. The origins of its legacy businesses dated back to 1831.
3 James Wolfensohn would go on to become the ninth president of the World Bank. https://www.worldbank.org/en/archive/history/past-presidents/james-david-wolfensohn
4 Mineral Securities was a heavily indebted mining group that had made a series of bets that went awry.
5 https://www.rba.gov.au/mkt-operations/ex-rate-rba-role-fx-mkt.html
6 https://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/chris-christensen-legend-of-the-classroom#:~:text=Professor%20C.,and%20his%20students%20better%20leaders. He was dubbed the maestro of Harvard Business School’s case method of teaching.
7 A Wall Street brokerage that has since been absorbed into American Express. Berg was there from 1970 to 1972.
9 Profit declined to A$107,000 for the year ended 31 March 1974, from A$311,000 in the prior 12 months.
10 Under John Gerahty.
11 James Graham would go later on to join the board of Wesfarmers in 1998 and became its chairman thereafter.
12 CSBP had snapped up competitor Cresco seven years earlier.
13 Hill Samuel & Co had offices in Hong Kong, South Africa, Ireland, the Channel Islands, Switzerland, West Germany, and representative offices in Brazil and the US.
14 A$766,000 consolidated income in the 1977 financial year, A$862,000 in 1978, then a dramatic growth over the million dollar mark to A$1,586,000 in 1979.
15 By 1979 it was a pocket watch under the headline ‘It’s time you knew what makes us tick.’
16 ‘We started with a million dollars and good backing from London—their expertise was only a telex message or a telephone call away,’ Owens wrote.
