A survivor in a class of his own William Hall
The Duke of Westminster, chairman of Grosvenor, one of Britain's most successful property companies, says: “Everyone thinks I still walk around with my robes and crown on, staring over my glorious acres and potting off the odd pheasant every now and again.”
It is easy to understand why. Last month the duke married off his eldest daughter, Lady Tamara Grosvenor, at Chester Cathedral, in a ceremony attended by the queen and several other members of the royal family. He is rumoured to have given the bridal couple a ￡10m wedding present.
Gerald Cavendish Grosvenor, 52, Baron Grosvenor, Earl Grosvenor, Viscount Belgrave and Marquess of Westminster, heads a family that dates back to William the Conqueror's day. It takes its name from le gros veneur chief huntsman and has all the trappings of great aristocratic privilege, notwithstanding its motto of “virtue not ancestry”.
The Duchess of Westminster is godmother to Prince William and the duke is a close friend of Prince Charles, with whom he shares a passion for maintaining traditional rural life. He takes his public duties seriously he is president, or patron, of more than 100 organisations and charities.
When not in the countryside he can often be found in service of his great love the Territorial Army, where he has worked his way to the top over 30 years. He dons the uniform of a two- star general on his regular trips to see troops in global hotspots such as the Balkans, Afghanistan and Iraq. He was recently promoted to assistant chief of defence staff in charge of reserves and cadets.
The sixth duke of Westminster, the UK's wealthiest landlord, could easily be dismissed as a feudal relic, even though a habit of chain smoking and a nervous breakdown some years ago suggest his life is not without its strains.
He left Harrow with two O levels and owes his start in business to some astute tax planning by Bendor, the much married second duke of Westminster, who bypassed three dukes to entrust the bulk of the Grosvenor fortune to the current duke then aged one.
The duke has been more successful than most of his fellow aristocrats in preserving and building the family fortune. He heads a growing property empire that recently started work on Europe's biggest retail development, the ￡850m “Paradise Street” project covering 42 acres of Liverpool's city centre. The 1.6m square feet of new retail space, due to be finished in time for Liverpool's year as European Capital of Culture in 2008, is the key to the regeneration of a rundown city that was once among the UK's top shopping destinations.
It is the latest in a string of Grosvenor urban regeneration projects that began with Vancouver's Annacis Island in 1953. Dublin's Liffey Valley and Basingstoke's Festival Place shopping centres are more recent examples, and Grosvenor is working with local authority partners in other British cities such as Bath, Cambridge and Preston.
“We have a very strong survival instinct,” says the duke. “We have been pursued by every single government and, prior to that, Cromwell had a damn good go at us. The great thing is that we have kept our heads on our shoulders.
“We take an old-fashioned view that we stick to the thing that we think we know something about, and do not go flying off into other things,” says the duke, who leaves the day-to-day running of the business to professional managers led by Jeremy Newsum, who is the Grosvenor Group's second chief executive in more than 30 years.
“I took the view very early on . . . that many families fall on their swords by thinking that the head of the family can be the world's greatest expert on everything,” says the duke.
He agrees that the most important attribute for the chairman of any family business is picking the right people and letting them get on with it. “Provided that you can do that with a sure hand, then the rest follows,” he says. He has recruited several heavyweight non-executive directors, such as Sir Eddie George, former governor of the Bank of England, and Alasdair Morrison, chairman of Morgan Stanley Asia, to Grosvenor's board.
The headquarters of the Grosvenor Group are in Grosvenor Street in the heart of London's Mayfair, which along with Belgravia remain the jewels in the group's increasingly global property portfolio. At least 500 roads, squares and buildings are said to bear one of the family's titles.
When the US government insisted on owning the freehold of its London embassy in Grosvenor Square the duke's advisers demanded in return a large part of Florida that had been confiscated at the time of the war of independence. The US government backed down.
Over the past five years pre-tax profits of the Grosvenor Group have nearly doubled, to ￡91.7m in 2003. The group, which employs 373 staff, has interests in ￡8.9bn of properties in 17 countries including 18m sq ft of retail space. In 2003 the amount paid in dividends to the Grosvenor family trusts nearly trebled to ￡16.9m.
The Grosvenor family business has not always been in such good shape. When the duke became involved at the end of the 1960s, the business was paying off a big death duty bill from the 1950s, and was financially unsound and poorly managed.
“To put it mildly, we had a bit of a problem,” remembers the duke, who came into his inheritance on his 18th birthday. “Ted Heath managed to yank inflation up to 26 per cent and then we had the miners' strike and the fuel crisis.” Jimmy James, Grosvenor's first chief executive, had to fly to Canada on a regular basis “just to keep that business afloat while our home base was leaking like a sieve”.
Grosvenor survived the high inflationary era of the 1970s and 1980s, which brought many property companies down. It has also survived the introduction of leasehold enfranchisement, which allows tenants to buy the freeholds of their properties, thus weakening the single ownership and cohesive management style of aristocratic landowners like Grosvenor.
Grosvenor has prospered, partly by diversifying overseas 47 per cent of its assets are invested outside Britain and Ireland and increasingly managing properties for third parties. Assets under management are nearly twice the size of its own property assets.
But Grosvenor's long-term success owes much to its longer-term time horizon compared with publicly quoted property companies and its willingness to get involved in long-term partnerships with local authorities. Its speciality is inner city development.
Other property developers cherish anonymity, but one of Grosvenor's biggest assets is its brand name. “It stands for stability, honesty and excellence. They are very important ingredients and we lay great store by them. I want to have a business that commands respect not only in the marketplace but also outside,” says the duke.
“They are very tough operators but they have real integrity. It is like a stick of rock written all the way through,” says Mike Storey, the Liberal Democrat leader of Liverpool city council.
Tom Bloxham, chairman of Urban Splash, a rival urban regeneration pioneer, is equally complimentary. In a property industry plagued by short-termism, he admires the way Grosvenor has tended its London estate for hundreds of years.
He also admires the duke's generosity. “Every time you go to a charity do he is always the one who puts in very sizeable amounts of his own money in a low-profile way,” says Mr Bloxham.
The duke has taken steps to ensure that even if his son and heir “wants to put his feet behind his ears and do something completely different”, the Grosvenor group has a professional management structure in place that will ensure its continuity.
When he hands over to the next generation he would like to feel that he has not done “too badly”. But that will be up to the obituary writers, says the duke.
英国首富：诚信为本经营房产
威斯敏斯特公爵是英国最成功的房地产公司格罗夫纳(Grosvenor)的董事长。他说：“每个人都认为，我还是身穿袍服头戴冠冕四处漫步，凝望自己广袤的田地，时不时还打落几只野鸡。”
原因不难理解。上月，公爵把他的大女儿塔玛拉?格罗夫纳(Lady Tamara Grosvenor)嫁了出去，婚礼在切斯特大教堂举行，观礼宾客中有女皇和其他几名皇室成员。传闻他给了这对新婚夫妇一份价值1000万英镑的结婚礼物。
杰拉尔德?卡文迪什?格罗夫纳(Gerald Cavendish Grosvenor)现年52岁，是格罗夫纳男爵、格罗夫纳伯爵、贝尔格雷夫子爵和威斯敏斯特侯爵，掌管着一个可追溯到“征服者威廉”(William the Conqueror)时代的家族。该家族得名于当时的狩猎长Le Gros Veneur，拥有大贵族特权的全部装束，尽管它的座右铭是“重视德行而非出身”。
威斯敏斯特公爵夫人是威廉王子的教母，而公爵则是查尔斯王子的密友。公爵和查尔斯王子都有维护传统田园生活的渴望。他认真地担负社会责任，是100多家组织和慈善机构的总裁或赞助人。
当他不在乡间时，会经常为他钟爱的英国地方自卫队(Territorial Army)服务。在过去30年中，他一路努力登上该组织的高层。他穿着镶有两星的将军制服，定期去巴尔干、阿富汗和伊拉克等全球热点地区检阅军队。最近，他被提升为国防副官，掌管预备队和军校生事务。
作为第六代威斯敏斯特公爵、英国最富有的业主，他很容易被人不屑地称为封建残余。不过，他烟瘾很重，而且几年前曾发生精神崩溃，表明他的生活并非无忧无虑。
他以两个O等成绩从哈罗公学(Harrow)毕业，而他开始商业生涯，则要归因于第二代威斯敏斯特公爵本德尔(Bendor)的精明税务规划。本德尔结过好几次婚，他绕开三位公爵，把格罗夫纳家族的大笔财富托付给现在的威斯敏斯特公爵，当时这位公爵才一岁。
在保持并发展家业方面，公爵比大多数同时代的贵族更成功。他领导着一个日益壮大的房地产帝国，该帝国最近启动欧洲最大的零售开发项目，即利物浦市中心占地42英亩的“天堂街”(Paradise Street)工程，投资达8.5亿英镑。这个占地160万平方英尺的新零售区计划在2008年竣工，以迎接利物浦作为欧洲文化之都的这一年。利物浦一度是英国首屈一指的购物目的地，如今有些破败。该工程对于这座城市的重建至关重要。
格罗夫纳公司于1953年开发温哥华安纳西斯岛(Annacis Island)，自此开始了一系列城市重建工程，上述工程则是最新的一个。都柏林的利菲谷(Liffey Valley)和贝辛斯托克(Basingstoke)的节日广场(Festival Place)购物中心也是近期展开的两项工程。此外，格罗夫纳公司正与巴思(Bath)、剑桥(Cambridge)和普雷斯顿(Preston)等其它英国城市的当地政府伙伴进行合作。
“我们有一种非常强烈的生存本能，”公爵说，“我们受到历届英国政府的纠缠，在此之前，克伦威尔护国公也曾想整我们。我们还能保住脑袋是一大幸事。”
“我有个老式观点，就是专注于自认为有所了解的事情，而不会突然转向其它领域，”公爵说。他把日常业务运作交给了以杰瑞米?纽瑟姆(Jeremy Newsum)为首的一些职业经理人。杰瑞米?纽瑟姆是格罗夫纳集团30多年来的第二任首席执行官。
“我很早就持有这个观点……即许多家族认为家族首脑在任何事情上都是世界上最杰出的专家，结果自取灭亡，”公爵说道。
他同意一个观点：对于任何家族企业的董事长来说，最重要的品质是选对人并让他们继续推进事业。“如果你坚决这么做，其它问题就会迎刃而解，”他说。他招募了好几名重量级非执行董事加入格罗夫纳的董事会，如英国央行前行长艾迪?乔治爵士(Sir Eddie George)、前摩根士丹利亚洲区主席文礼信(Alasdair Morrison)。
格罗夫纳集团的总部位于伦敦梅费尔区(Mayfair)中心的格罗夫纳街。在该集团日益全球化的房地产投资组合中，梅费尔区和贝尔塔莱维亚区仍是两大瑰宝。据说，至少有500条道路、广场或建筑归属该家族名下。
美国政府曾坚持要买断位于伦敦格罗夫纳广场的美国大使馆的地产所有权，但公爵的顾问则针锋相对地提出，以佛罗里达州的大片土地作为交换，这些土地在独立战争时期被没收。最终美国政府只能放弃。
在过去5年间，格罗夫纳集团的税前利润几乎翻了一倍，2003年达9170万英镑。集团有373名员工，在17个国家拥有89亿英镑的房地产权益，其中包括1800万平方英尺的零售面积。2003年，格罗夫纳家族信托基金获得的红利几乎增加了两倍，至1690万英镑。
格罗夫纳家族的业务状况并非总是这么好。当公爵在上世纪60年代末参与公司管理时，公司正在支付一大笔50年代留下来的遗产税，当时的财务状况并不好，管理也很糟糕。
“委婉地说，我们当时有点问题，”公爵回忆道。他是在18岁生日那天继承遗产的。“特德?希思(Ted Heath)成功地将通货膨胀拉高至26%，接着又出现了矿工罢工和燃料危机。”格罗夫纳的第一任首席执行官吉米?詹姆斯(Jimmy James)当时被迫定期飞往加拿大，“仅仅是为了维持那里的业务，同时我们国内的基地像个筛子一样四处渗漏。”
格罗夫纳挺过了上世纪70年代和80年代的高通胀时期，那个时期曾令许多地产公司倒闭。公司还安然度过了采用租赁权法律所导致的困难，该法律允许承租人购买他们所租不动产的所有权，从而削弱了格罗夫纳等贵族地主的单一所有权和自成一家的管理风格。
格罗夫纳欣欣向荣的部分原因是，公司实行业务多元化，将47%的资产投资于英国和爱尔兰以外，并越来越多地为第三方管理物业。公司管理的资产是其自有物业资产规模的近两倍。
但格罗夫纳之所以能获得长期成功，很大一部分原因是，它与上市地产公司相比有更长远的眼光，以及它愿意参与和当地政府达成的长期合作项目。公司的专长是市区开发。
其它地产开发商把隐姓埋名看得很重，但格罗夫纳最大的资产之一就是它的品牌。“它代表着稳定、诚实和卓越。它们是非常重要的成分，我们非常重视这些品质。我想拥有一家受人尊敬的企业，不仅是在市场上，而且在市场以外，”公爵说。
“它们是很难对付的运营商，但它们确实很有诚信。它们一贯如此。”利物浦市政委员会的自由民主党领袖迈克?斯托利(Mike Storey)说。
Urban Splash是市区重建先锋，格罗夫纳公司的竞争对手。该公司首席执行官汤姆?布洛克斯汉姆(Tom Bloxham)也同样对格罗夫纳公司赞赏有加。地产行业一直受到短期行为的困扰，因此他对格罗夫纳几百年来管理其伦敦地产的方式充满了敬佩之情。
他还钦佩公爵的慷慨大度。“你每次参加慈善活动，都会看到他很低调地捐出自己的一大笔钱，”布洛克斯汉姆先生说。
公爵已经采取措施，以确保即使他的儿子和继承人“想做些出格或完全不同的事”，格罗夫纳集团也有专业的管理结构，足以保证其连续性。
他希望在向下一代交接的时候，能感到自己做得“不太糟糕”。但公爵说，那将取决于讣告的作者。
