2
Lord Wolfson of Marylebone: An Oration to Welcome Him as Fellow of Birkbeck, 29 March 2006
Master, Colleagues, Distinguished Governors, Graduates and Guests
Leonard Wolfson grew up and went to school in Worcester, the son of Isaac Wolfson. His father, who started life as a cabinet-maker in Glasgow, had taken a small Manchester mail-order company and turned it into one of the three biggest home shopping businesses in Europe, Great United Stores, or GUS. When Leonard became a director of the company in 1965, after a period of intense expansion, he devoted himself to consolidating and maintaining the fortunes of what would be recognised as one of the century’s great business dynasties. At the height of the retail boom in the 1980s, when everybody else was on a spending spree, Leonard puzzled onlookers by shedding more than 2000 shops, a move that proved to be extremely prescient when the bubble burst. During the 1960s, GUS had owned more high street shops than any other group in Britain. When the recession came, only the flagship names of Burberrys and Scotch House, along with the comforting proceeds from the sale of the others, remained.
Choosing to run his operation from an office near the Tottenham Court Road rather than from within the excitable, flamboyant Square Mile, the style that Leonard Wolfson cultivated for GUS was austere, unexhibitionist, even ascetic, traits that did not always endear him or his company to the City, especially during the carnivorous years of eat-or-be-eaten in the 1980s. While acknowledging the virtues of the ‘reliable colossus’ that GUS had become, the financial press complained that all it did was to carry on ‘monotonously churning out profits’. To a financial naif like me, this sounds like an odd complaint – as though one should gripe about a vineyard that turned out nothing but classic vintages, or a maternity unit tediously teeming with triplets. Sir Leonard (as he became in 1977) presided over the longest period of continuous profitability of any company in these islands, reporting year-on-year profits for 48 years. When in 1996, Lord Wolfson, as he become in 1985, after the award of his peerage, retired from the running of the company. Luckily there was another Lord Wolfson to whom it could be handed over, his cousin David, Lord Wolfson, of Sunningdale rather than Marylebone. By then, Leonard Wolfson had been on the board of GUS for 44 years, having occupied his position for longer even than the monarch had occupied the throne (though she has had a few years to catch up since then). He had been managing director for 19 years, and Chairman for 15. The profits that GUS declared in the year of his retirement amounted to £237 million, 27 times the surplus reported in the year he had joined the board. No wonder the company was known familiarly to its shareholders as ‘Gorgeous Gussies’. If that’s monotony, it’s the kind of monotony most of us could easily learn to live with.
In 1955, Leonard Wolfson had set up with his parents the Wolfson Foundation, with £6 million worth of GUS shares. The Foundation was intended to assist health, education, the arts and humanities. Lord Wolfson became Chairman of the Foundation in 1972 and, since his retirement from GUS, has been able to concentrate his energies on this role. In that time, he can claim to have been one of the most prodigious donors to health and education that this country, or perhaps the world, has seen.
The Wolfson Foundation has proved to be not merely lavish in its support for health, science and education, but also skilful at directing its resources strategically, in order to act as a catalyst for further funding or to give vital support to promising projects in their early stages. The Wolfson Foundation has also frequently been able to supply core funding for expensive equipment for which it is hard to find funding from other sources. There is scarcely a university in the country that does not gratefully bear witness to the generosity of the Wolfson Foundation, whether in a Wolfson Laboratory, a Wolfson Library or a Wolfson accommodation block. In 2003, The University of Oxford mounted a celebration to mark the fifty years of support it had received from the Wolfson Foundation, during which time it had received over 170 grants amounting to some £25 million pounds, including one to set up its Wolfson College. Grants to the University of Cambridge, which also glories in a Wolfson College, have been scarcely less generous. Closer to home, the Wolfson Foundation have made available a substantial grant to assist in the establishment of the Wolfson Institute for Biomedical Research in University College.
Birkbeck has also been a conspicuous beneficiary of the generosity of the Wolfson Foundation. Past grants have assisted the establishment of a Language Centre in 1990, a Materials Laboratory in 1991 and a Biochemical Laboratory in 1993. Nor have Birkbeck’s distinguished achievements in the arts and humanities gone unrecognised. There have been four members, for example, of Birkbeck’s illustrious School of History, who have won the Wolfson Prize in History, awarded annually to a work of history that is judged to be scholarly, readable and accessible to the general reader: Joanna Bourke, Orlando Figes, Richard Evans and , a stalwart of these occasions, but sadly not with us today, our President, Eric Hobsbawm.
Most recently, Birkbeck’s Centre for Brain and Cognitive Development has received a grant of £800,000 to assist in its relocation to a space adjacent to the college’s Clore Management Centre. The Centre for Brain and Cognitive Development, or ‘Babylab’, as it has become known, has established an international reputation for its work on the development of brain functions in young children, and has overturned some long-cherished assumptions about the relations between perception and cognition in the very young. It used to be thought, for example, that babies who seemed to lose interest in hidden objects had effectively lost awareness of them. But analysis of neurological function casts doubt on this assumption that, for babies, ‘out of sight is out of mind’, suggesting that infant and adult neurology may be much more similar than has long been thought.
Lord Wolfson has been honoured with more fellowships and honorary degrees than I suspect he could enumerate if his life depended on it. Among these many honours, I will mention only one, that I suspect will have been of particular value to him, his Fellowship of the Royal Society, awarded just last year, in recognition of the magnificent support, which, over more than half a century, he has provided for the advancement of science, medicine and learning to almost 100 universities in the UK and abroad. We are proud and grateful, not only to be numbered among the beneficiaries of one of the greatest, most sustained and most enlightened charitable endeavours this country, or perhaps any country, has ever known, but also to have the chance to recognise the huge personal commitment to this endeavour of Lord Wolfson, whom we welcome as a Fellow of Birkbeck.