I was flown 6,000 miles to Hong Kong for an interview for the job of Chief Accountant for Cathay Pacific Airways.
Not many people travel 6,000 miles for a job interview!
However, the position was offered to their auditor, who knew the company and was nearly ten years older than me. I had got that far because I had already worked for two airlines.
Swire’s said come anyway as there will be another opportunity. So I, Valerie, Jan, Don and Diana flew to Hong Kong with Bruce our dog.
Initially, I stood in for the new Chief Accountant, who had to give six months’ notice, and worked for Bob Dewar, a really nice guy. Then Swire’s said that there were two possibilities. One was in their Computer Department on designing financial systems and the other heading up the financial and computer side of a new insurance joint venture. I saw the two bosses, and went back to the Financial Director, Richard Sheldon, and was about to choose the Computer position when he said they had decided I was being seconded to Taikoo Royal Insurance!
Swire’s had been an insurance agency for a hundred years right back into Shanghai days. They had decided to get into bed with Royal Insurance and set up as an insurance company. So Taikoo Royal Insurance was started in 1974.
There were two problems for me. I hadn’t the faintest idea about insurance accounting which is quite complex, and I had nothing to look back to and say what did they do last year. I had to set it up. A crash course with Royal in Liverpool got me going.
The second problem was that Swire’s insisted that I adapt their Insurance Agency system that ran on a main-frame. I knew enough about systems to know this was not going to work other than for a limited period, and it would be a nightmare. This was me meeting an immovable object, the power of Swire’s. I contacted my new friends at the Royal. Their IT executive was in Australia and it was agreed he would fly back via Hong Kong. I spent half a day with him and when he got back to the UK he sent two senior fellows out, Mike Duncan and Tony Kerrigan. After a week they prepared a report for Royal and Swire’s saying to throw the old system away and design a new one.
Using Swire’s IT department, and help from Tony Kerrigan from the Royal in Liverpool, I built a new system from scratch. It meant that I learnt lots about insurance, having to learn all the policy classes, claims, underwriting, reinsurance, fire commitments, etc etc. I even started to take the Insurance Institute exams in 1976. Having passed the Liability paper, with lots of case law, I decided enough of that. More boring than accountancy.
I had been in charge of staff for some time and had employed many really good Chinese, mostly females, all fluent in English as they had been to Universities in the UK, Canada or US. Therefore I had Agnes Nip in charge of finance and Wallace Lam in charge of the computer system. Alice Chan was in charge of Claims and Pat Ho was in charge of Commercial Underwriting. All Henderson recruits together with a number of Hong Kong Polytechnic graduates such as Lucy Chan. The staff responsibility was something I enjoyed, especially as these young people started to run departments.
I should point out that I dropped the accountancy responsibilities in 1976, and therefore cut any interest in accountancy once and for all. Therefore since qualifying as an accountant I had roughly 3 years in audit and 5 years as a commercial accountant. The next 25 years in computers. The ‘grey suit’ and ‘bean counter’ image has however been very difficult to drop, which is still an irritant to me.
However, my background forced me to take action on some very Chinese and questionable practices which meant in the end I had to write to the Swire director I reported to, saying we need to sort this out as I don’t want to go to jail! I worked with our auditors, Peats, and with help from above resolved a bad situation.
In my increasing role, I took on Personal Underwriting and ran that for a couple of years. which was fun.
In 1980 the original system was showing it needed modernising and that was the start of TREVOR (Taikoo Royal Effective Visual Online Retrieval) system. Built to run on an HP 3000 it was probably the hardest to design and best system I ever built. It was later described by a Royal UK director as a Rolls Royce system for a Mini company. I decided to take that the right way.
One of my responsibilities was Staffing, which included hiring, firing (only once) and talking to staff to resolve problems (I always had a box of tissues in my desk drawer). Here are my photos of the staff, many at the TREVOR celebration. My initial boss was Tony Bennett, who retired, and Ken Campbell ex-Royal soon took over and was a great boss. Valerie and I were good friends with him and his wife Dottie (who I helped write the book of her life) who were true ex-pats. Also, I was friendly with George Miller of Swires and the three Royal managers, David Markham (who we later visited in Manila when he too over there), together with John Prenton and Ian Boardman who I am still in touch with in the 2020s.
I collected a lot of company magazines and in Spain in 2019 I scanned some of the photos to remember the people I worked with and then destroyed the paperwork to declutter.
There was nothing more for me to achieve in Taikoo Royal, and although a move back to Cathay Pacific was mooted, we decided that over ten years in, Hong Kong, was enough. Feelers were put out to Royal Insurance who I used to see every year both in London and Liverpool when I went back to the UK on leave and they offered me two jobs! In Barcelona or Liverpool. Guess what!
Subsequently, I left Swire’s on 31st August 1983
Here are my appointment and leaving papers