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Geoffrey Chandler

Memorial Service – 17 November 2011

It is a great honour for me to have been asked to speak at Geoffrey’s Memorial Service. To my regret I never was an intimate friend, but I was one of Geoffrey’s greatest admirers.

I first met him at the country cottage of his friends John and Ann Burgh. He was bantering and arguing with John, as old friends do, and I was bowled over by Geoffrey’sexuberance, warmth, his quickness of mind, his humour and his sense of fun.

A few months later, I was fortunate to listen to a speech he gave at Oxfam, as Chairman of the Business Group of Amnesty International UK. He talked of the contribution that business could make to human rights with penetrating intelligence and passion. I was so inspired that I asked if I could be useful to him. It was clear to me that if there was a single person able to persuade business that human rights should be an important consideration in their decision making, it was Geoffrey. Only he had the mix of business experience, skills, courage, passion and persistence to take on such a daunting challenge.

His remarkable career is outlined in what he referred to with characteristic modesty as his ‘jottings’, beautifully written and prepared not for publication but for his family.

Despite astonishingly seeing himself as someone who lacked confidence, Geoffrey was an excellent student at Sherborne, became Head Boy of his House, Captain of Tennis and a member of the First Fifteen Rugby team.

Finishing school in 1942, and after two years at Cambridge, he enrolled in the army.After training in sabotage he was parachuted into the mountains of Greece wherehe survived the horrors of guerrilla warfare,working with the resistance against the Germans. Geoffrey loved Greece and would be saddened by its current travails.

After the war, back to Cambridge and thereafter to the Financial Times as a journalist and leader writer, and then Features Editor. While with the FT, he won a Commonwealth Fellowship for Journalists and visited the USA, meeting amongst others ex-President Harry Truman, Dean Acheson and J K Galbraith.

Leaving the FT, because he wanted a job which dealt with people and had an international dimension, Geoffrey joined Shell. There he rose to a very senior position after a spell as Chairman and Managing Director of Shell Trinidad. He declined an offer to become President of Shell Japan, one of Shell’s biggest operating groups, to avoidfamily separation as the children were established in schools in the UK.

As Head of Public Affairsbased in London, he drafted a Statement of General Business Principles which added an ethical dimension to the company’s profit driven operations.This was well ahead of its time in the corporate sector,yet he eventually obtained approval from the Board of Shell. Sir Mark Moody-Stuart, a former Chairman of Shell, who is unable to be here today,wrote:

“Geoffrey had a significant impact on my life and on Shell. The original Shell General Business Principles were drafted by him. Geoffrey is a shining example of the formative influence that a single individual who although senior but not at the very top of a large organisation, can have through persistence and a rational and persuasive approach. I owe him a lot and so does the whole Shell Community around the world, and his influence will live on.”

After some 20 years at Shell, Geoffrey was head-hunted to become Director General of Neddy, the National Economic Development Office, an institution independent of Government. He succeeded in transforming it into a far more effective body, and moved comfortably with many of the most influential and powerful people of his time, including Prime Ministers Jim Callaghan and Margaret Thatcher as also with Prince Charles whom he came to admire.

Geoffrey was then invited to become the Director of Industry Year. Ben Pimolett, the political historian, wrote “Industry Year is a Government-funded yet independent movement built on individual effort and goodwill. Its Director, Sir Geoffrey Chandler, ex-Director of Neddy, has everything that the leadership of British industry has not: energy instead of lethargy, keenness instead of dullness, open-mindedness instead of crass inward looking stupidity. Talk to him, and you come away lighter in step”.

Nothing could describe Geoffrey better. There was a lightness to his seriousness which together with his penetrating intellect and passion enabled him to influence others to do what he believed was principled and right.

Accumulating wealth was never Geoffrey’s ambition. When he moved from Shell to Neddy, his salary dropped by two thirds. During Industry Year and its sequel, the organisation was cash-strapped so he halved his own salary every year for five years, so that people who worked for him could be properly paid; although Lucy was able to persuade him that he should retain £1,000 of his salary for postage and telephones!

Industry Year was followed by Geoffrey’s last, and from a worldwide perspectivehis most important career move,to the international campaign to incorporate human rights into corporate culture, which Chris Marsden who worked closely with him will describe in his talk.

Running through Geoffrey’s career, the hallmarks of his work were his principles, his humanity, his belief in justice and honesty, his ability to understand and present opposing views fairly and objectively, his courage and his compassion, and his remarkable ability to find solutions to difficult problems.

Geoffrey was an all-rounder in every aspect of his life, an outstanding leader whose achievements will continue to make a real difference to the lives of many throughout the world, and enriched the lives not only of his beloved family but all who had the good fortune to know him.