John Samuel Swire
John Samuel Swire | |
|---|---|
| Born | December 24, 1825 |
| Died | December 1, 1898 (aged 72) London, England |
| Occupation | Businessman |
| Spouses |
|
| Children | John Swire George Swire |
| Parent(s) | John Swire Maria Louisa Roose |
| Relatives | William Hudson Swire (brother) |
John Samuel Swire (1825-1898) was a British businessman. He grew his family business, the
Early life
John Samuel Swire was born on 24 December 1825 in
Career
Swire established Swire Bros in Melbourne, Australia in 1855.[2]
In 1865, he negotiated with Alfred Holt to expand the cotton trade with China by using Holt's Blue Funnel Line.[2] He entered in a partnership with Richard Shackleton Butterfield, a textile manufacturer from York, and established Butterfield and Swire in Shanghai in 1867, followed by additional offices in England and the United States.[2] A year later, in 1868, they parted ways, as Swire kept the Shanghai office and Butterfield kept the English and American operations.[2] Swire renamed the Shanghai company Taikoo Sugar Refinery.[2]
Swire moved his main office from Liverpool to London in 1870.
In 1879, Swire was, as Holt's Far East agent, the main force in the founding of the China and Japan Conference (later known as the Far Eastern Freight Conference). This was a grouping of some of the steamship owners involved in routes from China and Japan to Britain. They co-operated in order to overcome excess capacity of steamers in that trade. Described by some as a cartel, the conference rewarded shippers that gave all their business to ships owned by conference members through a system of deferred rebates to the freight rates charged. These discounts were deferred for, typically, six months and were not payable if the shipper used a ship outside the conference in that time. The conference survived a legal challenge in 1885, which went to the High Court in 1887, then through the Court of Appeal and ultimately to the House of Lords: the conference won at every level. There were later enquiries on the anti-competitive nature of the conference, which it survived. However, when the European Union withdrew its exemption of shipping conferences from its competition laws, the conference was forced to close in October 2008.[6][7]: 126–127 [8]
Personal life
He was married twice. He first married Abigail Fairrie, the daughter of Adam Fairrie, a sugar refiner from Ayrshire, in 1859.[3] They had a son, John Swire.[3] Abigail died in 1862. Two decades later, in 1881, he married Mary Warren, the daughter of George Warren, a shipowner from Liverpool.[3] They had one son, George Swire.[3] They resided at Leighton House in Leighton Buzzard and maintained a London townhouse at 1, Pembridge Square.[3]
Death
He died on 1 December 1898 in London.[1][3]
References
- ^ Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
- ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l Swire Papers, Collected by Professor Francis E. Hyde, University of Liverpool Library: Special Collections and Archives
- ^ a b c d e f g Leighton-Linslade Past Times: John Samuel Swire (1825 - 1898), merchant and shipowner
- ^ Hugh Cortazzi, Britain and Japan: Biographical Portraits, Routledge, 2013, Volume 4, pp. 130- [1]
- School of Oriental and African Studies, London, http://www.soas.ac.uk/library/archives/
- ^ "Far Eastern Freight Conference closes with a whimper". Seatrade Maritime. 17 October 2008. Retrieved 15 December 2021.
- ISBN 978-0-7509-7851-4.
- S2CID 154880513. Retrieved 15 December 2021.
Further reading
- Sheila Marriner, Francis Edwin Hyde, The senior John Samuel Swire, 1825-98: management in Far Eastern shipping trades, Liverpool University Press, 1967.[1]