Alec MacKelden had been working for a big British company for just 10 days when he suddenly collapsed at home with "an horrific pain" in the chest. He was rushed to hospital. He had TB.
‘I was still being trained in the job and was appalled at my plight. I was married with two children and I had no income.’
When he became conscious he found a letter waiting by his bedside. It was from the Managing Director of his company, Bluemells, manufacturers of car steering wheels and number plates, which Alec had just joined. He has never forgotten the words:
"Our only concern is for your health. You must not worry. Your wages will be paid and your job will be secure, held for you when you are well enough to return. We have taken the liberty of adding two pounds to your salary to cover little luxuries like oranges, which you shall need. It doesn’t matter how long it takes for you to get well. You must not come back a day sooner than when you are well enough; and then maybe only for a couple of hours in the morning..."
‘That generosity was rare and it instilled something in me which I never forgot,’ said Alec. He determined always to show the same kindness to others lower down the business ladder.
It was 1947 and Alec MacKelden, MC, went back to work and quickly rose in the company ranks. When he became a captain of industry in Australia it worried him that ordinary workers might not experience the same employer generosity as he had done back in Britain.
‘When I became Managing Director of Cerebos (the Australian cereal, salt, sauce, gravy and wine conglomerate) workers were paid 10 days’ sick leave and then, I seem to remember, they had to apply for public assistance. There was salary continuation people for people like myself, who were paid on an annual salary basis; so I felt this was unfair. I wanted it to cover everybody in the workforce, so I had it introduced. We formed a Works Committee which had a say in production, conditions and the worker’s future. Only Schweppes, another British company, was doing the same thing at the time.’
Today, with bitter arguments being fought in Australia over the responsibility for workers’ compensation and the problem of government schemes finding themselves hundreds of millions of dollars in the red, Alec MacKelden’s ideas might seem quaintly naive. ‘It can be a mean world,’ he muses, now retired at 73 from a string of boards.
Old-fashioned compassion made him take on the honorary chairmanship of Australia’s Skin and Cancer Foundation: established so people with skin disease would have access to the best treatment available, regardless of their financial circumstances. He’d gone to see a specialist about an itchy back, then to have facial skin cancers removed - a legacy of years lying unprotected under the sun. ‘He said they’d rather like a businessman chairman to arbitrate between doctors and specialists and help promote the dangers of getting sunburned. I did it for nine years and as I got older, looked around, at the Foundation’s request, for my replacement. It’s a bit venal out there in business; most people want to know what the fee will be and what would be in it for them.’
His innovative mind then turned to the morning cuppa. As millions of Australians start the day pouring hot water over a tea-bag, they might thank Alec for the convenience. When he’d become General Manager of Lipton’s Tea, a Unilever offshoot, running a poor third in the Australian tea business, an English colleague said the idea of using tea-bags had been taken up enthusiastically by the Swedes and he thought: "Why not give it a try?" ‘I believed it wouldn’t work unless other tea manufacturers got into it, so I brought in a German machine and offered to make tea-bags for my opposite number, a very large competitor, as well as ourselves. He said: "Master MacKelden, tea bags will never sell in Australia so long as you have a hole in your ---."
Liptons went ahead with importing the 80,000-pound (Stg) machine and introduced tea bags on New Year’s Eve, 1958, while the competitor "through obtuseness", hung out for 13 years against the idea. ‘At first, for some reason, Australian retailers saw tea bags as a summer thing and when the big stores found themselves with large stocks on their shelves when the season ended, they asked us if we would take them back.’ Surrounded by thousands of packs of 25 bags, Alec’s marketing man said: "Why not introduce them to the hospitality industry?" If motels and hotels took to them, they’d sell packs of 500 at a time. ‘Guests tried them and liked them and tea bags took off. The rest is history. Liptons became No.1 in the tea business.’
Is the tea in bags as good as leaf tea? ‘Better quality tea and more expensive,’ Alec assures me, eyeing a Twinings bag on the kitchen shelf. ‘For such a fine grind it has to be high-picked tea from the mountainside rather than the valley.’ An old campaigner, talking...
