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Classic car
Academy at Sandhurst. Over the next six years he saw active service in Yemen, Bahrain, Oman and Malta.
‘The Army was the best thing that ever happened to me – it completely changed my life,’ he says. ‘It took all the energy and power that I had and it re-shaped it into a highly focused and disciplined box.’
It is an experience and legacy that resonates today in his work at Abercrombie & Kent. A firm believer in pragmatic intelligence, logical thinking and conscientious hard work, Geoffrey Kent runs his company with military efficiency.
‘The army taught me logistics, that everything was about detail and delivery,’ he explains. ‘Even today, Abercrombie & Kent is not really a travel company – it's a logistics company. We have 2,500 employees in 50 offices around the world moving 250,000 clients on an annual basis. Then think of the myriad of movements within all that –planes, Land Rovers, ships, boats, canoes, feluccas, horses, camels – it's all going on. All my troops are out there operating flat out minute by minute by minute.’
His short yet distinguished military career also provided valuable lessons on leadership. Geoffrey Kent is the type of boss who does everything himself first, including the reconnaissance. He is a team player who leads by example.
Kent's army career was truncated after he damaged his hearing during his years spent in heavy tanks – but it was also his entrepreneurial nature that spurred his departure. As a teenager he had sold crocodile skins and elephant hair bracelets, and by 1962, while still in the forces, he had started Abercrombie & Kent with his parents. The pioneering idea of a modern luxury safari operation had been born, in part, out of his military experience: he had noted and admired the way many of his senior officers were not prepared to compromise on comfort and luxury even in the most inhospitable of places. He returned to Kenya in 1965, bought a second Land Rover with his compensation money from the army, and took over the running of the business a year later. In 1966 the company's annual gross income was $24,000; today it is $433m.
‘I regularly work 12 to 14-hour days, seven days a week,’ he says. ‘I’m just crazy about the company.’ But there is another abiding love of his life: polo. Kent was captain of the polo team at Sandhurst and later, after committing himself to becoming a high-goal player, became captain of the Windsor Park team. In the 1970s, he developed and captained the celebrated Abercrombie & Kent team that went on, against the odds, to win the US Open twice, as well as triumphing in the US Gold Cup and World Cup.
‘You have to understand that polo is really my only love,’ he confesses unapologetically. ‘Abercrombie & Kent was there to support my drug. Any money I made
1 Geoffrey Kent and Prince Charles played together for Windsor Park from 1987-1991 2 From 1979 to 1991, Kent played for Rolex, one of the first companies to sponsor a team 3 Geoffrey Kent today
would go to horses and the game. Polo was my complete fixation and total passion.’
His extraordinary winning record on the polo ground was due largely to many of the skills he had developed both in the army and business: Geoffrey Kent is the energetic embodiment of the power of commitment, self-belief and perseverance.
‘The secret of my success in business and in polo is that I never give up,’ he reflects. ‘I also love the tactical nature of the sport, the fact that all polo games are won long before the team sets foot on the ground. I demonstrated that in 1978 when I won the US Open for the first time. My team had come last in the previous two years, and people were saying that I couldn’t do it, it was impossible. But I was determined, and that year I’d worked it all out beforehand. I chose my star players very carefully – people like Antonio Herrera from Mexico and Stuart Mackenzie from New Zealand, who were cheap players; they were underrated and I knew they could play well above their handicaps. I was only a 2-goal player, but I realised that if I got up early every morning and worked and worked and worked and worked and worked, I could play four goals on the day. I then gave that team the organisation, belief and passion to succeed. I knew we would win even before the first match, and we were never beaten all season.’
An horrific accident in 1996 violently interrupted his polo career. He was following a very high ball at full speed during a practice match at the Palm Beach Polo Club in the US, when he was hit at 30mph or more by an inexperienced player who crossed him, sending him crashing to the ground. The impact was so great that his third vertebra almost severed his spinal cord and he was in a coma for three hours. It took four months for him to recover after which, on the advice of his medical team, he decided never to play or watch the game again – a resolution he has just about stuck to in the intervening years. His horses were sold, he retired from the game, and he threw all his energy into Abercrombie & Kent.
Since then, the business has expanded to offer more than 350 tours in 100 countries on every continent, including expeditions to Antarctica. He and his former wife Jorie Butler Kent also developed an early commitment to wildlife preservation and responsible tourism, and they are founders of Friends of Conservation and the campaigning ecological Abercrombie & Kent Global Foundation.
Geoffrey Kent will hopefully soon announce the launch of Abercrombie & Kent Space, an ambitious programme he has been working on for the past 10 years that will offer sub-orbital rocket powered flights by 2011. Passengers will be flown to a height of 55,000 feet or more in a rocket-powered plane that is currently in development. ‘The sub-orbital tourists will be able to see the curvature of the Earth and the deep purple sky above them,’ he explains. ‘The next frontier of tourist travel is definitely space.’
Last October, he was elected chairman of the World Travel & Tourism Council, a body that promotes the interests of a global travel industry that employs 230 million people and generates 10 per cent of world GDP.
All this has been achieved, as many of his friends and colleagues often observe, with an inspirational verve and élan. There remains, at the age of 64, something of the dashing adventurer and urbane, youthful charmer about Geoffrey Kent.
‘The secret of success, in business, in polo, or in anything in life, is to be terribly well organised, to work as hard as you can, and to have a complete desire to win,’ he says, his gentle and amiable voice rising a little. ‘Above all else, I've always known one thing: that I love and am absolutely passionate about winning.’
My wife has one of those cute Smart Roadsters, a kind of supercharged hairdryer enclosed in a Lotus Elise that has been left in a hot tumble dryer for too long and has shrunk several sizes. It would be great for dashing off at weekends, but for one problem: if she packs a change of underwear, the boot space is full. I sympathise. Before kids came on the scene, I used to own a Caterham Seven, which was marvellous for sneaky assignations in the country, just as long as you didn’t actually both travel in the same car. Not being a light traveller, I found the passenger seat was essential for my luggage overspill. ‘You take the train, darling, I’ll meet you there’ was never one of my better lines.
What can you do? It is the curse of highperformance cars: in order to look sleek and sexy, they have to dispense with any storage space that might ruin the lines. However, there is a solution, as practised by David (later Sir David) Brown. He was the ‘DB’ in Aston Martin, a man who made his original fortune in tractors in the 1940s. Moving from muckrakers to high-performance cars might seem odd, but it’s no stranger than a having a world-famous peace prize sponsored by the man who invented dynamite. Brown saw the company for sale in an ad in The Times and thought – correctly, as it turned out – that it might be a ‘bit of fun’.
Although Aston was founded in 1913, its glory years (not counting the current renaissance) came when Brown took over in 1947, buying the outfit for £20,000. Initial success was boosted by the marque’s performance in races, notably winning the Le Mans in 1957. In 1963, the company pulled out of racing (it has, thankfully, recently returned to the track) to concentrate on establishing Aston Martins as the world’s premier sporting road cars. Inspired by the Zagato-designed DB4GT, it unveiled the DB5, the car forever associated with James Bond and Goldfinger – as well, of course, as making a welcome return in Casino Royale. (That greyish paintwork, by the way, is officially known as ‘Silver Birch’.)
Odd to think that at first Aston were reluctant to donate a car to the filmmakers, initially simply offering to sell an example for £4,500. But eventually David Brown agreed to loan them chassis DB216. That car was eventually de-gadgeted and sold but subsequently replicas were built: when one of them disappeared from its home in Florida a few years back there was a $4m insurance pay-out. People love that car.
So, too, did David Brown, although he was more often than not seen driving a Jaguar. Why? The rival had a bigger boot. You see, the guv’nor had a few hobbies. These included flying (he was a qualified pilot), race horses, motorcycles, fishing, shooting and, especially, polo. (In the 1960s he captained the Checkers team at Guards Polo Club, and Aston Martin has supported teams over the years.) Brown grumbled that, much as he admired the DB5, it wasn’t very mallet or kit-friendly. Oh, and then there were his dogs to contend with. They liked to chew the soft nappa of the seats. His answer? Tickfords, the coach-building company in Newport Pagnell he had bought, turned a standard DB5 into a ‘shooting brake’, by adding a tailgate and a load bay at the rear.
Now let’s just stop here and clear up the terminology. Don’t ever use the term ‘estate’ car, even though that, on the face of it, is what it was. David Brown had a specific function in mind, and it wasn’t transporting samples of ball bearings and screw couplings along the motorways of Great Britain. This was a sporting gentleman’s conveyance, to be taken to track and field, a genuine shooting brake.
The term is a corruption of ‘break’, a type of horse-drawn carriage used in the 19th and early 20th centuries, intended primarily for country use. So the ‘shooting brake’ was designed to carry the driver and a gamekeeper/ghillie at the front, facing forward, and up to six sportsmen on parallel benches at the back, along with their guns, dogs and refreshments. It would transport the party from the house to the shoot and/or the shooting lodge and back again. As a practical measure, wooden slats were placed along the outside for hanging the day’s tally of game. In a nod to that tradition, the original motorised shooting brakes of the
