On a wet November day in 1960, Albert Dock in London was host to a freighter of unusually ostentatious appearance. It was not just the freshly painted livery that set the 7,622-ton City of Chicago apart from the other cargo vessels huddled beneath the sodden East End sky. The swimming pool on the afterdeck and the elegant motor launch swinging from her stern suggested that the City of Chicago was destined for a far more exotic voyage than those of her humbler neighbours. Corralled behind barriers, a quiet assembly of onlookers awaited the arrival of the ship’s celebrated owner. Had they been allowed on board, they would have discovered that the five cabins normally set aside for passengers had been adorned with plush red carpets, cream curtains and elegant chairs of gold brocade. But canvas screens had been erected around the vessel to keep out prying eyes. For the man for whom these lavish arrangements had been made had spent his life behind an almost impenetrable shroud of secrecy.
Sir John Reeves Ellerman was one of the richest men in the world – far wealthier than those better-known British tycoons of the time, the Astors and Northcliffes, the Rothschilds and the Warburgs. He owned large shareholdings in The Times, the Daily Mail, the Financial Times and dozens of other publications, as well as huge swathes of property in central London, a vast investment portfolio and, most famously, the eponymous Ellerman shipping line that boasted 120 merchant vessels.
Ellerman was cited as the richest man in Britain in several editions of the Guinness Book of Records. And throughout his life he attracted the fascination and scrutiny of newspapers. But behind the great walls and barbed wire of his homes, he was largely successful in avoiding the cameras. The popular press dubbed him “the millionaire who no one ever sees” or, inevitably perhaps, “Britain’s Howard Hughes”. Ellerman was pursued most assiduously by reporters from Lord Beaverbrook’s newspapers – the Daily Express, Sunday Express and Evening Standard. It was widely known that the cantankerous old Canadian press baron could not bear rich people who had not earned their wealth.
Ellerman, it transpired, owed every last penny of his fortune to his father, also Sir John, who when he died in 1933 earned the distinction of leaving the biggest estate in British history. Incredibly, it amounted to about 30% of the total wealth left by the 400,000 adults who died in Britain that year. Of the nearly £37m that the elder Ellerman left, his son got £18m, roughly equivalent to £4 billion in today’s terms. But this figure almost certainly underestimates the real value of Ellerman Jr’s inheritance because, since then, property values have escalated by a ratio of a thousand. It was likely his fortune would far outstrip that of Britain’s current richest man, Laksmi Mittal (about £14.8 billion), and would certainly rival that of Bill Gates, reckoned to be worth around £30 billion.
It was a very wealthy – and lucky – man whose car swept into London Docklands on that dismal day, accompanied by a police outrider. Aides hovered round like royal courtiers before he made a fleeting appearance climbing on board the City of Chicago. One photographer managed to snatch a fuzzy picture of him, and the following day, as Ellerman’s ship headed south on his annual winter cruise, Reynolds’s News bragged it was only the third photograph ever published of the 50-year-old recluse.
Certainly the archives contain barely a handful of images of Ellerman. One, from his early youth, shows a bright-eyed boy full of enthusiasm at the prospect of a promising life ahead. Those of him taken in older age show a man who appears haunted by his unique legacy.
Ellerman inherited not just vast wealth but an obsessive desire for privacy from his father. “My father always wished me to avoid the limelight, as he did,” he once told a reporter from Lord Beaverbrook’s newspapers. Their adherence to a personal vow of silence was to guarantee their historical anonymity. “Both were extraordinary men,” says Bill Rubinstein, a professor of history at Aberystwyth University and the author of Men of Property: The Very Wealthy in Britain since the Industrial Revolution. “They were the richest men of their generation. Yet they lived privately and modestly. Neither sought political influence or public acclaim. Neither desired any lasting memorial.”
The enigmatic Ellermans might have disappeared into history altogether, were it not for the recent discovery of a 1929 secret register of Britain’s wealthiest people. This brief and seemingly innocuous sheaf of papers had been slipped into another document that archivists were studying in the National Archives at Kew. They revealed a catalogue of 438 men and women who at the time were worth more than £1m (about £250m today). The subjects were mostly identified only by their date of birth – so the government could make a rough calculation of how much extra cash it could expect in the form of death duties.
Top of the list was the date of birth of someone who in 1929 alone earned the equivalent of £389m and was worth an estimated £9 billion in modern currency. It is thanks to Rubinstein, who put a name to the date, that we now know that the individual was John Ellerman Sr. The American-born academic, who has studied the rich for 30 years, has long known that Ellerman left the biggest estate in British history. But he had no idea how staggering his annual income was. “Ellerman’s annual earnings in 1929 were more than twice as much as the second on the list [Lord Ashton], and his total wealth far outstripped that of the great landowners of the time, such as the Dukes of Westminster and Devonshire.”
What is more fascinating, perhaps, about the unearthing of the Inland Revenue’s secret rich list is the light it casts on one of the most secretive and intriguing families of our time. The first Sir John Ellerman was the son of a German Lutheran immigrant to Hull. But he spent much of his boyhood in France, where he found the liberating ambience to his taste. So much so that when he returned to fin de siècle Victorian England he found the social strictures too suffocating to bear. He left home when he was 14, and for the best part of two decades lived “in sin” with Hannah Glover, a delicate beauty who bore him a daughter, Annie Winifred, in 1894.
He did not marry Hannah until 1909, by which time he was well on his way to becoming one of the richest shipping magnates in the world. Shortly afterwards their second child, John, arrived. By then, Winifred was 15, and the disparity in their ages would be a harbinger of more ominous differences to come between the siblings. Winifred would, many years later, insist that her brother had had a “perfectly normal” childhood, with parents who doted on him. But the evidence suggests otherwise.
His father imposed upon the child similar stifling conventions that he had objected to in his own youth. Even as a boy, his son was never allowed so much as a walk in the park without wearing a suit and bowler hat. He was forbidden to watch Charlie Chaplin’s film The Kid, which his father deemed vulgar.
