Few business empires have had more modest or improbable beginnings. In most
other Scottish seaside towns of the 1950s, the small green wooden hut might
well have ended up home to a rain-lashed Punch and Judy show.
In the hands of Margie Moffat, the unassuming structure in Saltcoats provided
the original site for a £100m travel company that has enabled her to become
Scotland's most generous philanthropist.
Following in the tradition of Andrew Carnegie, the Dunfermline-born steel
tycoon who warned “the man who dies rich, dies disgraced”, Moffat, the
founder of the AT Mays travel chain, has given away more than half of her
£105m fortune, making her the second-most generous person in Britain.
Sir Tom Hunter, the flamboyant retail entrepreneur who has pledged to give
£1.05 billion fortune is third. Christopher Hohn, a City hedge-fund manager,
tops the list, giving away £235.8m in humanitarian aid, more than twice his
remaining £110m fortune.
Hunter, whose foundation has recruited the former first minister Jack
McConnell to help deliver education in Africa, said that donating wealth had
transformed his life. “I'm having the time of my life doing this. I am
evangelical about it,” he said.
Other leading Scots benefactors include Sir Ian Wood, the Aberdeen oil
services tycoon, who gave £50m to charity last year. Brian Souter and Ann
Gloag, the founders of Stagecoach, donated £17.3m.
The extent of charitable giving by Scots entrepreneurs is revealed in a new
Giving List, tied to The Sunday Times Rich List, which will be published
next week. The league table of charity benefactors assigns a giving index to
each, based on the proportion of their total wealth that they have donated
to charity over the past year.
Like a growing number of super-rich Scots, Moffat is following in the
footsteps of Carnegie, whose money built 2,500 libraries across the world
and funded the discovery of insulin.
What is it about wealthy Scottish entrepreneurs that, contrary to stereotype,
makes them so eager to give so much back to their communities?
A NEW survey, to be published by the Charities Aid Foundation this week,
reveals that Scots are more likely to give money to charity than their
counterparts elsewhere in the UK. While 33% in Scotland think people ought
to give at least 2p of every pound they earn to charity, 29% of the rest of
the UK feel the same way. One Scot in six thinks the level of giving should
be as high as 10%.
The super-rich, particularly those in Scotland, are engaged in unprecedented
levels of giving. Across Britain, the 30 leading philanthropists have
donated £2.38billion over the past year, almost double last year's figure of
£1.21billion.
“Sea-change is not too strong a word for what we are seeing,” said John Low,
chief executive of the Charities Aid Foundation, which last year distributed
£300m to 30,000 charities in the UK and overseas.
“There are two distinct trends: one is a move towards being more open about
giving, the other is a move towards planned giving and wanting to take
greater ownership of it.”
Carnegie provided the template for his fellow countrymen, advertising the
rewards of hard work, but also preaching that wealth is not owned outright
but merely held in trust, and carries a duty of providing benefit to others.
Born the son of a weaver in 1835, he emigrated with his family to the United
States aged 13, where he worked his way up from a bobbin boy in a cotton
mill to become one of the world's richest men.
At one point in the early 20th century about half of all Scottish
undergraduates received financial support in the form of Carnegie bursaries.
The charitable foundation he established, still gives away £4m a year in
Britain and £50m in America.
Moffat's story shares the principles of Carnegie's, even if it happened to
start with some budgies.
In the 1950s, her husband Jim, who had a fascination for the birds, was asked
to judge a budgie show in America. The couple found arranging the trip an
ordeal, and heard similar horror stories from friends.
When Jim inherited some money from his father a short time later, he gave up
his job in a bank, Margie gave up hers as a nurse, and, in 1955, the couple
opened their own businesses in adjoining huts in Saltcoats.
Jim launched the pet shop All Pets, while his wife, drawing a different lesson
from the trip to America, launched All Travel. Thanks in part to a wave of
emigrations to Canada, All Travel quickly overtook trade at the pet store
next door.
After buying over the Mays travel business, the renamed AT Mays grew into one
of the four largest travel agents in Britain. At its peak, it employed 2500
staff in 272 branches.
In 1988, the couple sold the firm to the Royal Bank of Scotland. Rather than
take cash, they wisely accepted RBS shares, and watched them soar beyond
£100m.
Just a decade into his retirement, Jim died in 1998, and a year later Margie
established the Moffat Charitable Trust.
One of its three trustees, she helps sift applications from medical and
educational groups at its quarterly meetings. To mark her 85th birthday last
September, she transferred £50m of her RBS shares to the Trust, earning her
place on The Sunday Times Giving List. “I'm never going to be able to spend
it, so someone else should. It's as simple as that,” she explained.
Since the announcement, the trust has upped its annual level of giving from
£750,000 to £3m.
Her son Jamie, chairman of the trust, says that his parents shared Carnegie's
sense that they were only temporary custodians of their wealth and that they
owed a debt to places where their business had prospered.
“They felt those places had been good to them,” he said. “When we are doing
anything with the charitable trust, we tend to start in Saltcoats and
radiate out.
“Before we make a decision, we ask whether there was a local connection or
whether there was an AT Mays in the area because we feel like some of the
money was generated in that local community and we're giving it back to
them.”
Among the first of the trust's big donations was £1m to the Princess Royal
Trust for Carers. The money has been used to fund a two-year project in four
health board areas in Scotland.
Ruth Clark, assistant director of trust, said it was the largest single
donation they had ever received: “The family just realise and appreciate the
extreme difficulties that carers experience. They have taken a very keen
interest in how any projects they have been able to fund have benefited
carers over the years.”
Since her daughter Margaret died from cancer aged 50, Moffat has also steered
money to Cancer Research UK.
“There are obviously personal family things that came into play,” said her
son.
“Unfortunately my sister did pass away from cancer, so we support that. It
also feels like I sit with my dad on my shoulder - although he's been gone
almost 10 years, he has a strong influence on what we do.”
In many cases, a shocking experience jolts a person into action, reminding
them of what really matters in life.
For the oil services and fishing tycoon Sir Ian Wood, now Scotland's
second-richest man with an £890m fortune, it was seeing children in a slum
in Africa who were so hungry they were tearing putrid meat from the carcass
of a dog. Last year he launched the Wood Family Trust with £50m of his
fortune. Three-quarters of the money from the trust will be spent in Africa.
“If you're lucky enough to have created a lot of wealth, then frankly it's a
natural decision,” he said.
ACCORDING to academics there may also be more benign form of self-interest at
play; giving makes people feel good.
Professor Elizabeth Dunn, of the psychology department at the University of
British Columbia, recently published a study in the journal Science that
found people experienced greater happiness after spending their money on
others or making gifts.
“Regardless of how much income each person made, those who spent money on
others reported greater happiness, while those who spent more on themselves
did not,” said Dunn.
It is a view shared by Duncan Bannatyne, the health club tycoon famous for his
appearances on the BBC's Dragon's Den, who has pledged to give away much of
his fortune.
“Giving the money you make away is the best reason for making it in the first
place,” he said.
The son of a factory worker from Glasgow, he drifted before starting an ice
cream van business and progressing, through huge risk-taking, to running
care homes and health clubs. Worth £310m, he has now created an eponymous
foundation to help others.
Public cynicism about the motives of the new philanthropists persists, he
says, and it's time attitudes changed.
“If we [the rich] help someone and we tell a newspaper about it, somebody says
it's a publicity stunt, it's a tax write-off - nobody ever says, ‘Oh, well
done'. So some entrepreneurs say, ‘I'll do my giving quietly'. But there's a
feeling at the moment that we should talk about it because it will encourage
more entrepreneurs to give money away,” he says.
“About 10 years ago, I started having more money than I could spend. So I
looked at what else I could do. In particular I went to Romania, where I saw
children tied to beds because they were HIV or Aids patients abandoned by
their parents.
“The nurses threw food at them because they thought they could catch HIV by
feeding them. It was terrible. So we set up a hospice, and it works.”
His foundation, established with an initial £1m donation, will further develop
such projects and others, including food and school schemes in Malawi.
Like Hunter and many modern donors, the 59-year-old brings an investor's eye
to his giving and seeks concrete results.
Like Carnegie, he also knows he has to get on with it fast.
“It's a cliché, but it's true: do I want to be the richest man in the
graveyard?”
Britain's Rich List: Giving it Away, Thursday April 24, 9pm ITV1
Good on them. There will always be cynics and for good reason. But sometimes it's best to ignore them.
Billy Barnett, HK,