Template:Featured article/July 2016

The Senior - John Samuel Swire

Central to the transformation of John Swire & Sons from a modest provincial trading house into one of the leading British hongs on the China coast is the figure of John Samuel Swire — the elder of John Swire of Liverpool’s two sons, who was born on Christmas Eve 1825 and took over the business in 1847, at the age of 21.

From his father he inherited a gruelling work ethic and a horror of debt. A man of uncompromising integrity, his driven and decisive approach to business was tempered by a cast-in-stone code of ethics: ‘I have been called a fool for not doing others as they would do me, but hate the faintest approach of playing with loaded dice, even in the ordinary form sanctioned by the highest commercial authority’. His close business associate and friend, Philip Holt, recalled: ‘I never knew a man with a stronger sense of justice in business’. Click here for more...