Do you remember the Great Eastern Hotel beside Liverpool Street station? Not the swanky one that Conran opened in 2007 – the original one that opened in 1884.
A hundred years after it opened it showed every sign of having all its original features, including grimy carpets, smoky rooms and unemptied ashtrays. It was the epitome of in-salubriousness. However, it did good trade with visitors to London needing to stay overnight and City workers used the bedrooms in the afternoon to agreeably while away the time with a typing-pool tart. (Similar to a Bakewell tart but different.) I used to go there in the daytime myself – to attend the AGM of Rowe Evans. They had rubber and palm oil plantations in Malaya and had been floated on the Stock Market in the early 1980s. The memory of the stale sandwiches served after these AGMs stays with me still.
But times change and the Great Eastern is now dead posh and Rowe Evans has become MP Evans with about 90,000 acres of palm oil in Indonesia. I have highly recommended MPE to you (An AGM), not least because they now have their AGMs in the courtyard of the Tallow Chandlers’ Hall, where they serve lashings of wine and rather delicious eats. What more could a shareholder want?
Well, as it happens, they have served up another tasty morsel to their shareholders this week. Malaysian plantation group KLK have made a hostile bid for them. The bid is almost 50% above where they were trading pre-bid but the Board have spurned KLK’s advances. We must await developments but I have a feeling that those lovely al fresco post-AGM lunches may be drawing to a close.
The Great Eastern Hotel was John Betjeman’s favourite London hotel and he and his wife Penelope Chetwode celebrated their wedding there with a lunch. His parents in law, Field Marshal Sir Philip and Lady Chetwode were not invited. He wrote of it in 1972 “It is the only hotel in the City and a very good one, especially for lunch”.
It will certainly be a pity if those post M.P. Evans AGM lunches at the Tallow Chandlers’ Hall come to an end.
I read in The Times this morning that the bid has been declined by 54.7% of the share holders, so there may yet be another lunch or two.
After reading today’s blog, I was pleased to re-acquaint myself with the Scaffold’s hit ‘Do you Remember’ although the words are not particularly appropriate to a London topic!
I definitely missed a trick not putting it at the end of the post but The Scaffold have had a good run here.
Doesn’t palm oil gobble up loads of pristine Indonesian rain forest?
MP Evans are pretty eco-friendly. Here is something from their website.
http://www.mpevans.co.uk/mpevans/en/sustainability/sustainability_overview