Fallon Creosote

Fallon Creosote at a Creosote Foundation event (1987)

### Relatives

Elizabeth Creosote (nee Parry), wife(m. 1947, d. 1974.)Celia Creosote (nee Robinson), wife(m. 1976, his death, 1992.)Jeremiah Creosote, son

## Biographical information

### Place of birth

Manchester Royal Infirmary, Chorlton, Manchester, England

### Place of death

Laghy, County Donegal, Ireland

**Fallon Creosote, Baron Creosote** CBE (1915 - 1992) was a British businessman, diplomat, hereditary peer and the father of Jeremiah Creosote.

Over his lifetime Fallon lobbied on behalf of big business, including a long-time position in the tobacco industry, where he aided the delay of regulations on cigarettes in the 1960s by using his position in the House of Lords to help ward off bills and promote reports which made claims to the health benefits of smoking.

He took an interest in various charitable causes in the 1980s, encouraged by his second wife, Celia Robinson, whom he married in 1982. This included the founding of the Creosote Foundation (later Creosote Aid) in 1984, which attempted to bring aid to former African former colonies with infrastructure projects. This charity, which was swallowed by Oxfam International after Fallon's death, is often wrongly assumed to have been Jeremiah's due to its distinctive name.

The majority of Fallon's wealth was inherited by his son in 1992 after a short legal battle with a grieving Celia, swelling Jeremiah's net worth to an estimated £150 million, argued by George Hudson to be a corrupting influence on his former colleague. Jeremiah himself claimed to maintain a distant relationship from his father even when his parents were still together, though some letters from Jeremiah unearthed in Fallon's home after his death contradict this.

## Early Life

Fallon was born on the 25th February 1915, the 3rd child of Earl Ronald Creosote and Lady Anne Bower. His father was the cousin of the famous politician and former president J.E. Creosote, who was at the time re-establishing himself in British politics. Fallon claimed the national notoriety of his name had a 'character building effect', encouraging him to adopt a bullish attitude in school to prevent any potential mockery about his family.

The Manchester Creosotes had largely moved from owning mills in Lancashire to investment and finance in the late 19th century; Ronald Creosote lobbied the government to enter the Boer War in 1899 due to his gambling on investments in gold in the Transvaal. Fallon spent his first years on his father's estate in Oxfordshire, before attending a Manchester grammar school, which his father believed would 'toughen him up', and living at his father's residence in Manchester. Fallon attended Harrow School and then the University of Oxford, graduating in 1937.

## Early Ventures & Second World War

While at Oxford, Fallon had garnered a reputation as a would-be socialite, often hosting extravagant parties and gatherings. This was facilitated by a massive allowance from his father, which showed no signs of stopping upon Fallon's graduation. From 1937-39 he lived in London and continued host dinner parties and establish a vast social circle of budding politicians, civil servants and businessmen, mostly met at Oxford and Cambridge. In 1938 he started British Oil (BO) along with Graham Simes and Martin Cox, formerly of Burmah Oil & the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, in a ploy to capture a disgruntled supplier in Iran. The company had relatively little plans for how to actually sell the oil and was mostly depending on Fallon's promise to marry into the family of the supplier and otherwise make connections as a young British bachelor with an aristocratic background. The company collapsed in July 1938 when Fallon returned from Iran in defeat and an article in The Times mocked it's name for the resemblance to the abbreviation for body odour (BO), embarrassing the owners.

When the Second World War broke out in 1939, Fallon evaded conscription by performing 'oil procurement' for the Foreign Office, later citing his experience with British Oil and supposed connections in the Gulf States. Fallon denied his former business partner Martin Cox's own role as an advisor at the Foreign Office had anything to do with his appointment. In 1940, he moved to the newly founded Petroleum Warfare Department, before it emerged he had neither the technical knowledge or civil service experience to perform a role there. He then travelled with his father to the British Embassy in Washington D.C to assist efforts to lobby the US government to join the war. Ronald's considerable connections to US business allowed him to meet with influential supporters of Britain, while Fallon worked as office manager for his father, who was now 71 and in poor health.

Earl Ronald Creosote died in October 1941, two months before America joined the war. Fallon, who had assumed his father's role at the British Embassy, remained in the US as a British diplomat until the war ended.

## As a Businessman & Investor

Fallon's one elder male sibling, Arthur Creosote, had died in the war, leaving him free to inherit his father's peerage and wealth. He joined the Conservative Party proper in June 1945 and became a part-time donor engagement officer in the run-up to the general election. Fallon later claimed the Conservatives' landslide defeat put him off serious politics for a long time, encouraging him to move into business instead.

In 1946 he helped found Westminster Airways with a group of MPs, which ran until 1949. During this time, Fallon expressed his wishes to several close friends to become more of a 'real entrepreneur' and 'innovator' than his father, who had 'sat on his shares'. Ronald Creosote had regarded his appointment to the board of the Bank of England in 1919, as his greatest achievement. This was said to embarrass Fallon, who claimed his family ought to aim higher. Despite this, he increasingly bought shares in growing companies, including Tesco, later claiming to foresee the expansion of the supermarket in the 50s and 60s. When he founded Creosote Dairy in 1949, his associates complained he was spending too much time trading stock from his office in London to attend business meetings and respond to supply problems. The company closed down the following year.

With a growing interest in aerospace developments, Fallon bought increasing shares in the British aviation manufacturer de Havilland, pushing hard for the company to put the de Havilland Comet into service as the world's first commercial jet airliner. The plane went into service in 1952 and company share prices soared. After a comet 1A crashed in Pakistan, Fallon began selling his shares. In the following year further accidents occurred and Fallon was criticized for publicly remarking that he had 'seen it coming'. He was called before an internal inquiry in 1954, where it was alleged Fallon had leaked information about the structural shortcomings of the comet to the press in an attempt to sink stock prices, in a bid for a wider takeover of the company. No such actions could be proved, but Fallon's acrimonious departure from the company, alongside the troubled first years of the Comet, seemed to dampen his interest in aerospace and innovative business more generally.

Fallon founded Creosote Haulage in 1965, later claiming he anticipated the rise in road-haulage businesses to replace rail following the Beeching cuts. The company opened five depots across the UK and captured a series of large contracts. He continued to grow his oil shares in the late 60s, with large stakes in BP and Texaco. This left him highly vulnerable in the 1973 oil crisis, which led to him panic-selling his shares.

In 1975 Creosote Haulage was issued a winding up order from HMRC for owing £43,000 in unpaid taxes. The situation worsened when investors began accusing Fallon of funnelling his profits from oil investment to keep Creosote Haulage afloat. Fallon promptly sold off his estate in Buckinghamshire to pay his investors and head-off any further investigations. Business partners later revealed the allegations had been true, and that Fallon had widely used his oil share dividends to maintain a series of unprofitable domestic businesses, including five pubs.

Following this debacle, Fallon claimed to be 'out of the game' regarding his business career. However, he is known to have maintained shareholder positions in several companies, and began investing in American real estate in the late 1980s, though he did not found a new business of his own.

## Political Career and Lobbying

Fallon kept many friends in the Conservative party throughout the 1950s and 60s. From the early 60s, he began to sit regularly in the House of Lords and became infamous for his unashamed interventions on behalf of his own business interests. The earliest example of this came when he demanded a British invasion of Iran for its nationalization of oil in 1951, claiming it could be 'easily done'. He later applauded the 1953 coup in Iran.

Throughout the 1960s, he opposed regulations on cigarettes, claiming toasted tobacco was 'not harmful' and 'gives the male voice a pleasant tone'. This obscured the fact all tobacco was 'toasted' in packaged cigarettes. He later claimed filtered cigarettes to be 'the miracle of human ingenuity...which allows us to inhale deeply without fear of harm'. Fallon held relatively few direct business interests in the tobacco industry, but was susceptible to large business gifts from individuals who did.

He vehemently opposed the introduction of seatbelts in cars in 1965, claiming it was 'a cost to great for British industry to bare'. In an attempt to demonstrate this he took out an advertisement in The Daily Mail, where he claimed the law would inflate the prices of new cars by up to 30%. This led to his forced resignation from the board of Rolls Royce, who considered the affair an embarrassment.