CHAPTER TWENTY
TAKING ON THE WORLD

It was an adventure for everyone.

Gordon Barton, 1987

While it had been an immensely satisfying investment in Australia’s cultural and intellectual landscape, by mid-1977 Nation Review’s circulation had fallen into serious decline, with weekly sales below 15,000 copies. His lifestyle increasingly costly, Barton was perhaps tired of covering the paper’s ongoing losses. He wanted a sale and Phillip Adams was interested. Adams recalls meeting with Barton in around 1978. The pair sat in Barton’s elegant office in leather-upholstered wing chairs on either side of the open fire piled high with mallee root logs (trucked in from South Australia annually). To Adams, this exclusive gentlemen’s club setting was ironic in the face of Barton’s anti-conservativism.

Adams’ dream of taking over the journal quickly collided with reality when Barton added, ‘Of course, you’d have to take over the legal liabilities’. He was referring to the defamation actions against the paper and passed Adams a thick file of some 50 or 60 writs.

It was, in fact, the 26-year-old publisher Geoffrey Gold who purchased Nation Review’s masthead and page reproduction rights. Given he did not have money for either the purchase or the cash-flow needs, Barton financed him with a loan secured over Gold’s publishing company. In financial crisis most of the time and with no money to promote itself, the once-great weekly had to look for younger less experienced writers and illustrators. From 1980 it switched to a monthly magazine format. While readership figures picked up, sales languished. The financial strain was too much for Gold’s Tjuringa Securities-indebted book business. It would collapse at the end of 1980, taking with it the last echoes of Nation Review.

Walking away from Nation Review was not to be Barton’s last involvement with a truly independent newspaper. The sale coincided with his and Mary Ellen’s introduction to American editor and investor Crocker Snow early in August 1978. Ranald McDonald, publisher of The Age, had set up the meeting.

Snow had a concept for an independent monthly newspaper, the WorldPaper, to be run out of Boston. It would appear as an insert in leading newspapers across the world. His vision was to provide informed comment on important global issues. Its editors would be leading journalists and experts native to the regions about which they wrote. The diversity of viewpoints would create balanced, pluralistic and informative coverage.

Barton could see this was something Mary Ellen might like. He was right. His partner suddenly found herself an associate editor (for Asia-Pacific initially) of a monthly journal with a global reach, penning articles herself, commissioning others and helping coordinate regular conferences around the world, the latter an important part of the WorldPaper concept.

While Barton was perhaps relieved to let someone else put up the financial backing for a change, he quickly became involved intellectually, introducing Snow to interesting, talented writers. He would erratically feed Snow special, sometimes far-out, story idea, as well as provide moral support and encouragement whenever WorldPaper embarked on bold editorial initiatives.

Ultimately the journal would reach over 1 million globally, appearing in more than 25 national newspapers and business magazines in 27 countries and seven languages. Barton and Crocker Snow would become friends, challenging each other on who could muster the most righteous indignation about some troublesome political development; and who could wear the most stylishly rakish hat.

Twelve years on, Barton would invest $100,000 in the publication, though he would never see a cent in dividends. While the publishing company would continue for another twelve years after his investment, at its demise in 2002 there was nothing left to return to investors like Barton who believed so passionately in an independent media.

During his earlier European road trip with the family, Barton ensured he took his children to sites of great battles in history—Frommelles and the plains on which the Battle of Thermopylae and the Battle of Hastings had been waged. Kate Ayrton recalls: ‘He always put things into . . . historical context . . . when we went to Greece he would read to us from the Odyssey and plays by Sophocles . . . He would always bring it to life . . . It was really important to him to teach that to us.’

While travelling Barton had been struck by the quality of Western Europe’s roads. The UK had five years previously joined the European Economic Community and this European trading bloc now had a population equal to that of the US. In short, a promising market. However, unlike in Australia, nothing much had changed in European road transport for decades. Transport hubs remained unheard of. When it came to inter-country freight, Barton had noted that most road and air carriers were small- to medium-sized, locally based players coordinating international deliveries through partners in the destination country.

European airfreight remained inefficient and slow. While airport customs operations had become computerised, theoretically allowing overnight delivery, a lack of motivation, priority given to passenger air travel, and congested major airports meant overnight airfreight remained hypothetical. Rail freight was fast and efficient on domestic routes but could not offer door-to-door service. Additionally, service for clients with less than a truckload of goods was poor. Europe’s road system suffered from slow customs clearance, complicated paperwork and a freight-forwarding system that meant one parcel might be handled up to seven times before it reached its destination. Few transport companies offered an integrated service. Trucks did not leave until they were full. Even for express services, delivery times were usually three or four days and often as slow as a week. At each border crossing trucks would line up for hours while copious amounts of paperwork were filled out—their loads often checked and rechecked.

Barton’s mantra had always been to seek more efficient processes, knowing that efficiency slashed overheads, thus increasing profits. He could see the potential to export IPEC’s one-stop-shop service model. If in Europe IPEC could successfully roll agent, customs broker and carrier into a single entity, Barton knew he could slash delivery times and offer a cheaper price than airfreight.

He had already asked Ron Devenish, a tough, no-nonsense Australian, to conduct a feasibility study into launching an express road service in Europe. Devenish would need assistance and Barton immediately remembered a plea Denis Thatcher had made to him a few months earlier. The connection had come via Thatcher’s daughter Carol who, in January 1978, having completed her legal training, had found her way to the Windsor Hotel and the employ of Peter Janson. Janson would tell Barton his new personal assistant ‘was working from early morning to late at night’. Sure enough Barton and Mary Ellen arose one morning, having overnighted in Janson’s Windsor apartment, to find Thatcher washing champagne glasses from the dinner party for 30 people he had hosted the evening before. The pair had rallied to help Carol with the clean up.

‘Carol was wonderful’, Janson would recall in a 1995 biography of her brother Mark. ‘She was highly intelligent and the hardest worker I ever employed.’ At a Sydney dinner party hosted by Peter Janson in 1978, Carol Thatcher was to meet Barton properly. Barton had been impressed and Carol had ended up accompanying him, Mary Ellen and the children on a trip to Tasmania while he was lobbying for the Tiger Line.

Their time with Carol had led to Margaret Thatcher inviting Barton and Mary Ellen to Sunday lunch at her Kent retreat near Lamberhurst the next time they were in London. Mary Ellen recalls Denis Thatcher’s unfailing habit of referring to his wife as ‘our future Prime Minister’. Just before lunch Denis Thatcher approached Barton while Margaret was out of earshot.

‘I don’t know what I’m going to do about the boy,’ he confessed.

‘Well, if I can help you, I will,’ Barton had offered.

‘If there is anything you can do, I would be most grateful,’ Denis sighed. He had made it very clear that his son Mark needed a job to settle him down.

Barton recalled this conversation as the driving holiday was coming to an end. He and his family were within reach of Rome. Their car needed to be returned to London as they were flying on to Greece and then back to Australia. Barton put in a call to Mark Thatcher, suggesting the 23-year-old racing driver meet him in Rome. He could drive the Merc back to London with Devenish and discuss the feasibility study. It would give Thatcher the chance to come up to speed on the business.

Within 50 miles it became clear he and Devenish did not get on. Devenish apparently bristled as Thatcher chatted non-stop about the saintly qualities of ‘Mummy’ and how, through her, he could make all the right connections for IPEC. Worse, Thatcher was in race driver mode. By the time the pair had reached Switzerland, Devenish could bear it no longer and flew back to London. Continuing solo, Mark Thatcher managed to reach Amsterdam before crashing the Mercedes.

Nonetheless, the car and tempers were eventually mended and Devenish and Thatcher set up the feasibility study from IPEC’s London apartment in Three Kings Yard, Mayfair, adjacent to the Italian embassy. Rented for an outrageous sum, the flat was a curious base for a business with its emerald-green internal walls and carpets. Typical of many of the places Barton would live in over the years to come, the apartment had a history. Lord Lambton, the former Conservative defence minister, had infamously used the flat to entertain prostitutes several years earlier.

The three-bedroom apartment would see continual comings and goings of IPEC staff in and out of Europe and Australia. Working and living together, each was exposed to the others’ foibles. The company opened an account at nearby Claridges, where staff often took their breakfast— or lunch if it was a business meeting. Barton himself would come to love Marks Club off Berkeley Square, and was also fond of the discreet Stafford Hotel.

If the European operation was to be viable Devenish and Barton had determined they would require a partner with an infrastructure already in place, so Thatcher was given the task of researching potential takeover targets. The Tory leader’s son had a way of grandly describing his duties to the press: ‘I am to be the London representative of a Far East firm with a very large annual turnover,’ he announced to the Daily Express in October 1978. To the Daily Mail it was: ‘I’m working for a Far East conglomerate whose head comes over here five or six times a year.’ Meanwhile, Devenish had been moved to erect a blackboard with the Ten Commandments in the sitting room at the flat, the tenth commandment being ‘Thou shalt not mention thy Mother’.

One former IPEC executive interviewed for the Mark Thatcher biography had the impression ‘that he thought the job was beneath him and he should have been higher up in the company. He also seemed more interested in what new car he was racing than working for us.’ Although competent in his role, on several occasions, while IPEC executives were discussing the problems of dealing with Customs to streamline the movement of freight, Thatcher would pipe up, ‘Don’t worry, Mummy can plug us in there’. One IPEC manager at least saw this as ‘naïve and ham-fisted as well as wrong’.

As well as Thatcher and the practical Ron Devenish, Barton realised he would need a senior London representative. When he mentioned to Peter Janson he was looking for a deal-spotter in Europe—someone with plenty of high-level contacts, trustworthy, who could entertain prospective business partners in style—Janson suggested his friend, former journalist Hugh O’Neill.

O’Neill was a smooth and classy Irishman—a toff but certainly no snob—with a farm in the mountains of Northern Ireland. A former investment banker and journalist with the Financial Times, he had been educated at Eton and had later served as a captain in the Irish Guards. His family had been involved in politics in Northern Ireland for most of the century. He fitted Barton’s brief, and was soon engaged as IPEC’s London deal-maker. His East End residence-cum-office was an ancient Huguenot house in Elder Street, near Spitalfields Market. Visitors would recall the house leaned in various parts and the difficulty of negotiating the stairs as the floorboards were riddled with gaps. Most of the street’s houses were then rundown and vacant, though the area would soon become extremely fashionable. IPEC’s Freddie Gardiner recalls O’Neill and his jam-jar spectacles clearly as well as the contrivance the eccentric Irishman used to keep a glass of wine perfectly suspended while he drove. The back seat of Hugh’s car was soon recognised as a no-go zone, so strewn was it with empty wine bottles.

Ian Sayer, a self-made, plain-speaking Englishman, was someone soon identified as worth consulting. By the time Sayer was 21 he had his own freight firm, using the sort of lateral thinking Gordon Barton admired. Like Barton, he had continued to find ways around government regulations, avoiding for some time the need to obtain the hard-to-get transport licences.

It had been Sayer who in 1969 had come up with the idea of overnight road express delivery between England and Northern Ireland. Until then, if a consignment was sent over water it would nearly always involve three handlings—often by three different companies. Sayer’s single-handler concept, which he would expand to the Channel Islands and the Isle of Man, was exactly what IPEC had been providing since the late 1950s.

Late in 1973, TNT’s Kwikasair had tried to introduce express freight to Europe with a service between the UK and Paris. Logistically it had proved a disaster. Over the next three years TNT’s Kwikasair had pumped many thousands of pounds into this European operation, but failed to get enough customers interested. Huge losses accumulated. Finally it admitted defeat on continental Europe, closing its office in Paris to concentrate on its UK business.

In 1977, TNT approached Ian Sayer with an interest in purchasing his company. He met TNT’s representative in July and they soon made an offer. Sayer turned it down, so they added a sweetener, offering him the managing director’s role. They also upped their original offer. Meanwhile, Sayer Transport’s turnover and profitability continued to rise—its pre-tax profits for the year would be over half a million pounds. Even when offered £1.75 million, Sayer remained unyielding. Exasperated, hard-nosed TNT senior executive Don Dick asked what price would he sell at. ‘Probably around £2.5 million’ had been Sayer’s cool reply. Angry, TNT’s executives walked away.

Just eleven months later, Sayer received a letter from Hugh O’Neill saying that ‘my chairman, Mr Gordon Barton’ had suggested ‘there may be some areas where we could cooperate to our mutual advantage’. It was November 1978. O’Neill and Sayer lunched and within a couple of weeks Sayer was having regular meetings with Ron Devenish and Mark Thatcher on the specifics of establishing an intra-European express delivery network. Their initial plan was to add specialist operators in each country, positioning Sayer Transport as the springboard. To keep him keen, on 24 January 1979 Sayer was offered a sum of nine times after-tax earnings for his operation—in cash.

Meanwhile back in Sydney Barton was doing his homework. What he didn’t understand was how TNT had failed in continental Europe. On 1 February he took Paul Brown (TNT’s former general manager in Europe) to lunch. He learned much. Neither freight rates nor profit margins were as high as in Australia. French customs procedures had been a nightmare. Many carriers required nine times as many administrative as operations staff. When inspectors unloaded trucks, they often failed to repack properly. If the Channel ferries had to turn back in foul weather, all goods had to be reprocessed as imports. Twenty-four-hour delays were common. European customers were loyal to existing suppliers. Legal and accounting requirements had proved a headache. To operate in France different company structures and book-keeping practices were needed as well as first-class accountants.

Barton would write to O’Neill to pass on the advice Brown had given him on buying a European freight business: ‘try not to interfere too much—with name, methods, personnel’. In fact, Barton was about to turn one European business upside down.

In early February 1979 O’Neill assured Sayer that even if the acquisition of his operation fell in a heap, he would be paid A$1000 per week for his time. For the money, his task was to pen a report that addressed the how-to of launching a European service. O’Neill even threw in the services of young Mark Thatcher ‘for research purposes’. ‘I will let you know as soon as I need him,’ replied Sayer. With the upcoming British election, he added, ‘I expect his mother would be only too pleased to have him out of the house come March or April’.

In late February, in an effort to flush out a few prospects, O’Neill requested Sayer place an anonymous advertisement in Britain’s Financial Times:

Express Freight Companies in Holland
Substantial Transportation Group wish to acquire a Dutch based company currently operating express road freight services to and from EEC countries including (preferably but not essential) Great Britain. Continuation of management assured. Please reply in confidence with brief details of operation, revenue and profitability together with any other relevant particulars

Six days after the ad had appeared just a handful of responses had trickled in. One was a reply from a Mr Harmsen in the Netherlands who claimed to be the majority owner of an international firm with some 950 staff and 40 terminals and offices in six European countries, including Great Britain. The unnamed operator claimed a US$60 million turnover.

Because of heavy other commitments the undersigned has no time to run the business, and is therefore looking for a partner . . . willing to . . . put up capital and who can provide management support . . . Providing the continuity of our Group is safeguarded, full take over of all shares could be arranged as well.

Before giving you any further information about the company I control, I would want to know to whom I am talking.

As business developments heated up in Europe, back in Australia Barton and Mary Ellen were enjoying Sydney’s balmy summer nights to the full. For years now the pair had enjoyed the company of friends with whom they could share their sexual fetishes. To be fully appreciated within this coterie, it was useful to have skills in role-play, as a bondage expert, a dominatrix, or as a transvestite. All four was a bonus. A non-judgmental, sexually open attitude was essential.

Mary Ellen and a gay friend whom everyone called Flash—an imaginative bondage specialist—would go to great efforts to choreograph inventive and unusual events for their own and Barton’s after-hours enjoyment. The brief seems to have been to incorporate elements of bondage, outrageous fun, style and the unexpected. Friends would observe that Flash brought a superb sense of occasion, though he would grandly overestimate the discipline of his party-goers and the feasibility of his plans. Participants would often be given their instructions in sealed envelopes, outlining what their roles or characters would be, what to wear and who would be giving them orders. There were invariably times when things went wrong, especially where boats and water were concerned.

Late in the summer of 1979, on an otherwise innocuously balmy Tuesday evening, there occurred an event that some in Sydney’s Water Police would never forget. The specific details survive, although not in police records but in a letter one participant wrote the next day.

This particular event had been postponed from a week earlier owing to inclement weather, but even on this night the weather was chancy. In the tradition of Sydney summer downpours, it had rained briefly but quite heavily about an hour before. Now the sky was cloudy and still—a half moon lighting up the harbour.

The players in the night’s adventure were told to gather at Mary Ellen’s Double Bay apartment. John Cummings—aka Cynthia—was instructed to report dressed as a cigarette girl. Cynthia arrived in a brief black leather skirt, bright red peasant blouse and high-heeled black pumps—a home-made cigarette tray on straps around her neck. Flash was dressed as a monk. Mary Ellen—in Italian boots, a leopard-skin jumpsuit, domino mask and a tiara—was huddled in the corner with him, going through arrangements. Silent in the background sat Barton, in a medieval knight’s outfit—chain mail, breastplate, a long red cloak and medieval helmet. Two guests were down by the wharf and another two—Madam Lash and her husband—had yet to arrive.

Barton, Flash, Cynthia and two others boarded an old wooden tender, most probably the one Mary Ellen shared with her family. Barton settled at the stern, clearly enjoying himself. As he steered the tender out into the harbour, he recited his favourite stanzas from Tennyson’s Morte D’Arthur.

. . . Then murmur’d Arthur, ‘Place me in the barge,’ And to the barge they came. There those three Queens Put forth their hands, and took the King, and wept . . .

The party’s destination was the harbour’s grassy, uninhabited Clark Island—just over a kilometre away. Barton, Cynthia and the two others were deposited on the island. Flash motored off to pick up Mary Ellen, Gretel and Dieter. However, the engine stalled, refusing to start again. The stranded players watched and only hoped Flash might drift ashore, find help and organise another boat.

Meanwhile Barton had been hooded and chained to a tree in the centre of the island, heavy manacles fastened to his wrists and ankles, with a chain between them. At about midnight, he was released announcing it was time for Cynthia to be placed in chains and lie bound beside him. A magnum of champagne was opened. After an hour of drinking, Mary Ellen turned up in a rowboat with Dieter. They had capsized en route, swum ashore, emptied the dinghy and bravely set off again with a single oar.

Mary Ellen’s good humour flipped when she discovered her partner had Cynthia in bondage. Barton was dispatched alone in the one-oared dinghy, although it was unclear whether to fetch help or to escape Mary Ellen’s rage. In all the upset, the key to release Cynthia had vanished.

Eventually a Water Police launch discovered the marooned party. With her arms still chained behind her back, Cynthia was terrified she was about to be taken to police headquarters. She saw her career, her marriage and her life sinking in the scandal. Seducing them with her personality and looks, Mary Ellen convinced the officers to drop the group back at its starting point—the private jetty next to Mary Ellen’s apartment. Despite it being close to 3 am, Mary Ellen invited the officers in for a drink. They declined. A gentleman in impeccable flannels and yachting jacket strode confidently out along the wharf to thank the officers for rescuing his missing guests. It was Gordon Barton.

By now plans for the European operation were moving apace. IPEC launched an international airfreight service. Ian Sayer delivered his report, recommending IPEC proceed, though with caution, concluding that he remained in an awkward position in recommending acquisitions given the sale of his own firm had not yet been finalised.

Perhaps to shore up his faith in Sayer—a partner he had never met—Barton suggested he might like to visit Australia. Unfortunately, one of Sayer’s idiosyncrasies was a fear of flying. When needed for meetings in continental Europe, he would insist on his personal chauffeur driving him. Sayer believes today that he and Barton were in some ways ‘pretty similar people’. Both liked cats, both had strong characters and a healthy respect for each other and their respective achievements, although they quite often disagreed.

It was not until April that Hugh O’Neill and Ian Sayer turned their attention to the letter from the mysterious Mr Harmsen. It turned out Harmsen had written on behalf of Gelders Spetra—one of the largest and most reputable of the major European road transport organisations. The Dutch–German firm had been in business since 1927, with 32 branches throughout Holland, Germany, the UK, Belgium, France and Switzerland. A weekend meeting was arranged with the company’s board members and executive in Holland.

Since the sudden death of Gelders Spetra capable managing director a few years prior the business had gone downhill, battling industrial recession and fuel crises. It could not pay its bills. Mr Harmsen’s letter had been accurate. Gelders indeed had the licences and the depots that could be potentially woven into just the sort of network Barton had in mind. But there was a major downside—it had only ever delivered freight cheaply and to slow timetables. Its trucks never left until they were full. Sometimes it was ten days before a truck departed. As in the rest of Europe, Gelders and its staff had no concept of overnight delivery.

Nonetheless, on the Monday following their weekend meeting, O’Neill wrote to the Gelders executive to say that IPEC had a definite interest in acquiring, and would like to send in investigating accountants.

A short time later, on 5 May 1979, Mark Thatcher’s mother Margaret won government for the Tories. Life would also change for her son Mark—by the end of 1979 he had left IPEC. Just days after Thatcher became prime minister Barton reached Derek Bimson, IPEC’s financial controller, by telephone. Bimson happened to be holidaying in Britain. Barton asked him to report to the company’s Mayfair flat urgently.

Waiting for him was Hugh O’Neill, who quickly asked Bimson to accompany him to Holland to check out this Dutch transport company. The pair bedded down for two days to study the Gelders Spetra books. Bimson quickly calculated the company was worthless. Its debts were enormous. After visiting Gelders’ Dutch bankers, it was clear the business was only viable if it could be acquired for next to nothing and the company’s creditors convinced to forgive most of its debts.

Greg Farrell was not keen on the investment, but Bimson pointed out that by consolidating the balance sheets of IPEC Australia with the proposed European business, it would provide an apparent massive asset base. Farrell had by now devised a grand expansion plan for Federal’s casino holdings. Three more sites were being acquired in Launceston, Darwin and Alice Springs. Launceston would be promoted as an exclusive country club, targeting tired business executives. Darwin aimed to focus on the Chinese and Japanese inbound markets. A feasibility study for Alice Springs was near completion. Farrell had convinced Barton the leisure industry was the place to be and now was the time to build. Given the large loans these projects would require, Farrell was desperate to shore up confidence amongst lenders for the casino projects. Buying a large European asset for a pittance might have merit.

Barton was confident he could slash the bills to debtors and, if the Gelders business could be bought for next to nothing, with the right management he saw it as ‘a very good deal for us indeed’.

IPEC had a greater quantity of urgent freight than that of Australia’s two commercial airlines combined but until now, it had been forced to use Ansett or TAA scheduled flights for next-morning delivery between non-adjacent capital cities. In May 1979, fifteen years after its first application, the federal government agreed to allow IPEC to operate a national cargo service in competition with Ansett and TAA. Licences were promised between Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide and Brisbane. In anticipation, IPEC acquired new depots near the airports of each city.

However, the government still clung to its two-airline policy, reserving 80 per cent of freight for Ansett and TAA. To ensure IPEC did not pick up any more market share, the government stipulated that IPEC’s efficient and high-volume Argosy airfreighters could not be used. Instead it insisted IPEC lease or buy DC-3s. This would mean setting up new maintenance facilities, re-certifying all its crews to fly the two-engine DC-3s (which were considerably older than most of the pilots) and completely re-engineering the roll-on, roll-off freight handling it had developed for Tasmania.

Barton was furious. DC-3 costs per kilo were double those of an Argosy. Argosies ran on a cheaper locally refined kerosene mixture while DC-3s used a more expensive imported fuel. It was one of the reasons IPEC had originally chosen Argosies. In media interviews Barton was blunt: ‘IPEC will be necessarily involved in renovating an almost extinct aircraft—the DC-3—while it has modern turbo-prop freight aircraft grounded at Essendon Airport. To me this is the ultimate lunacy of Government aviation policy.’

Barton remained adamant he would not be beaten. IPEC AIR already had one old Douglas DC-3 with options on three others. It would brand its new national road-air express service The Midnight Flyer. The company spent up big on T-shirts, phone stickers and a glossy brochure to promote the service. In the most expensive television campaign it had yet mounted, Barton and IPEC AIR staff fronted the camera. As the Eagles sang their ‘Midnight Flyer’ theme, the new IPEC logo swept through the night sky. On a cold, wet evening in July 1979 IPEC’s DC-3 service was unveiled, Barton announcing:

For the time being we will forget about modern technology and turboprops and fuel economy. Freight doesn’t mind what sort of aircraft it flies in so long as it is reliable and arrives on time . . . motivation counts for more than machinery. The extraordinary handicaps imposed by the government provide us with a strong incentive to beat them. Even with old aircraft, IPEC can and will provide a faster more economical door-to-door freight system that any alternative offered by the passenger airlines.

It was madness. Hopelessly cost-inefficient, the Sydney–Melbourne DC-3 service was to last only ten weeks. It had been introduced purely as a matter of principle. It would not be until 1981 that airfreight was finally divorced from the federal government’s two-airline policy. IPEC was finally issued with an aircraft import licence—only the second to be issued in 32 years and the only one restricted to carrying freight rather than passengers. The decision to ground IPEC’s Argosies on mainland routes was reversed. By then, however, even the Argosy was a dated aircraft. Instead, from August 1982, a more cost-efficient, faster DC-9 was purchased for the Bass Strait route. In October IPEC’s Tasmanian Argosies were redeployed to the mainland capital city routes where their quieter turboprop engines meant they could operate outside night-time curfews.

Additional flight crews, machinery and engineers needed to be recruited and trained. Despite such a major investment, IPEC AIR was at last able to undertake the huge transformation from a single-route operation into a freight airline servicing five cities, flying 9000 kilometres each night. Eighteen years had passed since Barton had begun this battle in 1964, but at last the dream became reality.

Ian Sayer admits he was occasionally nervous about Barton’s strategies. Despite the multitude of Gelders’ European depots, these did not work together as a network. Further, there was a work mentality problem. Practically no drivers or freight handlers and very few in management had any understanding of how express freight worked.

On a trip through Sydney, Adelaide-based John Konstas, who had been dabbling with his own business ideas in the few years since leaving IPEC, dropped in to see his old work colleagues. He appeared at the tail end of an IPEC board meeting and Barton showed him a spreadsheet.

‘Have a look at this—we’re going over to Europe to run it. Do you want to come? Go and pack your pyjamas and come’, Barton announced like a child inviting his old friend for a weekend sleepover.

‘I don’t wear pyjamas. I’ll come now’, Konstas recalls replying. In fact Konstas had been missing the transport game and couldn’t wait to get back into it. He left for the Netherlands with Barton two weeks later.

By June 1979, the Gelders acquisition was green-lighted by the Ipec Holdings board, if the right deal could be done. Negotiations with Ian Sayer were sidelined.

Forty years old, Barry Ellis had been with IPEC for thirteen years, working his way up to director of finance, when Barton called him.

‘Europe has been progressing a bit faster than expected and I need you to go over there’, Ellis recalls Barton’s words.

‘Fine, when would you like me to go?’

‘Tomorrow.’

‘Gordon, do you realise I’m married with a family?’

Barton could not tell his finance director how long he would be needed. For Ellis it was a choice between his career and staying in Adelaide.

‘I have to tell my family something,’ Ellis persisted.

He broke the news to his wife, confessing he had no set date of return. She used to ring and ask, ‘When are you coming home?’ Ellis never knew. This decision marked the beginning of the end of his marriage, he admits now.

On 18 June, Barton, John Konstas and Barry Ellis flew first class to Amsterdam. This trip was a fateful one. It would mark the moment Barton refocused almost completely on Europe, leaving IPEC’s many Australian businesses in the hands of Greg Farrell.

The three Australians would require accommodation and Hugh O’Neill had connections. The fifteenth-century Kasteel Ophemert near the sleepy village of Tiel lay about 60 kilometres from Gelders’ Arnhem headquarters. The ancient pile had been in the extended family of Hugh Mackay, Lord Reay, for hundreds of years. The recently divorced peer was a good friend of O’Neill’s from their Eton schooldays. An earlier Mackay—raised to the Scottish peerage of Lord Reay in the seventeenth century—had become a prominent general in Holland. For his efforts the general had been given Kasteel Ophemert by the Dutch nation as well as the Dutch title of Baron Mackay van Ophemert.

As swans floated past on the moat around them, Barton and his colleagues assessed the Gelders Spetra situation. To buy time and prevent the company from going into receivership, Barton sought to win the confidence of Gelders’ bankers, works councils and government agencies. To John Konstas Barton confided, ‘We must tread carefully, we are now experienced cats in a very strange warehouse’.

On 2 July he sent a memo to Greg Farrell assuring him he found operations to be ‘in the hands of experienced, competent and perhaps over-meticulous people. The systems are complex, involve a great deal of paperwork and an enormous staff.’ Accounting systems were shocking and top management almost non-existent. Each country was expending huge efforts to separate its own costs from others in the Gelders network. The Gelders business was losing around 80,000 Dutch guilders every week and had debts of about 6 million guilders. On the positive side, the firm’s customer list ran into the thousands across Holland, Germany and the UK. Many were blue-chip companies.

If Barton could convince creditors to write off some 60 per cent of their debt, while ensuring they were not put offside permanently, he thought the operation capable of a reasonable profit in time. Long and difficult negotiation would be required. The primary creditor—the Dutch tax department—needed to be convinced to give up some of its priority claim. Barton’s negotiation skills came to the fore, and according to O’Neill were ‘a masterpiece of business tactics’.

The investment would be no easy one. Even Barton had to admit to Farrell, ‘The cost of living is monumental here, about double Australian, and wages and salaries likewise’.

Sayer’s business had an extraordinary £1 million in cash available. By acquiring Sayer, Barton would use these funds and the leverage they provided to inject much-needed capital into the ailing Gelders business. Already his big-picture mind was racing ahead to a planned purchase of a UK airfreight group whose three planes could provide a far more efficient bridge across the English Channel. The purchase never came to fruition, and IPEC’s resources were instead focused on streamlining freight bottlenecks such as the Channel crossing.

Grahame Bunyan recalls getting a phone call from Barton in July 1979 asking him to come straight to London. His marketing skills were desperately needed. A host of others received similar calls. Within two or three days Bunyan was booked first class on a plane to London. He would remain three months before insisting it was time to return to his Australian family.

By September 1979, negotiations for the purchase of Sayer and Gelders were finalised. Ian Sayer and his business partner Peter Laverty sold their company for a massive £3.2 million—one of the largest amounts ever paid for a British transport operator. Sayer was not surprised at the size of the sale. He knew just how valuable the Sayer Group’s £1 million cash holdings were to Barton’s plans. Barton immediately had this money transferred to Holland to fund the Gelders debts. In return for taking over the massive Gelders debts, IPEC picked up this six-country transport firm for one Dutch guilder.