Reed Elsevier — one of the world’s biggest information providers — traces its origins back to 1880, when Jacobus George Robbers set up a publishing company in Rotterdam, naming it Elsevier after a 16th century family of booksellers and printers.
That business remained a small, family-owned business until after the Second World War, after which it expanded rapidly, due mainly to the success of a weekly magazine, still appearing today, called Elseviers Weekblad.
The British arm of the business dates back to 1894, when Albert Reed set up a newsprint manufacturing plant at Tovil Mill, Kent. It floated on the stock market in 1903 under that name and kept it until 1970.
During the 1960s, the company became a conglomerate, expanding aggressively under its long-serving chairman and chief executive, Don Ryder, who took into it sectors as diverse as bathroom equipment and building products.
Lord Ryder, who became known as one of Harold Wilson’s favourite businessmen and who received a peerage in 1974, was a ruthless and eccentric figure whose PRs boasted he got up at 5.30am to jog — an unusual pastime in those days.
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When approached by legendary Daily Mirror editor Hugh Cudlipp about a possible takeover of the paper’s owner, International Publishing Corporation (IPC), Lord Ryder — a former editor of the Stock Exchange Gazette — did not think twice. The deal made the newly-renamed Reed International one of Britain’s biggest newspaper, paper and packaging groups with more than 80,000 employees.
Reed’s turnover grew tenfold in Lord Ryder’s 11-year reign — but years of expansion had left it over-extended and over-indebted. It was left to his successor, Alex Jarrett, to slim the business down — selling low-growth businesses, such as wallpaper manufacturing, even though Reed was the world’s biggest player in the field at the time. Mr Jarrett’s successor, Leslie Carpenter, continued the process by offloading other businesses and, famously, sold the Mirror Group to Robert Maxwell in 1984.
The next chief executive, Peter Davis — later to find fame as “the man from the Pru” — sold the paper and packaging operations four years later, leaving Reed as a focused magazine publisher, before further acquisitions took it into books and consumer magazines such as TV Times.
In 1992 Sir Peter merged the company with Elsevier, by now a leading publisher of scientific journals, but lefte two years later after a boardroom power struggle. Over the subsequent 15 years, Reed Elsevier has sold its consumer magazines businesses to focus on scientific, business and professional publishing — much of it digital.