Tony Besse inherited wealth, courage and a sense of duty — and with them a disdain for authority. Like his father before him Besse made a fortune as a merchant in the Middle East; and like his father before him he was passionate about education. The older Besse endowed St Antony’s College, Oxford, in 1949; the younger Besse funded the purchase of St Donat’s Castle in south Wales, which opened as Atlantic College in September 1962.
Along the way he was expelled from school, smuggled arms for the French resistance, worked as an illegal taxi driver in New York, was jailed over business “misunderstandings” and oversaw the loss of the family’s sprawling business empire to the communist regime in Yemen.
Antonin Besse was born in the south of France in 1927, one of five children of his father’s second marriage to Hilda (née Crowther), a Scotswoman who worked as her husband’s secretary. Besse Sr, a passionate anglophile and anti-Nazi, was immortalised as M Leblanc in Evelyn Waugh’s novel Scoop, while Freya Stark, the explorer and travel writer, described him as “a merchant in the style of the Arabian Nights”. When enlisting for wartime service in 1914 he answered “millionaire” to a question about his civilian occupation, while his obituary in The Times (July 5, 1951), noted that he “accumulated great wealth as a general merchant and shipowner in the Middle East”. By 1923 he controlled 72 per cent of the Red Sea oil trade and in 1936 installed the first diesel engines in Arab dhows, building up a fleet that could operate in all weathers carrying mutton from Berbera to Aden.
In February 1941 Besse Sr and his wife, who were wanted by the Nazis for stemming the flow of oil to Italy in retaliation for the Italians’ use of mustard gas, escaped the Vichy regime in France and found their way back to Aden, leaving Tony and a sister at Le Paradou, their French home, with a courageous English nanny called Miss Ogilvie. With his physical fitness, sense of adventure and no parents to stand in his way, young Tony was soon running errands for the resistance, stealing German equipment such as guns, grenades and binoculars, and spending cold nights awaiting supplies dropped from Allied aircraft.
His formal education ended after he stood up in assembly and shouted at the headmaster, a Vichy supporter; thereafter his home was frequently visited by German officers. Eventually he was captured and sent for interrogation by an Italian officer who had been in Somalia and knew of his father. “You have your life in front of you. Run!” instructed the officer. Besse fled to Bordeaux, where he worked with the Spanish communists — specialists in resistance activities from the civil war. He was later awarded a resistance medal but declined to attend the ceremony.
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The immediate postwar years in France were not much easier: he recalled scores being settled with bullets and a thriving black market for silk stockings — which he worked like a professional. His parents brought him back to Aden, but after his wartime experiences he had no interest in office life. After one particularly violent argument with his father he marched straight to the harbour and jumped on one of the company’s ships that was about to sail for New York. Meanwhile, his father had donated £1.5 million to Oxford for the establishment of a new college, with the intention that it should receive a number of French students. He also established a subsidy for Gordonstoun.
Once in the New World, Besse Jr earned a living as an unlicensed taxi driver and parked cars in exchange for tips. When his mother wrote, urging him to visit his ailing father in Aden, he refused until his father made the request. Besse Sr died in 1951 while on a visit to Gordonstoun and the 24-year-old Besse now took over the disparate family empire, or, as he called it, “a vast series of private shops”.
In 1957 he had met and married Christiane (née Chateau), a journalist. She survives him with their son, Antonin, a former lawyer, and their daughter, Joy-Isabelle.
His company’s interests stretched from Ethiopia and Somaliland, up the Red Sea and into the Persian Gulf. It took Besse 15 years to gain control of what, under his father, had been a series of personal and informal arrangements. Yet communist forces were soon on the rise and by 1969 the Besse companies had been nationalised — or confiscated, as he preferred to say. He was not unscarred by the events and reported witnessing at least one beheading. He recalled how on one occasion a Dutch manager from Philips, sent to resolve a dispute with Besse, was so shaken by the hanging bodies lining his route to the office from the airport “that he acquiesced meekly and left as quickly as he could”. Not only were the business assets lost, but so too was their home and its contents, including pictures, papers and the children’s toys; he left Aden for the last time on June 10 with the French consul carrying his bag to provide a sliver of diplomatic protection.
Besse took refuge in a suite at the St Georges Hotel, Beirut, making occasional forays to Damascus and beyond in an attempt to revive his business interests, often returning with tales of long days and nights spent hanging around in sleazy hotels. Twice he saw the inside of a prison cell. On one occasion he found himself detained with a sailor whose wrists were bleeding from severely tightened ratchet handcuffs for which the warders had lost the key. Borrowing a revolver from the nearest guard he recalled a lesson learnt in wartime France and shot off the cuffs without causing injury to the prisoner.
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Eventually he made a new life in Paris, but his heart stayed for ever in the war-torn Middle East.
While in the resistance he had come across Jacques Cousteau, who later achieved renown as an underwater explorer. On one occasion Besse got into difficulties when diving with Cousteau and, with insufficient air to surface slowly, had to be placed in a decompression chamber. He helped to finance La Calypso, Cousteau’s boat, and joined him underwater during the filming of Silent World (1956). Later Besse spent many happy summers at the helm of his own restored classic boat.
Meanwhile, his father’s old friend Kurt Hahn, the founder of Gordonstoun, had a plan to impress Americans with a sixth-form college “in Britain, saved by a Frenchman and presided over by a German”. St Donat’s Castle, which had been owned by William Randolph Hearst, the newspaper magnate, was the ideal base — and Besse was prevailed upon to come up with the cash for what became Atlantic College. He recalled how, after the purchase was completed, he flew in a private aircraft with Hahn from London to Cardiff and, as they were taking off, Hahn absent mindedly opened the window; the pilot saved their lives by quickly leaning across him and closing it.
Engrossed in extracting himself from the Middle East, Besse took a back seat in the college’s affairs until Lord Mountbatten was appointed international president of what had become United World Colleges (UWC), which had facilities that were similar to Atlantic in other countries. He insisted on Besse’s involvement in the movement, which came to fruition notably in setting up United World College of the Adriatic in Italy and, in the movement’s first college in a post-conflict country, in Sarajevo after the Bosnian war of 1992-95.
Besse never lost his sense of disappointment over the family’s retreat from the Middle East. However, he was happy to embrace the future. “We did not return to Aden or to Yemen . . . I was not made for a primitive or lawless society,” he told David Sutcliffe, the author of a history of UWC, but thanks to the colleges, “I was no longer idle. I was busy. I was happy.”
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Tony Besse, merchant and philanthropist, was born on February 22, 1927. He died after a long illness on November 10, 2016, aged 89