Interview with Mark Holford

Mark Douglas Holford was born in 1950, in Fareham, Hampshire. His father was a naval officer, having joined the navy and gone to Dartmouth at the age of 13 in 1929. Mark describes his mother as “a domestic engineer” and says: “She was the daughter of one of the joint managing directors of Vickers-Armstrong who from 1929 till 1945 managed a small factory in Newcastle that employed 35,000 people and made most of Britain’s tanks during the second World War. He was in fact responsible for all UK tank production.”  Mark is the younger of two brothers.

In 1959, Mark attended St Peter’s Court, Broadstairs, Kent, a private prep school. Mark explains: “My parents, to some extent, had little choice but to send me to boarding school, because my father worked abroad at various times.  Shortly before I went to prep school my father was in Washington for two years, and then during my time at school he was both in Argentina and eventually in Hong Kong. It gave me a very good education.  There were some very capable masters, the most engaging of which had both taught my father. I then moved to another private public school, Radley College, which is just outside Oxford.”

Mark had an interesting time at Radley and joined the Combined Cadet Force, where he became a Leading Seaman. He did well in his studies and achieved ten O levels and three A levels – Latin, Greek and Ancient History. He says of the choice of subjects: “I was persuaded to do them, but in fact I enjoyed them enormously.”

 In 1969, upon leaving school, Mark took a gap year and worked his passage to South Africa on a ship. He says: “It was a refrigerated cargo boat owned by Union-Castle, best known for their passenger “mail” ships going to South Africa.  It was a really interesting time because Apartheid was at its height and I worked as a journalist for the Argus group of newspapers three cities: Cape Town, Johannesburg and Durban. I had an amazing time.”

Upon his return to the UK, Mark decided to train to be a solicitor. Mark studied law at Southampton University between 1969 to 1972 achieving a “gentleman’s degree” (2:2), followed by six months at the Guildford College of Law.

He made the choice based on advice from a family friend who told him that whatever career choice he made, legal training would stand him in good stead. Mark adds: “I think on reflection that’s absolutely right.  The only other thing I would now have considered doing would have been business studies, but I think the law was an excellent choice. Then having done that I felt that I’d better qualify, so I did what was known as Part IIs.  Then I became an articled clerk, in Newcastle: today, I’d be called a trainee solicitor”

In 1973, Mark became an articled clerk in Newcastle upon Tyne in one of the largest solicitor firms outside of London, Dickinson Miller & Turnbull (now Womble Dickinson). He says: “It had a very good mix of work, and had a very strong private client practice. It also did a lot of conveyancing of particularly housing estates.”

It was in this role that Mark had his first introduction to computers, he explains: “For a housing estate, they used to produce the conveyances on programmeable IBM Golf Ball typewriters. A whole bank of typists on the third floor did this. That was my first experience of automation, at least typing, if nothing else. I’d fill in the blanks and they typed it all out.”

Mark met and married his first wife, Elizabeth, while living in Newcastle and the couple stayed there for two years while his wife completed her course in picture restoration. They then moved to London when she got a job working for the government restoration service.

With the move to London in 1975, Mark secured a role at Holman, Fenwick and Willan, a solicitor’s practice of which Mark says: “They are today the world’s leading shipping and international commerce solicitors, with offices all over the world.

“At the time I joined, they had no international offices and one of the things I did with one of my colleagues, while I was there was to physically help set up their office in Paris. He and I drove a truck across the Channel with the furniture for the office, that was an interesting experience. I stayed at Holmans for nearly three years, , at which point it was made rather clear to me that I probably wasn’t going to progress. I always teasingly say they sacked me, because I know the people there very well. Then I went to work for their largest client.”

In 1978, Mark moved to Thomas Miller as a claims executive. He stayed with the company for thirty seven years and remains a significant shareholder. He says: “I enjoy the marine world partly because my father was in the Royal Navy for 40 years and I’d worked my passage to South Africa, so I knew what an inside of a ship looked like and how it worked, although of course containerisation was coming in very rapidly.”

Shortly after joining he separated from his first wife, although they still remain good friends today. Mark then in 1981 married his second wife Sarah Miller, a commercial / shipping barrister: they have two boys: Robert a pensions expert, and Thomas, a senior finance director in Pearson PLC. Mark says: “Sarah is the great granddaughter of Thomas Miller: nobody believes me when I say this was completely unconnected with my working at Thomas Miller!”

 Thomas Miller, based in the City of London, employs over 850 people, 200 of which work in offices around the UK and overseas. The company specialises in managing mutual insurance companies.  The company was founded in 1885 and has only ever been located in four buildings, all with 500 metres of the Gherkin.

Mark adds: “These are genuine mutuals, they are owned by their members, they have a board of directors elected from the members, and our role is to run them as, to use modern parlance, an outsourced manager. The oldest one was founded in 1869 and we have run it since 1885.  The best way to describe it is, if you took an insurance company like Aviva and sacked all the staff and just left the board of directors, we would then do everything that the staff would do, including the underwriting, claims handling, investment management, regulatory affairs, etc.  We have about 18 mutuals, most of which are involved in the international transport sector, which cover almost every segment of shipping, but we also manage mutuals for all Britain’s barristers, most of Britain’s patent agents, as well as City livery companies.”

Mark spent three years as a claims executive and then became an underwriter. He describes what it involved, saying: “I was in the part of the company that managed a mutual known as the TT Club, (these mutuals are known as ‘clubs’ colloquially in the market), and it’s the leading insurer of all the world’s containers.  Today 80% of the boxes you see driving down the road or on a ship are insured by the TT Club.  So I was handling some quite interesting claims and then I moved into the underwriting.  I handled our South African business, among other things. My relationship with my South African clients was definitely a high point, because some of them today remain very close friends of mine.  I used to go once or twice a year, we had a quite substantial amount of business there and we particularly insured the three largest freight forwarders in the country, as well as the two local shipping lines.

“I ended up being the director of underwriting, my job was to set the rates, policy terms etc.  Along the way, with the help of my second wife who is a commercial (and particularly shipping) barrister, we undertook the major task rewriting our terms and conditions in terminology that I would call plain English.”

Through a cousin, Mark was introduced in the mid 1980’s to spreadsheets in his personal life. He bought an Amstrad and wrote a database for a wine collection!  This made him realise the potential for the business, he says: “I became the first executive in the company outside the accounts department to think about using computers to do calculations in underwriting, and I built some really quite complex spreadsheets to do that, which later became the basis for an expert system.”

Working with the head of IT, Mark uploaded from an IBM A/S400 the TT Club’s claims and underwriting figures into a spreadsheet which allowed them to better understand their data. He says that this was the start of his route into IT taking on the role of group IT strategist and director of information in 1990 which he did for five years.

 Mark explains: “We had a very enlightened senior partner at the time, who had been my boss almost my entire career at Thomas Miller up to that point, and he said to me, Mark, you clearly understand what a computer can do, so I’m going to give you nine months off.  Go away, work with Mario de Pace, the IT director, and come back and present to one of our partnership meetings how you see our IT strategy should be.  So we did just that.

“I talked to people in IBM, to people in the London insurance market who were using computers, and I researched around generally.  I concluded there were two things that were going to make a difference to us.  One was to create an expert system to do our underwriting, and the other to create a system to handle all our claims.  I presented these ideas and the company bought into both of them.  One was successful, one was not.”

It was the expert system to do the underwriting which was not successful, Mark explains why: “It was because our policies were quite few in number and also quite complex and to make it work we’d have had to persuade people to change the way they did things, and they weren’t willing to do that, although I think we would have done a better job if we had. But the claims handling system was a huge success, we still use it today. IBM told us it was a world leader, particularly as it could handle, in a single inbox/folder, emails, faxes, telexes as well as spreadsheets and Word documents.”

In 1996 Mark was involved in a project called Bolero to turn traditional shipping bills of Lading electronic. He was instrumental in bringing together SWIFT, the bank’s payment network, and the TT Club to invest in this startup. The project survives today but has not had the success that it might have had, although none of the other similar projects have had success. This largely stems from the challenges of building a network that , at least in container shipping, must involve millions of participants in many different roles: This is not an IT problem but a management challenge. I was seconded to the project for six months mainly doing its legal work.

In 1999 in preparation for Y2K Mark was part of a project to make the shipping industry more aware of the potential problems,. He explains: “The question in shipping at that time was whether the world going to fall apart on 1^st January.  We organised a world tour, I went on most of it, we had five seminars around the world on what we thought might happen and we invented a toolkit to tell people what they should be checking to find out.  I think it’s fair to say it was probably a damp squib at the time, but on the other hand, you never know. What it did do,  I’m not sure how true this was in shipping, but generally it made people update their systems when they otherwise might not have done.“

In 2000 Mark was approached by three of colleagues, including Mario de Pace, the Head of IT at Thomas Miller, to potentially start a shipping dot.com business . Mark was involved in trying to raise the finance for the company and says: “We went around trying to raise money, something we didn’t have any experience of doing at all. I used to go to meetings and people would ask where’s your advertising revenue for your dot.com?  These young “finance” experts would say they had just seen somebody who said he was going to make $40 million in advertising revenue from shipping. In my experience I didn’t think even $10 million dollars was being spent on advertising in the whole shipping industry, if that, because I knew roughly where people advertised. So I think the answer is that often some exaggeration is necessary if you want to get a start-up off the ground.

“It was an interesting experience, but we failed to find a backer . As a result of our activities, however ,we were approached by another dot.com, called ShipServ, and Thomas Miller were asked to invest in it, which we did.  It’s still around today, possibly one of only three dot.coms surviving today out of at least 200 start-ups in the shipping sector..  It’s the world’s largest exchange of information for the buying and selling of all the goods that a ship requires to operate.  It worked like a telephone exchange.  We had standards for exchanging documents including orders, requests for quotes and all that sort of thing, and we both integrated directly with ship management software and we supplied standalone online versions so that you could go in and manually enter the information in the forms online.  But most ship owners connected their ship management systems directly to it and the bigger suppliers, as they traded more, would also directly integrate their ERP systems into it. Today it trades about $4 billion dollars’ worth of goods across the platform.

“It has just been sold for a large eight figure sum. This could and should have happened at least five years earlier if the original founder had not spent substantial sums on projects that were never going to work in a conservative shipping world. It is an interesting example of how at a certain point in a startup’s life the founder may need to hand over to a traditional operations manager to grow the next stage.”

Mark is the chairman, non-executive director and shareholder in Klipboard, which manages mobile work-forces. Mark explains: “For example, if you have a team of heating engineers, it manages the whole business process from taking appointments, sending the engineer out, engineer writing and sending a report out, and connecting to your accounting system to send the bill out afterward. It’s a complete suite of products, all online:  the customer rents the software, i.e. it’s a software as a service (SaaS) business.  We’re still relatively small.  We’ve met many of the challenges of a small startup and we’re still working through some of those today, but it’s been a really interesting experience.”

Mark is also chairman and director of a wholesale distributor of wine, Red Squirrel Wine, and a director of Reefer RoRo, a shipping company which owns the patent for the design of a ship to carry bananas from the point of growth to export markets, mainly in Europe North America and Asia.

In 1998, Mark joined the Real Time Club, the world’s oldest IT dining club. He spent a year as chairman.

As one of the leading collectors of contemporary glass, Mark is also a member of the Worshipful Company of Glass Sellers, sitting on its Court and as a trustee of its charity. Mark is also the Patron of the Guild of Glass Engravers and the Contemporary Glass Society.

He says: “I started collecting glass when I was two and a half when my mother gave me a 1953 Coronation goblet, which I still have.” Mark has just permanently loaned a third of his collection to The World of Glass in St Helens, Merseyside. The museum has just reopened following a £1 million refurbishment and forms part of the glass cluster that makes St Helens the UK ‘s leading glass centre. This includes Glass Futures a £54 million project to decarbonise glass and Mark sits on its Membership Council representing the Glass Sellers.

On his death the rest of the collection will be loaned to the museum and ownership will be given to the Glass Sellers’ charity to act as legal custodian of the collection in perpetuity.

 Mark says of his commitment to joining organisations: “I’m very good at networking and joining people together, that’s always been one of my management strengths.”

Mark also joined the Information Technology Livery Company (WCIT) in 1994 having been introduced to it by Jean Irvine from the Post Office. He became Master in 2022 during Covid.

Asked if it’s the job of organisations like the WCIT and the British Computer Society to regulate members, Mark says: “I don’t think that’s at all the job of a livery company.  It’s the job of doing things, many of them probably behind the scenes, of actually helping various aspects of IT along.  It is wide ranging with 20 plus committees and panels working on many aspects of IT, including the arts, medicine, education, entrepreneurship etc. Many of our members work pro bono on charity projects, all of which I think is different from the BCS. We probably have the largest pro bono activity of all the livery companies, which is very gratifying, and we definitely could do more, but we’re doing really remarkably well.”

Mark highlights the failure of expert system to change the way the company does its underwriting as probably the biggest mistake of his career, saying: “That’s probably my biggest mistake, because we spent quite a lot of money creating it and in the end had to give up, although there were parts of it we could still use because it was designed not only to do the underwriting calculations but also to produce all the documentation, which was technically quite complex.”

Asked about the use of AI and in particular the development of ChatGPT, Mark says: “It’s a really difficult question to answer.  I have used Bing, which has ChatGPT built into it, to draft a legal agreement and I was really quite surprised by how well it did in a rather obscure document.  It certainly provided a very good basis for moving forward.  But I do worry at what point does AI take over our lives, and I think regulation in some form will be inevitable.

“The danger is that, as is always the case, regulators will not move fast enough and it has the potential to abuse our lives more than anything else that probably has appeared so far.”

“So whether it needs a pause or for the governments of the world to wake up and to do something now or quickly, I think will be important. In my mind there is no doubt it’s going to change our lives.  If mundane tasks are going to be taken over, we’re also going to have the problem of how do we redeploy people.  People say that’s a rather overdone fear, but I feel there are things happening here which we don’t really understand and that will significantly change society in all sorts of ways.”

Asked about the UK’s ability to produce competitive large IT companies, Mark says: “I think there are possibly two reasons why we don’t produce these. I don’t think we’ve got the finance right.  We went to America to get most of our finance for Klipboard, but actually that finance turned out to not have enough experience in the area we’re in. The second reason is that the UK is quite risk averse.  At least until probably 2000, you were viewed as a risk if you’d been the founder or a director of a business that went bankrupt, whereas of course in America people thought, well, you tried once, why don’t you try again, you should have learnt from the experience. I think there is a lot in that, failure can well lead to success and I don’t think that traditionally we’re very good at that.”

Aside from collecting glass, Mark also collects wine (mainly Bordeaux and Burgundy) and hats. He says that he is also a reasonably competent photographer and needs to catalogue and digitise thousands of his analogue photographs, But that will have to wait until he has catalogued his glass.

From 1997 to 2019 Mark helped his wife Sarah found and run Les Azuriales Opera Festival in Cap Ferrat in the south of France. Sarah is now well known in the UK opera world for her extensive support and encouragement of young singers.

Through helping the Festival survive Mark had to learn to become a fundraiser. He has probably raised at least £3 million for charity over the last 25 years. His most successful project was raising £1.8 million, while at Thomas Miller, to help renovate Africa’s oldest (1899) motorship into a clinic on Lake Malawi. Sadly the renovation part of the project failed but the medical aspects of the project were achieved successfully in a different way. Also during Covid Mark and Sarah ran the live streamed Carols for The City raising £50,000 for the Lord Mayor’s Appeal Charity as well as the WCIT charity. It featured a distinguished cast, including HRH Price Edward, the Lord Mayor, the Lord Lieutenant of London, the Governor of the Bank of England and Dame Mary Berry, with the music provided by City based Voces8 of which Sarah was a trustee.

Interviewed by Richard Sharpe

Transcribed by Susan Nicholls

Abstracted by Lynda Feeley