Mad Dogs and Englishmen (The Brigandshaw Chronicles Book 3) by Rimmer Peter & Rimmer Peter

Author:Rimmer, Peter & Rimmer, Peter [Rimmer, Peter]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Kamba Publishing
Published: 2017-01-15T05:00:00+00:00

The office of the managing director of Colonial Shipping was an unpretentious affair. Harry’s grandfather had seen to that and Uncle James had carried on the tradition. The board table was in the same room. The board of directors met in the managing director’s office. It made the point of who was in charge as well as saving space. Harry soon gathered his grandfather was not a man to fritter away his money showing off.

They showed him the books of accounts that might just as well have been in Greek. They showed him pictures of the ships. They gave him a list of subsidiary companies that was as long as his arm, with job descriptions that meant very little. There was a confirming house, whatever that was. A shipping and clearing company divorced from Empire Castle Line with subsidiaries with foreign sounding names. There was a freight company that Harry surmised rightly moved goods by truck from inland in Britain and Africa to the ports and the ships of Empire Castle, as well as a company previously owned by two companies merged by Colonial Shipping. There were storage companies right throughout Africa and at all the large British ports.

C E Porter was right. He had no idea what was going on. He knew how to fly an aeroplane. He knew how to explore for minerals and recognise a rough diamond from a piece of quartz. He knew how to grow maize and look after a herd of cattle. Thanks to his Grandfather Manderville he even knew how to grow and cure tobacco.

“Five years! I don’t think so.”

“What did you say, sir?”

“Nothing, Grainger. Well, not nothing. I just have no idea what this lot is all about.”

“You’ll get the gist of it soon enough.”

“I had no idea the business was so spread. So diverse. So complicated… Just out of interest, do we have ships with cold rooms? Places where the temperature is kept to say five degrees on the centigrade scale.” Harry was thinking of his friend Pierre Le Jeune and the acres and acres of new fruit trees growing in the Inyanga.

“I don’t know, sir. Why would anyone want a commercial cool room on board a ship?”

“To carry fruit from Africa to England when the fruit season is over in Europe. An industrial-sized freezing compartment to carry my beef from Rhodesia to England.”

“We have beef in England, sir.” Now Grainger was buttering up.

“Thank you… We don’t have such ships, do we?”

“No, sir.”

“Ask around. Better still go to Birmingham, Mr Grainger. Go and see an engineer or two. The British are the most inventive nations on earth.”

“The Americans?” Grainger was now being generous.

“Yes, well, maybe the Americans… Do you wish to go to America, Mr Grainger?”

“No, sir. Birmingham will be sufficient. We have clients in Birmingham who make heavy machinery. Bakers. Electric generators. We ship their goods out to all parts of Africa. They’ll probably know what to do… Are there any fruit growers in Africa?”

“Maybe this business is not so difficult after all.

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