‘A great visionary’: Canadian retail magnate W. Galen Weston dies at age 80

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W.G. Galen Weston, the Canadian billionaire who built his family’s bakery and grocery business into a global retail empire, died on Monday after a long illness. He was 80.

His contemporaries describe Weston as one of the most formidable and visionary leaders in Canadian business, a man of style and substance who turned Loblaw supermarkets into the biggest player in the country’s food chain.

He was a philanthropist, a handsome and elegant dresser, a solid polo player into his middle age, a friend to the British Royal Family and reportedly the subject of a thwarted kidnapping plot by the Provisional Irish Republican Army in the 1980s. But those who knew him said he was a man most interested in other people, who preferred to spend his leisure time wandering the well-stocked aisles of Loblaws or the perfumed halls of Holt Renfrew, chatting to customers, asking staff questions, or trying out new products.

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“He’d get up on Saturday morning and say, ‘Let’s go visit the stores,’” said friend and colleague Robert Prichard, the former president of the University of Toronto and current chair of downtown Toronto law firm Torys LLP.

“He’d spend Saturday going from store to store. Then he’d go to his competitors’ stores and take a look at them, too. That’s what he loved doing. But when he did it, he wasn’t just looking. He was talking to people.”

Willard Gordon Galen Weston was born in Buckinghamshire, England, on Oct. 29, 1940, the youngest of nine children in a prominent family. His grandfather, George Weston, started a bread bakery in Toronto in the 19th century. By the time Weston took the reins from his father, Willard Garfield Weston, in the 1970s the family bakery business had expanded considerably and included a majority stake in the Loblaw Companies Ltd. supermarket chain.

But his was not a story of a caretaker heir just guiding an already established empire.

“Don’t forget, he’s one of the great businessmen in our history,” said Prichard, who serves as the lead director for George Weston Ltd., the public company that controls the family’s grocery, bakery and real estate assets.

He’s one of the great businessmen in our history

Though Galen Weston spent the beginning of his career acquiring supermarket and luxury retail chains in the United Kingdom, he returned to Canada to take over Loblaw from his father, which was veering toward bankruptcy at the time, friends said. Weston spent decades building the Loblaw network into Canada’s biggest and most dominant supermarket chain player, with more than 200,000 employees across several major retail banners, including Shoppers Drug Mart and No Frills. His time at Loblaw is often credited with revolutionizing the concept of the grocery store brand with the President’s Choice line and the famous Decadent chocolate chip cookie.

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Weston also built a stable of luxury retailers — the Selfridges Group, which includes Holt Renfrew in Canada and Selfridges in the U.K., which he ran with his wife of 55 years, the former Irish fashion model Hilary Weston, who served as lieutenant governor of Ontario from 1997 to 2002. Their daughter Alannah Weston is now chair of the Selfridges Group.

“One of the things from a business perspective that I don’t think people realize is what a visionary Galen was,” said Gordon Nixon, the former head of the Royal Bank of Canada and a longtime board member with George Weston Ltd. “I think a lot of people think Westons, the history, the family — but he was a real retailer.”

One of his most effective skills, friends said, was the way he was able to find talented people to run his acquisitions. He wasn’t jealous for credit, and the people he hired always seemed to succeed, said Prichard.

“He had a phenomenal ability to light people up. You couldn’t meet him and not remember it,” he said. “This is not a man sitting on top of an empire, surrounded by flunkies and never dealing with real people. It’s the opposite. This is the guy who is happiest in one of his stores, dealing with the people who make the whole business possible.”

Weston had a net worth of $10.7 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. His wealth sometimes came at a cost. In 1983, police tipped off Weston and his family about a planned kidnapping attempt at their estate in Ireland. During a police ambush, several members of the Provisional Irish Republican Army were reportedly shot and captured.
Despite his prominence in society circles on both sides of the Atlantic, the incident led Weston to keep a low media profile throughout much of the rest of his life. He continued to lease the historic Fort Belvedere in Windsor Great Park in southeast England, a 17th-century “folly” where Edward VIII abdicated.

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In 1989, Weston and his wife founded Windsor, a wealthy resort community in Vero Beach, Fla., helping design the lay-out of the community, golf course and polo field. A 2013 article in Toronto Life described the enclave as a “plutocrats’ playground,” where a tight-knit group of jet-setters convene in a not-quite-retirement community to “play polo, hit the links, plan corporate takeovers and party.”

The Westons also maintained ties to Toronto, keeping a house in the Forest Hill neighbourhood where members of the Royal Family sometimes stayed when they visited Canada.(He and Prince Charles were friends.)

“He and Hilary were an incredible team,” Nixon said. “He did so much for his country.”

The family said on Tuesday that Weston died “peacefully at home after a long illness faced with courage and dignity.”

“My father’s greatest gift was inspiring those around him to achieve more than they thought possible,” Galen Weston Jr., Weston’s son who succeeded him as the head of Loblaw, said in a statement.

That his two children took over his companies smoothly and successfully, is in itself a rare feat, according to Anthony Fell, the former chairman of RBC Capital markets who served as a director on the Loblaw board.

“The transition from one generation to another has been seamless and, I would say, flawless, which is very unusual,” he said.

But the succession to the fifth Weston generation, as unusual as it might be, appears to have been in motion for years. When his two children were little, according to one friend, Weston took them along on his walks through their stores.

— With additional reporting by Bloomberg News