‘You can’t WFH in the foreign legion’, says tycoon Simon Murray

The financial world is full of warlike language: there are boardroom coups, bid battles and bombshells, but however dramatic they sound, these are merely martial metaphors.

Not so for Simon Murray. The veteran businessman, who has served on a string of boards in the UK and Hong Kong, is not just another pin-striped desk warrior – he is the real thing.

His autobiography, Nobody Will Shoot You If You Make Them Laugh, sounds like one of those whimsical business book titles in the vein of Who Moved My Cheese, except that it is based on a real incident in the eventful life of the 81-year-old polar explorer, former soldier in the French Foreign Legion and raconteur extraordinaire.

From soldier to tycoon: Veteran businessman Simon Murray has served on a string of boards in the UK and Hong Kong

Plenty of executives boast of their triathlons and mountain biking.

Murray can gazump the lot, having climbed the Atlas Mountains and Kilimanjaro, trekked up Everest, run the 150-mile Marathon des Sables in Morocco aged 60 and abseiled down the Shard at 72.

His book opens in Botswana, where, having been taken hostage by gunmen, he attempted to beguile his chief captor by performing a magic trick to make a coin disappear. The man’s wife asked whether, since Murray was a conjurer, he could make her husband vanish?

‘Yes,’ replied our hero, ‘but it will be very difficult to bring him back.’

Cue general hilarity and Murray’s release. And there are plenty more anecdotes like this in his improbable ascent to the top of the business world, armed with a CV that reads like a Dickens novel.

Soldier: Murray served in the French Foreign Legion

Part of his childhood was spent in an orphanage, followed by a stint at a brutal boarding school then a little light relief in the Foreign Legion.

At the age of 63, he became the oldest man to reach the South Pole, along with the explorer Pen Hadow, each pulling a sledge weighing about 23 stone uphill for eight hours a day.

He spent most of his career working in Hong Kong, serving 14 years at Jardine Matheson, where he became boss of its engineering business. ‘There is a lot of loyalty in the Foreign Legion,’ he says, ‘but at Jardine Matheson, well, there was a lot of backstabbing.’

Murray, who founded the Orange mobile phone brand is still working today, including a seat on the advisory board of Huawei, the Chinese telecoms company.

Despite his long career, his 54-year marriage and three children, are, he says, his greatest success, no doubt all the sweeter because of his own fractured childhood.

His father, Patrick Murray, was the scion of a wealthy family and his mother, Maxine King, was the daughter of a publican from Worksop, Nottinghamshire. 

They met one lunchtime in the bar of the Berkeley Hotel in Mayfair in 1937 and married after a whirlwind romance.

By the time Simon was born three years later, the marriage was on the rocks.

His father went bankrupt and abandoned the family, leaving his mother penniless.

In desperation, she handed Murray and his brother Anthony into the care of ‘what was effectively an orphanage’, a nurses’ training school outside Tunbridge Wells in Kent.

Record breaker: At the age of 63, Murray became the oldest man to reach the South Pole

He says he feels ‘nothing, zero’ about his father, who he met only once, by chance, when he was 27.

‘I was travelling in Sweden after I had been in the Foreign Legion. I was using poste restante [where a post office holds mail until the recipient calls for it] and I got a letter addressed to him.

‘I went to see him, and we went to the pub.’

It was the first and last encounter – his father died shortly after.

Murray never asked his late mother why she put him into an orphanage. ‘She was a single parent and it was wartime,’ he says. ‘Bombs were raining down and she must have thought we would be safer there.’

The brothers were evacuated to Montgomeryshire then lived for a while with their maternal grandparents in the slums of Worksop before his father’s family paid for them to go to boarding school. 

He is best known in the UK as a former chairman of commodities giant Glencore from 2011 to 2013, where days into the job, he was embroiled in a row over sexism.

The iceman cometh: Murray was joined on his South Pole expedition by explorer Pen Haddow, each pulling a sledge weighing about 150 kilos uphill for 8 hours a day

Women, he said, were not as ambitious as men because they preferred bringing up their children, and he wouldn’t rush out to hire a female director who is ‘going to go off for nine months’.

He is unrepentant, and the idea he is a sexist ogre is also confounded by the fact his wife of 54 years, Jennifer, sounds more than a match for him. At 60, she became the first woman to fly solo around the world in a helicopter, earning the headline, ‘Chopper granny rounds globe’ in the Guardian.

‘My wife knows the score. The idea I don’t like women on boards is rubbish. What I was saying is I don’t want them just because they are women, as tokens.’

In any case, he is unlikely to be perturbed by the woke lobby, given his many brushes with genuine danger and violence, including a grim episode when, still in his teens, he witnessed a fellow Legionnaire decapitating three dead deserters during the Algerian War of Independence and was then ordered to carry two of the heads back to base for identification.

Legionnaires, he says, became anaesthetised to horrors. ‘But they were and are fine soldiers. I learned esprit de corps, which served me well in business. You couldn’t have the French Foreign Legion doing Work From Home.

‘WFH is sad, you are missing out on all the camaraderie and the pride.’

And as for the future, this old soldier sounds a note of pessimism. ‘Someone said: “When goods don’t cross frontiers, armies will.” We are all at one another’s throats.’

• Nobody Will Shoot You If You Make Them Laugh by Simon Murray, Unicorn Publishing, £25.

This post first appeared on Dailymail.co.uk