Janet Holmes à Court

Desert Island Discs

BBC

Society & Culture, Music Commentary, Music, Personal Journals

4.4 • 13.7K Ratings

🗓️ 19 May 1996

⏱️ 37 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The castaway in Desert Island Discs this week is Janet Holmes à Court. Recently named Businesswoman of the Year, she'll be talking to Sue Lawley about how, after the sudden death of her husband, the hugely rich Robert Holmes a Court, she was advised to sell up and retire to the beach. Before his death, he had just been starting to turn the tide which had run against him after he'd lost around £400 million in the stock market crash of 1987. Forgetting the beach, she proceeded to take up the reins of the business. Over the last six years, she has created an impressive commercial organisation out of cattle, construction and transport, she owns 10 theatres in London's West End and her cattle company is estimated to own about 1.1% of Australia's land mass. The owner of a desert island herself, she'll be contemplating exile far from the demands of the business world.

[Taken from the original programme material for this archive edition of Desert Island Discs]

Favourite track: Fidelio by Ludwig van Beethoven Book: Tourmaline by Randolph Stow Luxury: Jar of Vegemite

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello, I'm Krestey Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive.
0:05.0	For rights reasons, we've had to shorten the music.
0:08.2	The program was originally broadcast in 1996, and the presenter was Sue Lolly. My cast away this week is a business woman in fact she's just been named Business Woman of the Year.
0:33.0	Married for nearly 25 years to one of the richest men in Australia,
0:37.0	she supported him loyally through huge success and stressful failure.
0:41.0	When he died suddenly in his early 50s, she was advised to
0:44.7	sell up and retire to a beach. She did the opposite. Her husband had just
0:49.2	begun to turn the tide which had run against him and she now took the helm. In the past six years
0:54.5	she's created an impressive commercial empire out of cattle, construction,
0:58.7	transport and theatres, ten of them all in the west end of London. She remains a proud and loving widow, unafraid of being on her own.
1:07.0	This, she says, is what women have to prepare for.
1:10.0	She is Janet Holmes a court.
1:13.0	Preparing for widowhood may be one thing, Janet, but preparing to take over a multi-million dollar empire is quite another.
1:20.0	Was there any doubt in your mind that that was what you had to do?
1:23.7	It wasn't actually anything that I really thought about, I just did it.
1:27.6	So you never gave the beach a thought?
1:29.8	Definitely not.
1:32.3	You'd be bored out of your mind. I'd be bored out of my mind. So no that didn't really occur to me.
1:37.2	But there seems to have been a suggestion that somehow your your husband Robert Holmes
1:41.6	accord had kind of prepared you for this moment.
1:45.0	Is that the case?
1:48.0	I'm not really sure about that.
	...

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