Ronald Alfred Brierley could have been remembered as the man who introduced taxi drivers, hairdressers, plumbers and schoolteachers to the giddy thrills of the sharemarket. Instead he’s likely to be filed in the public memory under the shameful pejorative of dirty old man.
Mention his name to anyone born after, say, 1980 and the image that’s likely to come to mind—if the name rings any bells at all—is that of a frail, stooped figure being harried on a Sydney street by reporters thrusting microphones at him in the vain hope that he might tell them something. (What, you wonder, did they expect Brierley to say? Did they think he was going to blurt out an anguished mea culpa just for their gratification? Has any defendant in human history ever said anything of interest or value to pursuing journalists outside court? Or are they like dogs chasing cars, just doing it instinctively?)
Brierley at 88 is a pathetic sight. But there was a time when this nondescript-looking man with the neatly trimmed chevron moustache presided over company meetings attended by thousands of adoring shareholders. On one occasion, 15 buses had to be chartered to cart them to Auckland’s Aotea Centre; on another, Dunedin’s main street was closed so that a marquee could be erected to accommodate them all. Small-time investors queued, metaphorically speaking, to touch the hem of Brierley’s garment. Many reputedly became millionaires as a result of their faith in his supposed Midas touch.
Brierley was made a knight of the realm and feted globally. His executives had a fleet of three corporate jets at their disposal. As improbable as it seemed, given his less than charismatic personality, his place in the pantheon of male New Zealand folk heroes seemed assured: Charles Upham, Ed Hillary, George Wilder, Colin Meads, Ron Brierley. But all that changed in December 2019 when customs officers stopped him at Sydney Airport and found him in possession of nearly 12,000 images of child sex abuse on a laptop and two USBs. At his home in the posh Sydney suburb of Point Piper, police seized another laptop and USBs containing 35,000 more.
What followed, in swift succession, was the relinquishment of his knighthood, the termination of all his cherished honorary positions in public life and the elimination of all traces of his philanthropy. Disgrace has rarely been more complete or brutal. One suspects the most painful aspects of his public penance were the severance of all connections with his beloved alma mater, Wellington College, to which he had been a generous benefactor, and his ostracism (officially, at least) by the cricketing fraternity, membership of which seems to have been a crucial source of his self-esteem.
A judge rejected Brierley’s suggestion that he thought the pornographic material in his possession was legal. He eventually pleaded guilty and was jailed, although his 14-month sentence was subsequently quashed on the ground that he was too old and unwell to be cared for in prison. When further charges were brought against him last year, Brierley was declared unfit for trial because of dementia.
If his arrest in 2019 came as a surprise to his closest friends and associates, it surely would only have been because it hadn’t happened earlier. Many were aware of his sexual predilections. Decades ago, his good friend Bob Jones told me almost matter-of-factly about Brierley’s trips to Thailand to enjoy teenage prostitutes. These were even mentioned in a published 1990 biography by the journalist Yvonne van Dongen, who noted that Brierley seemed “completely comfortable” with this aspect of his life and showed no sign of embarrassment when he was “teased” about his sexpeditions to Bangkok.
Brierley himself seemed almost nonplussed at his arrest. He told the police the images were “perfectly okay” and said he looked at them “for recreation”. The youngest child in the images appeared to be about four years old.
If Brierley’s surprise at his arrest indicated a striking lack of self-awareness, the recent publication of his thrillingly titled memoir The History of Brierley Investments Ltd 1961-2021 seems to confirm it.
It’s not so much that the self-published book makes no mention of his sexual offending; it’s primarily about his business career, after all. What’s more telling is that he published the memoir at all. Most people in Brierley’s position—that is to say, a pariah—would want to retreat from the public eye. But the fact that Brierley published the book (while reportedly suffering from dementia, it should be noted) suggests either that he feels no ignominy, or at the very least that he’s able to compartmentalise his criminal behaviour almost to the point where it’s as if it didn’t happen. It takes a special type of hubris to be sentenced to jail for offences that elicit public disgust and then publish a book that makes no reference to it.
Not surprisingly, the release of the memoir—or more precisely, an argument advanced in defence of it—provoked a backlash. Whanganui-based entrepreneur Henry Newrick, who’s distributing the book in New Zealand and wrote the foreword, justified its publication in an interview with the New Zealand Herald by saying that Brierley’s conviction shouldn’t preclude him from telling his story. Fair enough, you might say. But Newrick, who founded National Business Review in 1970, then went on to say: “The word ‘paedophilia’ is a very emotive term. At one end of the scale you have the Jeffrey Epsteins of the world. At the other end, you have the softer end – still shameful, still paedophilia. I’m not defending him [Brierley] but I think he paid a high price. I stand by the fact he is entitled to have the book read.”
That triggered a sharp response from Labour MP and sexual abuse campaigner Helen White, who pointed out in a letter to the Herald, “Those images were not abstract or victimless. They were records of real children being assaulted.” To put it another way, Brierley helped sustain the child abuse industry even though he may not have personally victimised anyone directly.
What, then, of the book? It’s subtitled Not as boring as you think, which is a bit of a fib, because large parts of it are.
The early part of the memoir has an almost rollicking quality. At 19, Brierley launched NZ Stocks and Shares, a newsletter modelled on a horse-racing tip sheet with which he had been briefly associated. From there he progressed to the establishment of R A Brierley Investments Ltd in 1961, specialising in the acquisition of minority stakes in complacently run, sometimes almost moribund firms whose share price didn’t reflect their true value. These “juicy targets” were to become his stock-in-trade, leading to his reputation as a consummate corporate raider and asset stripper—phrases whose swashbuckling connotations seemed at odds with his personality.
Brierley writes about this era in a brisk, gossipy style, at times displaying an almost impish sense of humour. Here he is describing how, when he was still unknown, he attended a company meeting on behalf of NZ Stocks and Shares and pretended not to hear when the chairman asked the press to leave before moving onto the confidential stuff: “My pulse quickened but I remained as silent as the tomb.”
A born disrupter, the young Brierley appears to have been an unusual combination of nerdiness and audacity. The share market then was the exclusive preserve of a wealthy, conservative business elite who viewed him with distaste as an upstart interloper. Newspapers refused to accept his ads and the Attorney-General prosecuted him for issuing a false prospectus. He became accustomed to—in fact thrived on—establishment opposition. There is a sense of almost gleeful mischief in the way he outwitted less nimble rivals and mounted surprise takeover bids that “jolted boards out of their complacency”, to use his words. Often there was a large element of bluff involved. The Brierley who emerges in these pages is quite likeable. He seems bemused by his own success.
All this no doubt contributed to his growing public appeal during a period that saw him expand into Australia and Britain, acquiring stakes in a bizarre miscellany of companies—gold dredges, wool brokers, newspapers, supermarket chains, forestry companies, fertiliser manufacturers, even a maker of billiard tables—whose only point in common was that they were usually lazily managed, overlooked by the investment community and sitting on unrealised wealth.
When the Lange government unshackled the New Zealand economy—stifled by nine years of Muldoonism—in the mid-1980s, Brierley and his companies rode the wave of the subsequent share market boom. It was a strange, febrile time. Kiwis responded to economic deregulation and the opening up of markets the way someone brought up in a teetotal household reacts on discovering gin. Brierley became a household name and to many, something of an improbable national hero. Anecdotally, it was also a time when marriages collapsed after husbands mortgaged the family home to buy shares without telling their wives and then lost the lot when it all came to a shuddering halt in the “Black Tuesday” crash of October 1987.
Brierley was then at the peak of his powers. He calculates that about 10 percent of the population held Brierley shares either directly or through investment institutions. The smarter (or luckier) investors did very well: Brierley shares appreciated by 5000 percent in the decade 1977-87. He reflects modestly that they were probably the best investment in New Zealand corporate history.
The irony, as he more or less concedes, is that he eventually morphed into the sort of establishment figure he himself had targeted in his piratical early days. A “dangerous complacency” set in. He grew tired, lacked commitment and ended up falling out with some of his more avaricious and reckless colleagues (a bit of score-settling goes on in this book). Brierley notes elegiacally that the magic had evaporated by 1988, though it took another 33 years for Brierley Investments Ltd to disappear altogether.
The Brierley who then wastes much of the latter part of the book documenting his sometimes fleeting connections with Famous People is less entertaining. Among those he name-checks are Rupert Murdoch, Kerry Packer, Robert Maxwell, Ronald Reagan, Michael Parkinson (“Parky”) and the Queen. But his interactions with these people reveal nothing about him or them and you get the impression they are mentioned just so the reader knows that he moved in rarefied circles.
He does occasionally offer a glimpse at the peccadillos of the rich and powerful. The British peer Baron Kissin, a fellow director of the Brierley-controlled Guinness Peat Group, liked to meet Brierley at the House of Lords so he could claim an attendance allowance—thereby proving that the more money some people have got, the more reluctant they are to part with any. For his part, Rupert Murdoch operated from a curtained-off corner in the composing room at one of his London papers.
Then there’s the cricket. God, the cricket. Along with stamp collecting, it was Brierley’s lifelong passion. Not all men who enjoy cricket are dull and not all dull men are interested in cricket, but there’s an undeniable co-relation. Brierley is Exhibit A. He hero-worshipped Sir Donald Bradman and shamelessly admits greasing up to him. He was also clearly in awe of Gary Sobers, Rod Marsh and Ian Chappell and never missed an opportunity to rub shoulders with cricketing names. His obsession with cricket even leads him to declare that Sir John Major—another cricket bore, obviously—was “one of the better British prime ministers”. Good grief.
A photo on the back cover of the book captures what may have been the consummation of his most cherished aspirations. Clad in a natty striped blazer, Brierley is standing alongside two men I presume to be cricketing notables at Windsor Castle and shaking hands with the Queen. She is not wearing gloves. Another photo purports to show Brierley, in cricket whites, delivering a lethal-looking fast bowl during a match. But he doesn’t strike the reader as an athletic type and it’s hard to escape the conclusion his face was clumsily photo-shopped onto someone else’s body. Good grief again.
Brierley never married, although the Sydney blueblood Lady Mary Fairfax reportedly tried to find him a bride. The only Mrs Brierley in his life was his mother, May, with whom he lived for many years and who was, by some accounts, his staunchest supporter. Yvonne van Dongen, who struck an almost affectionate tone in articles about Brierley, wrote that his mother called him her “little old man, and that’s exactly what he was like in person: particular, slightly cantankerous, socially ineffectual and easy to make fun of”.
A tall, attractive woman appears with Brierley in a photo taken alongside the Reagans and Margaret Thatcher on the occasion of Ronald Reagan’s 83rd birthday, but she’s not dignified with a name and it seems reasonable to assume she was roped in (and paid?) to be his partner for the evening.
Otherwise women barely rate a mention, and certainly not the ones he patronised in Thailand. Still less the children in the images on his laptop, even though it’s impossible to read this book without being constantly aware of them.
The History of Brierley Investments ($45) is available online or from Eurocom NZ Ltd, PO Box 4085, Whanganui 4541. “Remember the battles. Revisit the names. Rediscover the era”, the publisher hollers. “If you enjoy bold business stories, boardroom battles, takeover games, wild profits, bad decisions, and big personalities — This book is unmissable. 25 Jaw-Dropping Moments from 60 Years of Corporate Warfare. RELIVE THE MOST EXCITING ERA IN NZ & AUSTRALIAN CORPORATE HISTORY.” And: “Only 1,250 copies available in New Zealand and 1,250 in Australia.”
