The surprising Jean Richards

IT has been said that no young man has fully completed his shipping education unless he has danced with Jean Richards.

Jean has been dancing since she was a child, beginning with tap at the age of three and progressing to jive as a teenager. At great family Christmases in the Pacy household, everyone danced. There were three aunts on the stage as dancers, one as a London Palace Girl. So it is an easy step to compare Jean to the current Speaker of the House of Commons, former Tiller Girl Betty Boothroyd.

Jean exudes natural authority as a woman in the predominately man's world of shipping. She remembers growing up in a era when it was still safe to play in the street near her home in South London. With two brothers - one her twin - she was part of an all-boy gang. "It never occurred to me that I couldn't play their game," she says, adding, "Now I like to feel I'm the best man for the job. I am certainly not a feminist. I like being a woman, but don't necessarily act like one in the boardroom."

Jean says with relish, "I have enjoyed this industry. I have lunched and wined well". She was one of the first women to become a member of the Baltic Exchange, in 1976. Prior to that, women were not allowed in the all-male bar. One afternoon, after a particularly long lunch, Jean was stopped on her way to the ladies cloakroom, which was next to a broom cupboard at the back of the trading floor, by a porter who raised an eyebrow and said, "Are you still here, miss?".

'If you can't beat em, join em' has been the approach that has helped make Jean such a popular figure in the world of shipping. Tongue in cheek, she will tell you that she is described as "the most kissed woman at the Baltic".

It was Jean's natural air of authority that led the careers advisory service at Reading Universitry to advise her, when she had just completed a degree in maths, that she should opt for the army, the police force or the teaching profession.

But Jean's first love was operational research, an area in which she had gained considerable experience during holiday jobs at the Central Electricity Generating Board. In the end, though, she decided that the bureaucracy that inevitably came with this kind of job would mean that she would not have enough fun. So, while she decided what to do, Jean chose to start teaching at St Martin in the Field High School near her home in South London. Within a year she was teaching not only maths but also netball and tennis, and leading skiing trips abroad during school holidays. She also took over running the school timetable.

A few years later Jean was ready to move on from teaching. She joined Cripps Warburg Bank as an assistant accountant. This commercial experience, combined with her skills as a mathematician, opened a door for her at Seabridge Shipping in the spring of 1973.

Her appointment first had to be cleared with all the directors at Seabridge, who were not expecting to find a woman to do the job. It was a question of the right person being found who happened to be the wrong sex. On Jean's first day she was asked by one of the directors to make a cup of coffee. She simply answered that this was the job of his secretary. This ensured that she was never again asked to do the tea run during her five years at Seabridge.

From there she moved to Gulf Shipping as a development analyst. At that time the company had one hundred ships and was growing at a phenomenal rate.

Jean describes its md at the time, Abbas Gokal, as an intelligent man who was running an interesting company, adding as an aside, "He is now at Her Majesty's pleasure for his role in the BCCI scandal". But the ex-employees of Gulf Shipping still meet under the guise of Goblins (Gulf old boys living in new surroundings).

It was Jean's next role, as manager of strategic planning at Gotaas-Larsen, that enabled her to get her teeth into a wide range of markets including dry bulk, tankers, LPG, LNG and chemical tankers, as well as cruise ventures.

It was here that she learned that cash is king in the shipping industry and that , as a result, it is unwise to get over-geared. "Cash gives you the flexibility to buy at the bottom of the market" says Jean. Following a review by management consultant McKinsey, Jean became the sole surviving member of Gotaas-Larsen's strategy group. She no longer liked what the organisation had become. On the basis of "if you don't try, you don't know", she decided to undertake a new venture, Magma Services Ltd, in 1982.

Her project was to market a new approach to chartering in the form of a charterers' co-operative aimed at potential dry cargo shippers. "In two years of working on my own, I learned more than I had in the previous twenty," Jean says, "I also learnt who my friends were and how to go out and peddle my wares."

But it was the early eighties, in a depressed market where no amount of marketing and sheer hard graft was going to make a new venture tick. Jean did, however, establish a broad network of banking contacts during this time, as well as personal contacts in the maritime community around the world, which were later to influence and encourage commercial management contracts and credit lines for shippers when she joined Fairwind Shipping.

Her partner at Fairwind, Trevor Fairhurst, is in every sense of the phrase another larger-than-life figure in the shipbroking fraternity, and the two of them enjoy a complementary relationship based on mutual respect and a huge capacity for hard work.

Fairwind offers commercial management and consulting services to banks and shipowners. Its speciality is in repossessing assets and in advising on corporate restructuring.

Fairwind played a central role in the well-reported saga of Adriatic Tankers, which offered a platform for both Jean and Trevor's skills. Their job was to repossess forty-nine ships from the Adriatic fleet on behalf of US insurance companies which had provided finance for the vessels. This involved locating and arresting ships all over the world. "We reactivated and traded fourteen of the ships under full commercial management before they were sold," says Jean, who - with a trace of lost opportunity in her voice - now looks back on two years of non-stop travel as "a job well done, but we could have done more had we been called in sooner."

Jean has been involved in a wide range of projects, including the privatisation of the shipping industries in Latvia and Lithuania. In addition to her commercial activities, she is much in demand as a conference speaker and as an expert witness.

She has appeared in court and at arbitration in London, Australia, Hong Kong, Sweden, Norway and New York. She holds strong views on the role of the expert witness, especially in relation to lawyers.

"There is a damaging trend for lawyers to write experts' reports," says Jean, with regret. "I like to be fully involved as an expert witness and I want to be given as much information about the case as possible. An expert witness can see holes that lawyers sometimes miss."

And how does she remain impartial? "I am extremely stubborn and will suggest to clients that they find another expert witness if they ask me to say something that I don't believe is right."

"Let an exporter write a report that people understand - and accept that split infinitives are OK."

What advice would Jean give to lawyers on how to manage their relationships with expert witnesses? "I hate it when a lawyer tries to put words into my mouth," she says. "My advice is that they should resist the temptation to think that a judge will read only a legalised presentation. Consequently, a sentence of bad English, if rewritten by a lawyer, can completely change the emphasis of what an expert witness wants to say. The expert witness's report then becomes a piece of work befitting an English scholar but loses its original meaning and message.

"So much needless redrafting goes on, which involves extra expense to the client. One firm I acted for recently took my report and sent it back to me retyped and redrafted. That added three days of extra work on the case and I sent it back with the message, 'Find another expert'. Let an expert write a report that people understand, is my advice to lawyers - and accept that split infinitives are OK."

Looking back on her career, Jean reflects on early events that helped shape her thinking and views on life. Without hesitation, she identifies winning a scholarship to Christs Hospital School at the age of eleven as a major determining influence. The school's close links to the City of London influenced what she was later to become.

At Christs Hospital, Jean was always the person designated to be the negotiator. If a special dispensation to waive the rules was required, Jean would be sent in to bat on behalf of the other pupils. She learned early the knack of asking a question that would be answered with a yes. "I have always worked on the basis that you have to ask," Jean says. "If you don't like something, you have to decide whether to accept it and not worry - or change what you can. I always focused on things that were possible to achieve."

An associate of the Institute of Chartered Shipbrokers, a member of the Baltic Exchange, Freeman of the City of London and Liveryman of the Worshipful Company of Shipwrights, happily married to the same man for twenty-six years, a director of Fairwind and a shipping personality in her own right, Jean has enjoyed a career which has been characterised by a knack of knowing what is possible and how to get there. On a business trip to Houston, Jean was on the dance floor when the music changed and she had to quickly alter her step. Afterwards her surprised dancing partner announced, "Gee, Jean, I didn't know you could do the Texan two-step." This is an apt summary of Jean's successful twenty-five years in shipping. Behind every successful woman is - a man who is surprised.