David Gasan and Laurence Grech (eds), Wheels of Fortune: The Gasan story. Progress Press, Malta, 2013, 126pp.
The Gasan Group of Companies is unquestionably the bee’s knees of local business. The group employs more than 600 people and has interests in the automotive, marine, insurance and financial, manufacturing and property sectors.
For this review I did some rudimentary fieldwork with average people who did not come from business backgrounds. It turned out the name Gasan is, first, universally known and, second, associated in a Pavlovian way with ‘cars and money’. It’s a baggage that has been decades in the making and that the Gasan family has borne remarkably well. This book tells the sunny side of that story.
Wheels of Fortune is a commemorative volume (the business is over 80 years old) that ought to be evaluated as such. The reader who looks for archival or systematic research, or even for an index, will be disappointed. There can be no question of comparing it to, say, Niall Ferguson’s magisterial two-volume The House of Rothschild.
It isn’t just that the subject matter at hand is more modest; rather, the genre itself is entirely a different one. I for one am perfectly happy to live with that, not least since the book brought memories of the sort of indigenous self-published biographies I once made use of to research (Sindhi) Indian businesses.
The main protagonist in this case is Joe Gasan, who was born in St Julian’s in 1891 to lawyer Annetto Gasan and Paolina née Muscat. The fact that Joe lost his father at five was probably what steered him away from the legal profession by paternal nature and towards business by avuncular nurture.
Paolina was closely related to the Agius family, who were established coal merchants, shipbrokers and contractors. It was with Ed. T. Agius & Co. that Joe spent the first 10 years of his working life and got a taste for business. But the young man was obviously not employee material and in 1919 (at 28) he borrowed £50 from one of his uncles and secured a contract to recover a wreck that was blocking the entrance to the Grand Harbour.
Gasan’s constitution as a remover of obstacles went from cheque to fat cheque and by the late 1920s his name was one to be reckoned with on the list of local entrepreneurs. Which is how, in 1928, he signed an agreement with Henry Ford himself and became the Ford Motor Company’s sole concessionaire in Malta.
Eventually, what this meant was that all those Maltese who ever owned a new Prefect, Anglia, Escort, Capri or Cortina, had at some point signed a piece of paper with his name on it. The list now also includes Jaguar, Chevrolet, Honda, Yamaha, Volvo, Mazda, and Isuzu.
Joe Gasan spent a good chunk of his life working hard and playing just as hard with a socially-mixed bag of chums. That was until the breathless rounds of boating and fishing found they had to share him with Lilian Mercieca, the daughter of Chief Justice Sir Arturo and Lady Mercieca.
In 1946, when he was 55 and she 28, Joe and Lilian got married. By 1960 their brood had grown to five children. Joseph, the present chairman of the Group, was the only boy.
The book’s various anecdotes give us a glimpse into some of the more straightforward aspects of authority and succession in a paternalistic family business.
It is clear that Gasan himself was a textbook case. There could be no question as to who was boss and it seems he managed to successfully combine a strong leadership with a fatherly benevolence towards his many employees. In his later years he also displayed dynastic tendencies, grooming his only son to become his worthy successor.
Joseph Gasan’s recollections in this vein are often hilarious. For example, his father would take him to the Phoenicia and make him sing along with Oscar Lucas and his band.
Joseph is candid about his musical talents, but he is also aware that the whole point was to drip-feed him the kind of resolve he would later need to run the business. In any case, had he chosen a singing career, his father would certainly not have lived to 85.
On another occasion, a certain Fr Anton Caruana (known as il-Mons in my time at St Aloysius) tried to peddle the Jesuit cloth to young Joseph. His father got wind of this: “From that day on, I never heard from Fr Caruana and his vocational promotions!”
One question that comes to mind when one looks at the history of family businesses is that of relations with the State and its agents and satellites. Not surprisingly, given the genre, the topic is largely steered clear of.
There are, however, tantalising clues. For example, Sylvia Trapani Galea Feriol (one of Joe Gasan’s daughters and blue-blooded by marital osmosis) mentions in passing a dinner party thrown by her parents at which “lots of ambassadors and government ministers” were invited.
We are also told that when Joseph Gasan figured, in the mid-1980s, that there would be a change of government, he “anticipated that there would be a lot of work once the new government took office” and “decided to take it seriously”. He set up Gasan Technical Services Ltd. and the tenders duly rolled in.
Not surprisingly, the last photograph in the book (which is lavishly illustrated throughout) shows Joseph Gasan and his two sons. Gasan would be delighted to learn that neither David nor Mark is a singer or a Jesuit.