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Wood Hall Trust Plc Business Information, Profile, and History

Greenly House Dukes Place
London
EC3
England

History of Wood Hall Trust Plc

Wood Hall Trust is a company in the process of disposing of its assets. A large and diversified company with interests in construction, shipping, and mercantile operations, Wood Hall Trust was acquired in 1982 by Elders IXL, the Australian conglomerate. Acquired for its more profitable enterprises, which have been merged into those of the new parent company, Wood Hall Trust is now systematically selling or closing down its remaining, less profitable operations.

Wood Hall Trust was formed in 1951 when the Ocean Salvage and Towage Company, a small and bankrupt maritime enterprise, was purchased by the Singer and Friedlander merchant banking company. As a condition of the sale, all five of the Ocean Salvage's directors were required to leave the company. They were replaced by a new board, with Michael Richards serving as chairman. Shortly after the sale, Richards and two other directors purchased 70% of the shares held by Singer and Friedlander and changed the company's name to Wood Hall Trust. The new company was intended to function as a trust for investments in the wine and spirits industries--the original operations in boat salvage and towing were abandoned altogether.

The new directors were highly astute investors. Within five years of taking control of the company, they had brought two important subsidiaries into the trust: the David Sandeman Group and Hart, Son and Company, merchant bankers. Drawing principally on the skills of Hart, the trust went on to acquire a variety of companies involved in construction, import/export trading, bill brokering, and advertising.

Speculative investment of this kind has often led to uncoordinated growth. The directors of Wood Hall Trust, however, closely monitored their investments and were ready immediately to dispose of any asset that failed to perform well. Although still small, Wood Hall Trust became, by the mid-1960's, one of the most successful investment houses in the City of London. Among the companies acquired by the trust during this period were Bendicks (a chocolate manufacturer) and Tilgate Pallets. Wood Hall Trust entered the construction industry in 1964 when it purchased Cableform, an electrical engineering concern, and Hornibrook, an Australian civil engineering contractor.

The trust's interests in construction were later expanded when they acquired Davis Estates and H. Fairweather and Company. Davis Estates was a major real estate development company involved in council and private housing projects throughout the United Kingdom. The Fairweather and Hornibrook groups were involved in a broader range of construction jobs--office and public buildings and civil engineering projects. Most notably, Hornibrook had a major role in the construction of the Sydney Opera House.

One of the Wood Hall Trust's most interesting acquisitions during the 1960's was that of the Paterson Simons Group (later called Paterson Newark). Paterson Simons was established in Singapore during the 1850's by a group of colonial merchants. One of the company's founders, William Ker, fostered a strong personal relationship with Temenggong of Johore, and by 1853 he had been placed in charge of the Malay ruler's finances. The relationship led to special business privileges for Ker and his partners, William Paterson and Henry Minchin Simons. The company traded in a variety of commodities, including camphor, vanilla, cinnamon, sea slugs, shark fins, tin, coffee, and pearls. Taking note of the profitable opium trade being conducted by companies such as Jardine Matheson, the partnership began shipping opium to China.

The partnership eventually adopted the name Patent Slip and Dock Company, but its name was changed to Paterson, Simons & Company in 1859, when Ker retired. The company re-established its port monopoly in Johore in 1899, following a merger with the Tanjong Pagar Dock Company. Six years later the port operation was expropriated by the British government, but the company retained its interests in shipping and in maritime and property insurance and continued to act as agents for the East India Coal Company and for a number of shipping lines--and thereafter, despite its colorful past, continued to operate uneventfully until the time it was acquired by Wood Hall Trust.

The 1970's was a decade of stable growth for the Trust, particularly in Australia, where its mercantile and construction interests gained the attention of another investment trust, Elders IXL. Like Wood Hall Trust, Elders--and its constituent company Henry Jones IXL--had a long history. Initially involved in pastoral interests (fruit jam production, among other things), Elders was eventually acquired by a group of investors who transformed the company into a classic international financial conglomerate which launched often hostile takeovers of marginally performing and undervalued companies. Once acquired, these companies were either dismantled and sold for cash or other assets, or rehabilitated by Elders to be more competitive.

Elders made a hostile bid for Wood Hall Trust in 1982 and gained control of the company shortly after offering to pay £90 million for all outstanding shares. Unwilling to work with Elders after its raid, Michael Richards retired and was replaced by fellow board member Alastair Ennand. Ennand, however, retired soon after Richards, and a third man, Bob Stickens, was named chairman.

In the years that followed, Elders acquired a number of other large companies and reorganized its management structure. It was decided that Wood Hall Trust's operations would be sold or absorbed by other subsidiaries of Elders. This plan precipitated the retirement of Stickens and the absorption of other Wood Hall Trust board members into the Elders organization. Many of the Wood Hall Trust's mercantile interests have now been taken over by the Elders Agribusiness group, and its assets in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East have been transferred to Elders International. The Wood Hall Trust building group, once the most prominent division of the company, is currently being "wound down," concluding or selling maintenance contracts and selling many of its real estate holdings.

It is possible that Wood Hall Trust will have ceased to exist by the mid-1990's.

Principal Subsidiaries: Wood Hall Building Group Ltd.; K.E. Millard & Co. Ltd.; One St. James's Ltd.; Vogan & Co. Ltd.; Osborne & Stevens Group Ltd.; A.J. Phillips Ltd.; Wood Hall Pty. (Australia); Paterson Ewart Group Ltd.

Related information about Wood

The bulk of the tissue making up the trunk and branches of trees and shrubs, consisting of xylem. Its exact composition varies between species, affecting properties of the timber produced. For commercial purposes, it is divided into two types: softwoods, derived from gymnosperms, and hardwoods, which have a less regular grain and are derived from flowering plants - though the terms are misleading, as some softwoods are very hard and durable. As one of the most abundant elements in the world, wood has been used by humans from earliest times for fuel, building materials, and furniture, as well as in modern developments such as paper and packaging. It has been estimated that there are well over 10 000 wood products in current use.

Wood is derived from woody plants, notably trees but also shrubs.

In its most common meaning, "wood" is the secondary xylem of a woody plant, but this is an approximation only: in the wider sense, wood may refer to other materials and tissues with comparable properties. Wood is a heterogeneous, hygroscopic, cellular and anisotropic material. Wood is composed of fibers of cellulose (40%?50%) and hemicellulose (15%?25%) held together by lignin (15%?30%) Lesson 1: Tree Growth and Wood Material at University of Minnesota Extension . Wood has been an important construction material since humans began building shelters, and remains in plentiful use today. Construction wood is commonly known as lumber in North America and timber elsewhere. Wood may be broken down and be made into chipboard, engineered wood, hardboard, medium-density fibreboard (MDF), oriented strand board (OSB), paper or used to make other synthetic substances.

Formation

A tree increases in diameter by the formation, between the old wood and the inner bark, of new woody layers which envelop the entire stem, living branches, and roots. The outer portion is the late wood or summer wood, being produced in the summer Wood growth and structure www.farmforestline.com.au. In white pines there is not much contrast in the different parts of the ring, and as a result the wood is very uniform in texture and is easy to work. In hard pines, on the other hand, the late wood is very dense and is deep-colored, presenting a very decided contrast to the soft, straw-colored early wood.

Knots

Knots are portions of branches included in the wood of the stem or larger branch. Branches generally originate at or near the pith (central axis) of a stem, and the living portion will increase in size through the addition of annual woody layers which are a continuation of those of the stem. The fibre direction is at right angles or oblique to the grain of the stem, thus producing local cross grain. In grading lumber and structural timber, knots are classified according to their form, size, soundness, and the firmness with which they are held in place.

Knots materially affect checking (cracking) and warping, ease in working, and cleavability of timber. The weakening effect is much more serious where timber is subjected to bending and tension than where under compression. The extent to which knots affect the strength of a beam depends upon their position, size, number, direction of fibre, and condition. Small knots, however, may be so located in a beam along the neutral plane as actually to increase the strength by tending to prevent longitudinal shearing. The effect of knots is to reduce the difference between the fibre stress at elastic limit and the modulus of rupture of beams. Sound knots do not weaken wood when subject to compression parallel to the grain.

For some purposes, e.g.

Heartwood and sapwood

Examination of the end of a log of many species reveals a darker-colored inner portion, called the heartwood or duramen, surrounded by a lighter-colored zone called the sapwood. The color of fresh sapwood is always light, sometimes nearly white, but more often with a decided tinge of yellow or brown.

Sapwood is comparatively new wood, comprising living cells in the growing tree. Its principal functions are to conduct water from the roots to the leaves and to store up and give back according to the season the food prepared in the leaves. Sometimes trees grown in the open may become of considerable size, 30 cm or more in diameter, before any heartwood begins to form, for example, in second-growth hickory, or open-grown pines.

As a tree increases in age and diameter an inner portion of the sapwood becomes inactive and finally ceases to function, as the cells die. Thin sapwood is characteristic of such trees as chestnut, black locust, mulberry, osage-orange, and sassafras, while in maple, ash, hickory, hackberry, beech, and pine, thick sapwood is the rule.

There is no definite relation between the annual rings of growth and the amount of sapwood. Whatever advantages, however, that sapwood may have in this connection are due solely to its relative age and position.

If a tree grows all its life in the open and the conditions of soil and site remain unchanged, it will make its most rapid growth in youth, and gradually decline. Since each succeeding ring is laid down on the outside of the wood previously formed, it follows that unless a tree materially increases its production of wood from year to year, the rings must necessarily become thinner as the trunk gets wider. As a tree reaches maturity its crown becomes more open and the annual wood production is lessened, thereby reducing still more the width of the growth rings. Some trees, such as southern oaks, maintain the same width of ring for hundreds of years. Upon the whole, however, as a tree gets larger in diameter the width of the growth rings decreases.

There may be decided differences in the grain of heartwood and sapwood cut from a large tree, particularly one that is mature. In a large log the sapwood, because of the time in the life of the tree when it was grown, may be inferior in hardness, strength, and toughness to equally sound heartwood from the same log. For example, while mahogany is a medium-dense hardwood which is excellent for fine furniture crafting, balsa is light, making it useful for model building. The densest wood may be black ironwood.

Wood is commonly classified as either softwood or hardwood. The wood from conifers (e.g. pine) is called softwood, and the wood from broad-leaved trees (e.g. oak) is called hardwood. This is produced by deposits in the heartwood of various materials resulting from the process of growth, increased possibly by oxidation and other chemical changes, which usually have little or no appreciable effect on the mechanical properties of the wood. Some experiments on very resinous Longleaf Pine specimens, however, indicate an increase in strength. This is due to the resin which increases the strength when dry. Spruce impregnated with crude resin and dried is also greatly increased in strength thereby.

Since the late wood of a growth ring is usually darker in color than the early wood, this fact may be used in judging the density, and therefore the hardness and strength of the material. In ring-porous woods the vessels of the early wood not infrequently appear on a finished surface as darker than the denser late wood, though on cross sections of heartwood the reverse is commonly true. Except in the manner just stated the color of wood is no indication of strength.

Abnormal discoloration of wood often denotes a diseased condition, indicating unsoundness. The reddish-brown streaks so common in hickory and certain other woods are mostly the result of injury by birds. Certain rot-producing fungi impart to wood characteristic colors which thus become symptomatic of weakness.

Structure

In coniferous or softwood species the wood cells are mostly of one kind, tracheids, and as a result the material is much more uniform in structure than that of most hardwoods. There are no vessels ("pores") in coniferous wood such as one sees so prominently in oak and ash, for example.

The structure of the hardwoods is more complex Hardwood Structure www.uwsp.edu. They are more or less filled with vessels: in some cases (oak, chestnut, ash) quite large and distinct, in others (buckeye, poplar, willow) too small to be seen plainly without a small hand lens. In ring-porous species, such as ash, black locust, catalpa, chestnut, elm, hickory, mulberry, and oak, the larger vessels or pores (as cross sections of vessels are called) are localized in the part of the growth ring formed in spring, thus forming a region of more or less open and porous tissue. These fibres are the elements which give strength and toughness to wood, while the vessels are a source of weakness.

In diffuse-porous woods the pores are scattered throughout the growth ring instead of being collected in a band or row. Examples of this kind of wood are basswood, birch, buckeye, maple, poplar, and willow. Some species, such as walnut and cherry, are on the border between the two classes, forming an intermediate group.

If a heavy piece of pine is compared with a light specimen it will be seen at once that the heavier one contains a larger proportion of late wood than the other, and is therefore considerably darker. The late wood of all species is denser than that formed early in the season, hence the greater the proportion of late wood the greater the density and strength. The width of ring is not nearly so important as the proportion of the late wood in the ring.

It is not only the proportion of late wood, but also its quality, that counts. In specimens that show a very large proportion of late wood it may be noticeably more porous and weigh considerably less than the late wood in pieces that contain but little. In conifers, at least, rate of growth alone does not determine the proportion of the two portions of the ring, for in some cases the wood of slow growth is very hard and heavy, while in others the opposite is true. But in choosing a particular specimen it is not the width of ring, but the proportion and character of the late wood which should govern.

In the case of the ring-porous hardwoods there seems to exist a pretty definite relation between the rate of growth of timber and its properties. This may be briefly summed up in the general statement that the more rapid the growth or the wider the rings of growth, the heavier, harder, stronger, and stiffer the wood. This, it must be remembered, applies only to ring-porous woods such as oak, ash, hickory, and others of the same group, and is, of course, subject to some exceptions and limitations.

In ring-porous woods of good growth it is usually the middle portion of the ring in which the thick-walled, strength-giving fibres are most abundant. As the breadth of ring diminishes, this middle portion is reduced so that very slow growth produces comparatively light, porous wood composed of thin-walled vessels and wood parenchyma. The late wood of good oak, except for radial grayish patches of small pores, is dark colored and firm, and consists of thick-walled fibres which form one-half or more of the wood. Such variation is very largely the result of rate of growth.

Wide-ringed wood is often called "second-growth", because the growth of the young timber in open stands after the old trees have been removed is more rapid than in trees in the forest, and in the manufacture of articles where strength is an important consideration such "second-growth" hardwood material is preferred. The results of a series of tests on hickory by the U.S. Forest Service show that:

"The work or shock-resisting ability is greatest in wide-ringed wood that has from 5 to 14 rings per inch (rings 1.8-5 mm thick), is fairly constant from 14 to 38 rings per inch (rings 0.7-1.8 mm thick), and decreases rapidly from 38 to 47 rings per inch (rings 0.5-0.7 mm thick). it is maximum with from 14 to 20 rings per inch (rings 1.3-1.8 mm thick), and again becomes less as the wood becomes more closely ringed. The natural deduction is that wood of first-class mechanical value shows from 5 to 20 rings per inch (rings 1.3-5 mm thick) and that slower growth yields poorer stock. The Wood Handbook: Wood as an engineering material. Madison, WI.

The effect of rate of growth on the qualities of chestnut wood is summarized by the same authority as follows:

"When the rings are wide, the transition from spring wood to summer wood is gradual, while in the narrow rings the spring wood passes into summer wood abruptly. The width of the spring wood changes but little with the width of the annual ring, so that the narrowing or broadening of the annual ring is always at the expense of the summer wood. The narrow vessels of the summer wood make it richer in wood substance than the spring wood composed of wide vessels. Therefore, rapid-growing specimens with wide rings have more wood substance than slow-growing trees with narrow rings. Since the more the wood substance the greater the weight, and the greater the weight the stronger the wood, chestnuts with wide rings must have stronger wood than chestnuts with narrow rings. This agrees with the accepted view that sprouts (which always have wide rings) yield better and stronger wood than seedling chestnuts, which grow more slowly in diameter."

In diffuse-porous woods, as has been stated, the vessels or pores are scattered throughout the ring instead of collected in the early wood. The effect of rate of growth is, therefore, not the same as in the ring-porous woods, approaching more nearly the conditions in the conifers. If ease of working is prized, wood should be chosen with regard to its uniformity of texture and straightness of grain, which will in most cases occur when there is little contrast between the late wood of one season's growth and the early wood of the next.

Water content

Water occurs in living wood in three conditions, namely: (1) in the cell walls, (2) in the protoplasmic contents of the cells, and (3) as free water in the cell cavities and spaces. Even oven-dried wood retains a small percentage of moisture, but for all except chemical purposes, may be considered absolutely dry.

The general effect of the water content upon the wood substance is to render it softer and more pliable. A similar effect of common observation is in the softening action of water on paper or cloth. An extreme example is the case of a completely dry spruce block 5 cm in section, which will sustain a permanent load four times as great as that which a green block of the same size will support.

The greatest increase due to drying is in the ultimate crushing strength, and strength at elastic limit in endwise compression;

References

Hoadley, R. (2000) Understanding Wood: A Craftsman?s Guide to Wood Technology.

Additional topics

Company HistoryFinance: Banks & Credit

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