Sir James Michael Goldsmith (26 February 1933 – 18 July 1997) was a French-British financier and politician who was a member of the Goldsmith family. His controversial business and finance career led to ongoing clashes with British media, frequently involving litigation or the threat of litigation.
In 1994 he was elected to represent a French constituency as a Member of the European Parliament. He founded the short-lived Eurosceptic Referendum Party in the United Kingdom, which became an early campaigner for opposition to Britain's membership of the European Union.
Born in Paris, Goldsmith was the son of luxury hotel tycoon and former Conservative Member of Parliament (MP) Major Frank Goldsmith and his French wife, Marcelle Mouiller, and younger brother of environmental campaigner Edward Goldsmith. Frank Goldsmith had previously changed the family name from the German Goldschmidt to the English Goldsmith. The Goldschmidts, neighbours and rivals of the Rothschild family, were a wealthy, Frankfurt-based, Jewish family that had been influential in international merchant banking since the 16th century. James's great-grandfather was Benedikt Hayum Goldschmidt, founder of the B. H. Goldschmidt bank and consul to the Grand Duke of Tuscany. James's grandfather was Adolphe Benedict Goldschmidt (1838–1918), a multi-millionaire who moved to London in 1895.
Raised initially in Paris, James Goldsmith had to flee France with his family when Nazi Germany overran the country in 1940, only just managing to escape on the last over-loaded ship from the French port of exit, leaving behind their hotels and much of their property. After that the family relocated to the Bahamas, and Goldsmith was sent to school at St. Andrew's College, Aurora, in Canada, where he founded a business trapping small furbearing animals such as rabbits, skunk and mink. He later attended Millfield and Eton College, which he left early in 1949 at the age of 16, after winning £8,000 (equivalent to £244,000 in 2025) on a horse racing bet of £10 (equivalent to £310 in 2025) for a three-horse accumulator at Lewes racecourse. With the money, he decided that he should leave Eton immediately; in a speech at his boarding house, he declared that "a man of my means should not remain a schoolboy!" He then took over a business in Paris from his brother Teddy, which sold a cure for rheumatism and electrical plugs and sockets.
Goldsmith served as a Gunner in the British Army's Royal Artillery under the National Service requirements, during which time he received a commission as an officer.
During the 1950s and 60s, Goldsmith's involvement in finance and as an industrialist involved many risks, and brought him close to bankruptcy several times. His successes included winning the British franchise for Alka-Seltzer and introducing low-cost generic drugs to the UK. He was described in the tabloid press as a greenmail corporate raider and asset stripper, a categorisation he denied vigorously. He claimed the re-organizations he undertook streamlined the operations, removed complacent inefficient management, and increased shareholder value.
Having taken on the management of the Paris business handed on by his brother Teddy, Goldsmith organised a publicity stunt involving an arthritic racehorse. Sales escalated in response and, within a couple of years, the staff had been expanded from two to over a hundred. Goldsmith took on the agency for various slimming remedies and branched out into the manufacture of generic prescription drugs. His acquisition of the distributorship for Slimcea and Procea low-calorie breads was the start of the shift of focus towards the food industry. In the early 1960s, in partnership with Selim Zilkha, Goldsmith founded the Mothercare retail chain, but sold out his share to Zilkha who went on to develop it with great success.
With the financial backing of Sir Isaac Wolfson, he acquired diverse food companies quoted on the London Stock Exchange as Cavenham Foods in 1965. Initially, the group had an annual turnover of £27 million and negligible profits. He added bakeries and then confectioners to the group, and then took over a number of wholesalers and retailers, including small chains of tobacco, confectioner and newsagent shops. By rationalising the activities, closing inefficient factories, and improving the management practices, he steadily improved productivity. By 1971, the turnover was £35 million and profits were up to £2 million.
In June 1971, he launched a bid for Bovril, which was a much larger company with a diverse portfolio including several strong brands (including Marmite, Ambrosia, Virol and Jaffajuice), dairies and dairy farms, and cattle ranches in Argentina. It was run by the third generation of the founding family and Goldsmith concluded that they were ineffectual. The bid was strongly contested and Goldsmith was fiercely attacked by the financial press. The directors tried to induce Beechams and Rowntree Mackintosh to make rival offers but, in the end, they both withdrew.
After the successful bid, Goldsmith sold the dairies and farms to Max Joseph's Express Dairies group for £5.3m, and found buyers in South America for the ranches. Sales of other parts of the company recouped almost all of the £13 million that the acquisition had cost him. Some years later, he sold the brand names to Beecham for £36 million. Later, he took over Allied Distributors, who owned a miscellaneous portfolio of grocery stores and small chains, including the Lipton shops. As journalists began to question his techniques of dealing with the funds and assets of publicly quoted companies, Goldsmith began dealing through private companies registered in the UK and abroad. These included the French company Générale Occidentale and Hong Kong and then Cayman-registered General Oriental Investments.
In early 1973, Goldsmith travelled to New York to assess US business opportunities, followed by a tour round Central and South America. He took the view that the UK economy was due for a downturn and began aggressively liquidating many of his assets. In December that year, in the midst of financial chaos, he announced that he had acquired a 51% controlling stake in Grand Union, one of the oldest retailing conglomerates in the US. He set Jim Wood – who had revitalised his British retail operations – to work on rationalising the operations of the chain, but ran into continuous obstruction from both unions and management.
During the 1960s and 1970s, Goldsmith received financing from the banking arm of the conglomerate Slater Walker, of which he succeeded founder Jim Slater as chairman following the company's collapse and rescue by the Bank of England in the secondary banking crisis of 1973–75.
Goldsmith was knighted in the 1976 resignation honours – the so-called "Lavender List" – of Prime Minister Harold Wilson. In early 1980, he formed a partnership with longtime friend and merchant banker Sir Roland Franklin. Franklin managed Goldsmith's business in the Americas. From 1983 until 1988, Goldsmith, via takeovers in America, built a private holding company, Cavenham Forest Industries, which became one of the largest private owners of timberland and one of the top-five timber-holding companies of any type in America. Goldsmith and Franklin identified a quirk in American accounting whereby companies with substantial timberland holdings would often carry them on their balance sheets at a nominal valuation (as the result of years of depreciation).
Goldsmith, a reader of financial statements, realised that in the case of Crown Zellerbach the underlying value of the timberland assets alone, carried at only $12.5 million on the balance sheet, was worth more than the target company's total market capitalisation of around $900 million.
With this insight, Goldsmith began raids that left him with a holding company owning huge tracts of timberland acquired at virtually no net cost. The majority of the pulp and paper assets were sold in 1986 to James River Corporation, which in turn became a part of Georgia-Pacific in 2000. (The brown paper container division became Gaylord Container.)