Harold Salvesen

He left in 1914 at the outbreak of the First World War to undergo officer training at the Royal Military College, Sandhurst, where he was a prize cadet.

[4] In his four years there, he taught a number of undergraduates who would become prominent Labour politicians, including Hugh Gaitskell, Frank Pakenham, and Richard Crossman, a fact of which he was greatly proud.

Salvesen himself was broadly leftwing, declaring himself to be a Labour voter, but was generally distrustful of government and strongly opposed to nationalisation, His nephew, Gerald Elliot, recorded "a faith in entrepreneurial capitalism [and] sympathies for social welfare", and suggested that his dislike of the Conservative government was at least in part a reaction to Conservative politicians who he saw as pompous and imperialist.

[13] In 1928 Salvesen left Oxford to enter the family business, alongside his brothers Noel and Norman and his cousin Iver.

After learning Norwegian – the universal language among the whalers – he spent the summers of 1928/29 and 1929/30 in the Antarctic, the first senior manager to actually visit the Southern Ocean whaling fleet, and came back arguing strongly for more investment and more modern practices.

He oversaw the conversion of two factory ships for pelagic whaling, Salvestria and Sourabaya, and brought a new zeal and efficiency to the operations at South Georgia and at sea.

[16] On the outbreak of the Second World War the Salvesen fleet headed south for the Antarctic summer, returning in 1940 to find that their Norwegian home ports were now occupied by Germany.