William Keswick(1834–1912)

William Keswick was born at Edinburgh on the first of December 1834, the second son of Thomas Keswick of Coldstream and Margaret Johnstone Jardine, niece of William Jardine of Lochmaben, the Lanarkshire-born Edinburgh-trained ship's surgeon and tea-trader who in 1832 had founded with James Matheson the Canton firm of Jardine Matheson & Co. He was educated at the Edinburgh Academy, was sent out to the East at twenty as a junior clerk of the firm, and arrived at Hong Kong in 1855, three years after the founder's death.

In July 1859, in his twenty-fifth year, he sailed north from Shanghai to the new Treaty Port of Yokohama, opened to foreign trade only the month before under the Harris Treaty with Japan, and on the first of July registered Jardine Matheson as the first foreign trading firm in the country. He took a long lease on a strip of Yokohama Bund waterfront opposite the British consulate, built the firm's first godown there, and through the next three years made Jardine Matheson the leading silk, tea and cotton-piece-goods house in Japan, the firm shipping the early Japanese silk exports to Lyon and Manchester and importing the cotton textiles and machinery that began the Meiji industrialisation. The Yokohama branch, built from nothing in those three years, was the foundation of the firm's twentieth-century Japanese business.

He returned to Hong Kong as taipan, the senior partner of the firm in China, in 1874 at forty, and from 1874 to 1886 ran Jardine Matheson through the period of its great expansion into shipping, insurance and Chinese industrial finance. He chartered the China Sugar Refining Company (1878), the Hong Kong and Whampoa Dock Company (a controlling stake from 1880), the Hong Kong and Kowloon Wharf and Godown Company (1886), and brought the firm into the syndicate that built the first stretch of the Imperial Chinese Railway from Tianjin to Kaiping in 1886. He served on the Legislative Council of Hong Kong from 1869 to 1872, founded the Hong Kong Chamber of Commerce, and was appointed Sheriff of London on his return to England in 1886.

He took the chairmanship of the parent firm in 1886, becoming the first member of his family to head the house his great-uncle had founded, and held the chair until his death in 1912. From that year forward the senior partnership of Jardine Matheson has run, without break, through one Scottish family: William, then his nephew William Johnstone Keswick (1903 to 1990, the wartime Special Operations Executive officer who handled British-Free French intelligence in the East), Sir John Keswick (chairman after the war), Sir Henry Keswick (chairman 1970 to 2000), Simon Keswick, and the current chairman Ben Keswick (from 2019). Six successive generations of Keswicks have now held the chair, the longest such tenure in modern British corporate history.

He sat as Conservative member of Parliament for Epsom from 1899 to 1912, was made a director of the Bank of England (1899 to 1903) and of the Hudson's Bay Company, and was the largest single individual shareholder in the British East Asian trading economy of the late Victorian period. He died at his house at Eastwick Park near Leatherhead on the ninth of March 1912, in his seventy-eighth year. Jardine Matheson today is one of the largest conglomerates in Asia, with operations across shipping, property (Hongkong Land), hospitality (Mandarin Oriental), motors (Jardine Cycle & Carriage) and food retail, and remains under the chairmanship of his great-great-grandson. The Keswick name in modern East Asian commerce carries the weight of the Yokohama godown the twenty-five-year-old Edinburgh clerk built on the Bund in 1859.