GoKawiilOn a spring morning in 1987, a 30-year-old man named Robert Kilgour pulled up beside a row of foamy cherry trees in the town of Kirkcaldy, on Scotland’s east coast, to visit an old hotel. The building was four storeys of blackened Victorian sandstone. Kilgour was a big man, a voluble Scot with a knack for storytelling. He already owned a hotel in Edinburgh but wanted to branch into property development and was planning to turn this old place, Station Court, into apartments. A few months after he completed the purchase, however, the Scottish government scrapped a grant for developers that he had been counting on. He had just sunk most of his personal savings into a useless building in a sodden, post-industrial town. He urgently needed a new idea.
Care homes weren’t so different from hotels, Kilgour thought. And the beauty was, their elderly residents were unlikely to get drunk, steal the soap dispensers or invite sex workers back to their rooms. Turning Station Court into a care home seemed like the best way out of a bad situation. Kilgour arranged a bank loan and in June 1989 he launched Four Seasons Health Care, taking the name from a restaurant in Midtown Manhattan where he had once dined.
By sheer luck, Kilgour had found himself at the start of something big. The following year, the government in Westminster started to transfer responsibility for social care on to local councils. This gave businessmen such as Kilgour a huge opportunity. Councils began paying them to provide beds that had previously been supplied by the NHS. Demand boomed.
Kilgour opened three other homes in Kirkcaldy, another overlooking the Firth of Forth, and a further one near Dundee. Alongside running his new business, he juggled the pastimes of an increasingly wealthy man. He raised money for a cancer charity, played tennis, networked ceaselessly and began to dabble in politics, campaigning (and failing) to become one of Scotland’s few Conservative MPs. By 1997, he owned seven care homes across Fife.
That year, he chaired a fundraising appeal to open a new hospice in the grounds of Kirkcaldy’s main hospital. The guest of honour was an irascible TV celebrity called John Harvey-Jones, star of a reality show called Troubleshooter in which he dispensed tough-love advice to underperforming British businessmen. Over tumblers of whisky, Harvey-Jones counselled Kilgour: “He said I was stuck in a regional comfort zone. He said I needed to break out of it and go wider.” Deep down, Kilgour agreed.
He had few contacts in London, where the serious money was. It occurred to him that his best lead might be an accountant he knew called Hamilton Anstead, who had recently left a job at a care company in the south of England. Kilgour invited him up to a hotel in Glasgow and the two men hatched a plan for Anstead to join Four Seasons as a joint chief executive.
View image in fullscreen Robert Kilgour opened his first care home in 1989 and within two years had 43. Photograph: Nick Mailer Photography
View image in fullscreen Among them was Guthrie House in Edinburgh. Photograph: Murdo MacLeod/The Guardian
Kilgour told me all about this over coffee at his private members’ club in Mayfair, a high-ceilinged, low-lit place with clusters of velvet chairs arranged for quiet conversation. He had now entered the “legacy” phase of his life, he said: more concerned with what he was leaving behind than what lay ahead. He often mentioned the politicians with whom he was on first-name terms, as if showing me the photographs in a well-handled album. Mostly, he seemed happy, but there were aspects of his past that bothered him.
Over the course of two years, Kilgour and Anstead built Four Seasons into, if not quite an empire, then a small dominion of 43 homes dotted across Britain. As the business grew, however, their relationship soured. Anstead often felt that Kilgour was more interested in his political career than the minutiae of spreadsheets or suppliers. (“I’m a strategy and vision person, not a detail person,” Kilgour said. “Hamilton is a brilliant micromanager and I’m an entrepreneur.”)
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