Biography | Colin Marshall — Hired in 1983 to Make the State Airline Saleable

People treat the rescue of British Airways as Lord King's file alone.

King hired the customer-service man.

In early 1983 headhunters put Marshall, then deputy chief executive at the retailer Sears, in front of John King, the chairman Margaret Thatcher had charged with preparing the state carrier for sale.

An LBC interview with Marshall on the appointment was broadcast on 13 March 1983.

British Airways plc was incorporated later that year, on 13 December 1983, with the government still holding the shares.

The office he walked into was Speedbird House, BOAC's old headquarters on the Heathrow airfield.

That block is gone.

The airline later moved to Waterside at Harmondsworth, finished in 1998, a mile northwest of the runways.

The pin is Heathrow because that is where the 1983 work was done.

The job was specific.

BA had been formed in 1974 from BOAC and BEA and still carried their rivalries.

Service was poor enough that City voices joked they already suffered the flights and did not want the shares.

Marshall's brief, under King and with Gordon Dunlop as finance director, was to change how the cabin and the ticket desk behaved before the Treasury could float the company.

Landor Associates in San Francisco were brought in to redraw the livery.

The Speedbird on the nose gave way, in December 1984, to the Speedwing stripe.

This page does not put a profit figure on the turnaround that cannot be tied to a named annual report.

What is dated is the hire, the incorporation, and the building that no longer stands.

Photo: Nick Warner, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons — Waterside, the later headquarters, not Speedbird House.