MONDAY MARCH 26 2001
Obituary
David McTaggart
http://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/0,,60-104658,00.html

Protester of the high seas who confronted the might of the French military machine and transformed Greenpeace into a powerful pressure group

IN 1972 David McTaggart spotted an advertisement from Greenpeace, then a small Canadian protest group. It was seeking volunteers to set sail to the South Pacific atoll of Mururoa to demonstrate against nuclear tests being carried out by the French. Thirty-nine years of age, with three failed marriages and a ruined business behind him, McTaggart put himself and his 38 ft double-ended ketch Vega, renamed Greenpeace III, at the fledgeling organisation’s disposal.

Once in the South Pacific, he quite literally sailed up against the full might of the French war machine which had declared large parts of the ocean off-limits. Eventually blown off course by the heavy weather, McTaggart was out of the way when the French exploded their nuclear devices into the atmosphere.

The following summer, when France announced its intention to continuing nuclear testing over Mururoa, he set sail again. Equipped with a note of his maritime rights prepared by the University of Auckland, he found himself rammed in international waters by a French minesweeper, taken prisoner and subjected to a serious assault. The French claimed he had been injured in a fall, but one of McTaggart’s crew had taken pictures of the assault and smuggled the film out in her vagina. In the ensuing outcry the French announced that all future bomb tests would be underground and, in a ruling that embarrassed President François Mitterrand’s Government, McTaggart was awarded damages by a French court.

McTaggart emerged as a hero within the burgeoning and ad-hoc environmental movement of the mid-1970s. Many would credit him as the founder of Greenpeace. In fact, he was only the most prominent of a group who were dedicated to environmental protection. But, more than any other individual, Greenpeace bears the mark of this piratical, swashbuckling eco-radical.

As the organisation consolidated and evolved, McTaggart brought together its disparate constituencies, becoming chairman of Greenpeace International, a Dutch-registered company with sparsely equipped offices at Lewes, East Sussex. The sinking of the Rainbow Warrior by French agents in Auckland Harbour with the death of a crew member proved to be one of Greenpeace’s greatest fillips. Almost by accident the organisation achieved respectability; in Britain alone membership, which had already quadrupled in less than two years, continued to rise by several hundred a week. Over time New Zealanders took to mass boycotts of French produce while both the New Zealand and Australian Governments suspended military agreements with France.

McTaggart continued to be a thorn in the side of the French Government and was frequently ejected from French Polynesia. In July 1995, accompanied by two colleagues, he managed to evade sophisticated French detection equipment and slip back on to Mururoa causing yet more disruption to the French nuclear programme. While they quietly infiltrated the tiny atoll, where they remained hidden for two weeks, French commandos used teargas to storm their vessel, Rainbow Warrior II. Helmut Kohl the German Chancellor, fresh from chiding John Major over the Brent Spar incident, in which Greenpeace also played a leading role, protested to President Chirac of France. Other world leaders voiced their outrage and Chirac was shouted down by MEPs as he tried to explain his policy to the European Parliament.

McTaggart, whose brusque and offhand manner antagonised supporters as well as governments, relied on a curious combination of liberal instinct enlivened by personal autocracy to achieve many of his goals. He took Greenpeace into the anti-whaling campaign, exposed the dumping of nuclear waste at sea, demanded curbs on mineral exploitation in the Antarctic and launched a “fur-free Britain” campaign with a series of controversial posters. No one was more aware of the importance of the media in conveying the message than McTaggart. As a former colleague once said: “The secret of David McTaggart’s success is the secret of Greenpeace’s success: it doesn’t matter what is true, it only matters what people believe is true. . . You are what the media define you to be. (Greenpeace) became a myth, and a myth-generating machine.”

Of Scottish descent, David Fraser McTaggart was born on a small island off the west coast of Canada. He grew up by the sea and, as a boy, rowed, sailed and fished every day. Whales were a regular sight. Sometimes they came right under his boat, but never caused any harm: boy and mammal coexisted in splendid maritime harmony. Leaving school at 17, McTaggart became Canada’s national badminton champion three years in succession; by 21 he was running a successful construction company.

Moving to the United States in the 1960s, he became vice-president of the Bear Valley Development Corpororation. A millionaire with a mission to convert virgin mountain slopes into ski resorts, he was an unlikely environmentalist. His tales of how his change of heart came about were various. Sometimes it was as a result of seeing a huge mushroom cloud while sailing with his family in the South Pacific. On other occasions he would tell of how a fire caused by a gas leak wrecked a ski lodge he had built, injuring some of the workers.

He had already abandoned his family and his business to enjoy a loner’s life on the open seas when he encountered Greenpeace. After his exploits against the French in the South Pacific, McTaggart forged an alliance in 1979 between the various factions of Greenpeace, uniting them under his chairmanship.

The man himself was a complex and, in many ways, a private figure. Remarkably inarticulate, he rarely made speeches, frequently declined to be interviewed and considered magazine and newspaper profiles to be “threats”. Under his aegis Greenpeace became a multimillion pound operation, a slick machine that mastered the tools of direct mail and image manipulation as well as indulging in forms of lobbying that, according to a Forbes magazine profile published in 1991, it would be among the first to condemn in big business.

Closer to the country of his origins, McTaggart skippered the Rainbow Warrior in 1978 when she dogged the Norwegian trawler Kvitegen around the Orkneys for more than a week, preventing her six marksmen from carrying out a planned cull of 5,000 grey seals. Once again, a tide of public opinion had worked in favour of Greenpeace.

He retired in 1991 to run an olive farm in Umbria but still remained closely associated with Greenpeace as the pressure group’s honorary chairman. In 1996 he and some of the original leading lights in Greenpeace published a report condemning the organisation’s “fat cat” leaders. But Greenpeace had grown from an anarchic band into an organised, professional pressure group.

He is survived by at least four daughters from an indeterminate number of marriages and liaisons.

David McTaggart, former chairman of Greenpeace International, was born on June 24, 1932. He was killed in a car accident in Umbria, northern Italy, on March 23, 2001, aged 68.

Copyright 2001 Times Newspapers Ltd.