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Channel Flights. Loudon's visas add up to a record of accomplishment. In Venezuela, where he was once the Group's manager, he is credited with persuading the company to become one of the first (along with Créole Petróleum) to adopt the new fifty-fifty profit plan later adopted by the entire oil industry. In Iran, he helped head the international consortium in negotiations in 1954 after Premier Mossadegh nationalized the oil industry. Generally, Loudon prefers to leave most of the on-the-spot negotiating to local managers. Says he: "By comparison, they are certainly more important and have greater responsibility than ambassadors today." All of them go forth with one ironclad rule from Loudon: "Be a good citizen, obey the laws, but never get mixed up in politics. Never contribute to political campaigns and never pay baksheesh. Never. Never." He does much of his traveling between London and The Hague, where the Group keeps separate headquarters, flies back and forth in a de Havilland Heron from the Group's fleet of 60 planes.
In London, he lives in a fashionable Grosvenor Square apartment, walks the first mile to work each day to keep in shape, is picked up by a trailing Bentley for the rest of the trip. He does not like to take work home with him, usually spends his evenings among London's international set. The pace does not seem to faze Loudon. but his attractive wife has an ulcer. Loudon rarely sends letters, believes that firing off cables is a better way to get attention. One of his favorite sayings: "You can never be too long in a cable or too short in a letter."
He spends weekends during the summer in his white-brick mansion in a pine forest near Holland's Haarlem. Called Koekoeks Duin (Cuckoo's Dune) when Loudon bought it five years ago, it is hung with tapestries and paintings (among them a self-portrait of the young Rembrandt), stocked with old editions, and graced with an icebox liquor cabinet hidden behind a fake bookshelf (Loudon's drink: Scotch and soda). He is an excellent dancer, likes to golf (in the 90s), spent a week last winter skiing in Switzerland with his wife and two of his sons, Fred, 22, and George, 17. Loudon's third son, John 24, has followed his father into Shell. (His oldest son was killed in an auto accident in Holland in 1957.)
Policy Changes. John Hugo Loudon was a natural candidate for the Group's exclusive club. His grandfather was once Governor General of the Dutch East In dies, his uncle Holland's Foreign Minister in World War I. His father. Hugo Loudon, broke the family's civil service tradition to study civil engineering, became one of the early pioneers of Royal Dutch and later a managing director and chairman.
After a carefree youth traveling the Continent with his parents. Loudon studied law at Utrecht, and then, despite his father's urgings that he enter the diplomatic service, joined Shell. He spent 14 months in Venezuela, working on the rigs and derricks of Lake Maracaibo, and then returned to Holland to marry his college sweetheart, Marie van Tuyll, the slim, at tractive daughter of an aristocratic Dutch family. Reassigned to the U.S.. he worked in Boston, Houston (where his two oldest sons were born) and Los Angeles, gradually advancing in the Group's ranks.