E. P. Taylor
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Edward Plunket Taylor, born January 29, 1901 in Ottawa, Ontario, Canada - died May 14, 1989 in Lyford Cay, New Providence, Bahamas, was a business tycoon and famous breeder of thoroughbred race horses.
Born into a wealthy family, Taylor graduated from Montreal's McGill University in 1922 with a Bachelor of Science degree. Pursuing a business career, he used a brewery business inherited from his grandfather as the vehicle to merge more than 20 other small breweries into the giant Canadian Breweries corporation while in the process of building one of Canada's largest and most successful industrial empires.
During World War II, he was a volunteer executive in the Canadian government’s war effort. He came close to losing his life when, in December of 1940, the ship he was on was torpedoed while crossing the Atlantic. He and others on the sinking ship were rescued by a captain who broke regulations to pick them up. At war's end, E.P. Taylor founded Argus Corporation, becoming the investment company's majority shareholder by rolling Canadian Breweries stock into the new entity. Over the years, he gained control of many of his country’s greatest companies such as Canadian Food Products, Massey-Harris, Orange Crush, Standard Chemical, Dominion Stores, B.C. Forest Products, Domtar Paper, Standard Broadcasting, and Hollinger Mines.
Despite his business successes, E.P. Taylor is most remembered as the owner of Windfields Farm, a thoroughbred horse breeding operation that produced Northern Dancer, the greatest sire of the 20th century. By 1970, Taylor was the world’s leading horse breeder in terms of money won. He was President of the Ontario Jockey Club from 1953 to 1973 where he consolidated the numerous money-losing tracks throughout the Province of Ontario into fewer, but viable businesses. He was voted Racing’s Man of the Year in 1973 and the following year was elected to Canada's Sports Hall of Fame. In 1977 and 1983 he was named the winner of the National Thoroughbred Racing Association’s Eclipse Award as the leading thoroughbred breeder in North America.
In the early part of the 1960’s E.P. Taylor moved his main residence to Lyford Cay in the Bahamas, taking advantage of the warm climate and its inheritance tax laws. He died there in 1989 at the age of 88.