How The Other Half Live (a life well lived it surely was)
OBITUARY
Peter Wilmot-Sitwell obituary
Self-deprecating gentleman banker and international fencer whose clipped Eton-and-Oxford tones once held sway in the City
On the first weekend of 1974, Peter Wilmot-Sitwell was shooting with the royal family at Sandringham. Shares had fallen to their lowest for 20 years as a sudden rise in the oil price dislocated the British economy, generating real fears for the future of capitalism.
The Queen Mother, one of Wilmot-Sitwell’s stockbroking clients, asked his opinion of the economic climate. With his customary understatement, he said: “Worrying.” At lunch on the Sunday, the Queen Mother announced that she had prayed in church that morning for an “improvement” in the stock market. Despite the royal intervention, shares fell again the next day.
For Wilmot-Sitwell, as for many other upper-class men in the City at that time, work and leisure blended into one. The soul of discretion, he had always declined to comment on persistent gossip that his firm, Rowe & Pitman, was the royal family’s broker. No one firm was or is, but the connections were there to see. In 1991 his wife, Clare, part of the well-connected Cobbold brewing family, was appointed a Lieutenant of the Royal Victorian Order for many years’ distinguished service to the Duchess of Kent.
Wilmot-Sitwell became R&P’s senior partner in the 1980s, thrusting him into the forefront of negotiations leading to the “Big Bang”, which changed the way the London stock market was run. The changes allowed brokers, market-makers and banks to merge, injecting billions of pounds of foreign capital into the City and transforming the culture from an old boys’ club into a deal-hungry global trading centre where friendships came second best.
Wilmot-Sitwell was the right man in the right place at the right time. In his history of the City of London, David Kynaston said that “despite the double barrels” in his name, Wilmot-Sitwell “was intelligent, ambitious and unfrightened of change”.
A faction of the R&P partnership wanted to take an aggressive approach, by floating the firm on the stock market before the Big Bang. In his clipped Eton-and-Oxford tones, Wilmot- Sitwell rejected the proposal. He said: “I wasn’t very keen — too high-profile, really.”
Instead, he arranged for Charter Consolidated, the mining group, to take a 29 per cent stake in R&P, giving his firm a financial prop while leaving it to continue operating independently. The plan was overtaken when the merchant bank SG Warburg bought R&P along with the jobbers Ackroyd & Smithers and Mullens, which was the official broker in government stocks.
Wilmot-Sitwell said: “What we planned all along was to try to keep the balance in the business so that if one side went down, another could bail it out. We were lucky not to have a cultural problem, in that through sheer geography our broking operation was put in a different building from banking and our chairman, Sir David Scholey, left people to get on with it. Salary and holiday arrangements were brought into line, but by levelling up to the best: my secretary got seven weeks’ holiday a year, more than I got.”
Scholey and Wilmot-Sitwell were old friends from Oxford where Scholey ran a lucrative if not entirely approved roulette game with Stuart Wheeler, who later founded the spread-betting company IG Index. Wilmot-Sitwell was one of the punters. “In the immediate postwar years, it wasn’t what you knew but who you knew,” he said. “People wouldn’t do business with people they didn’t know socially.”
He rather modestly claimed that he became an R&P partner at the age of 25 “for almost no reason relating to skill”. What mattered was that he had attended the right school and university, and did National Service as an officer in the Coldstream Guards. Well-bred new recruits like Wilmot-Sitwell were known in the firm as orchids because, he said, “we were deemed to be very beautiful but utterly useless”.
He was introduced to R&P by Comar Wilson, a family friend who was the head of two of the firm’s big clients, the South African giants Anglo-American Corporation and De Beers Consolidated Mines. Charter Consolidated was part of that network. Having got in the door, he showed that he had more than glittering connections. According to Scholey: “He was very courteous, very shrewd and very tough, in a most polite way. It was a big mistake to misunderstand his politeness for weakness. He had no histrionics, but he was daunting to work against.”
In those gentlemanly postwar years, Wilmot-Sitwell arrived in the office in black jacket, Guards tie and white shirt with monogrammed cuffs between 9.30am and 10am, had a relaxed working lunch often washed down with gin and tonic, wine and liqueurs, and was home to read to his children by 6pm. By the time he retired in 1994, he was at his desk from 7.30am to 7.30pm with a break for a relatively abstemious lunch. It wasn’t his style. He was then running the securities operation at Warburg.
Wilmot-Sitwell was one of the last generation largely trusted to regulate themselves because of the social networks. “We really were ruled by the governor of the Bank of England’s eyebrows,” he said. “If he wasn’t happy with something, you stopped doing it.” It helped that for ten years the governor was Robin Leigh-Pemberton (later Lord Kingsdown), a family friend.
However, this haphazard “cat and mouse” system could not last and regulation crept in. In 1968 merchant banks formed the Panel on Takeovers and Mergers to draw up a rule book to make all shareholders equal, and in 1980 insider trading — at one time the City’s lifeblood — was made illegal. Some of the more innovative and aggressive brokers and bankers still tried to get round the rules.
In 1979 Wilmot-Sitwell organised the first “dawn raid”. Living up to his nickname as Captain Mainwaring of the Dad’s Army TV series, he ordered 30 of his staff to hit the phones as soon as the market opened, asking the biggest Consolidated Gold Fields shareholders if they would sell immediately at an attractive premium without telling anyone. Most did, giving R&P’s clients, Anglo-American and De Beers, a key stake in Consolidated and a head start in a takeover bid for the firm before it had a chance to react. The tactic became standard practice, but within a year the Council for the Securities Industry cracked down.
While he preferred to deal with those from his own background, Wilmot-Sitwell could hold his nose long enough to engage in rougher trade.
Although Graham Corbett (obituary, June 19, 2018), Eurotunnel’s finance director, had got the balance sheet in decent shape in 1987, the company’s City advisers were struggling to find buyers to float its stock. Nicholas Verey of Warburg asked Wilmot-Sitwell to try Robert Maxwell, who by then had long been a disgraced figure.
When Wilmot-Sitwell demurred, Verey pointed out that Maxwell’s French wife, Elisabeth, was connected to the Bouygues family, whose company would be tunnelling from the Calais end. Within hours Wilmot- Sitwell was in Maxwell’s office with Sir Alastair Morton, Eurotunnel’s chairman (obituary, September 3, 2004). Maxwell wrote them a cheque for £25 million (about £70 million today).
Peter Sacheverell Wilmot-Sitwell was the son of Robert Wilmot-Sitwell, a naval commander, and Barbara Fisher, a lively and determined New Zealander. Both sides of the family were encrusted with baronetcies.
As Robert was often abroad, Peter hardly knew his father, who died when he was 11. He went to West Downs, a Winchester prep school, then Eton, which he loved. His office walls were covered with photographs from his school days. He obtained a third-class degree in modern history, but turned out to be a top-class épée fencer, winning a half-blue at Oxford and representing England. “I had immensely quick reflexes,” he said, “and was the fastest man in the world — over two feet.” He later took up golf, and clinched many of his biggest deals on the golf course. He belonged to Swinley Forest, Ascot, and White’s club in St James’s.
He did his National Service at Wellington Barracks, next to Buckingham Palace, and enjoyed it so much that his mother had to persuade him to go to Oxford. One day he raced an army friend, Nicholas Cobbold, to Maidstone in Kent in Ford Populars. There they took Cobbold’s sisters to tea. Wilmot-Sitwell married one of them, Clare. They had two sons and a daughter, all of whom survive him. Alex followed his father and was until recently Bank of America Merrill Lynch’s top executive in Europe; Christopher started Cazenove Loyd, a bespoke travel agency; while Vanessa produces stand-up comedy.
According to Christopher: “One of my father’s foibles was that he was ridiculously fond of bland British food.” Like the archetypal English tourist abroad, he once set off for Italy with a case filled with a side of ham and marmalade. But they had to ditch it at Rome airport because they could not get the suitcase into the hire car.
Instead, he bought a holiday home in Cornwall, where he messed about in boats so much that his nickname changed from Captain Mainwaring to Captain Pugwash.
Although he gave the impression of being a caricature of the stuffy City gent, he liked to break the mould. When he turned up in a suit to hear a friend’s son play in a band in Camden Town, he was delighted to be described by a member of the audience as “a trad dick”. He dined out on that for years.
Peter Wilmot-Sitwell, stockbroker, was born on March 28, 1935. He died on June 19, 2018, aged 83, after a strok
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