Financial Times chief transformed British paper
‘Rarely fought a battle he could not win’
Sir Frank Barlow, the former chief executive of the Financial Times, who has died at age 89, was one of the British newspaper industry’s most formidable managers.
A northerner who made his name running overseas and regional titles, Barlow was given charge of the FT by its parent company, Pearson, in the autumn of 1983, following a 10-week strike by print workers in which the previous management had eventually caved in at a cost of $10 million.
Barlow’s style was in marked contrast both to the prevailing defeatism of Fleet Street bosses of the era and to the patrician tone of the family-dominated Pearson board. FT historian David Kynaston recalled him as “aggressive ... insisting that management should manage ... a tough operator who rarely fought a battle he could not win.”
One interviewer encountered “a short, bespectacled man with a rather chilling Cheshire Cat smile.” Barlow himself liked to joke that he was “brutally Frank.” In the new industrial dawn that followed Rupert Murdoch’s defeat of the Times and Sunday Times print unions at Wapping, Barlow was able to revolutionize the FT’S production technology as well as advance its international profile.
Having turned down an offer from Murdoch to run News International, Barlow was promoted in 1990 to managing director of Pearson — where his strategy was to sell the conglomerate’s peripheral interests, investing instead in television stations.
Frank Barlow was born in Barrow in Furness on March 25, 1930, the son of John and Isabella Barlow, née Morgan, and was educated at Barrow grammar school. He served in the Royal Navy, qualified in accountancy and spent seven years with the Nigerian Electricity Supply Corp before entering the newspaper business in 1959 as a manager of Nigeria’s Daily Times — owned by the parent of London’s Daily Mirror.
Frank Barlow was knighted in 1998. He enjoyed golf, fell-walking and fishing.
He married, in 1950, Pat Ginns, who died in 2000. He was briefly remarried and is survived by a son and daughter of the first marriage, another daughter having predeceased him.