Tony Rudd
Journalist-turned-stockbroker who brought a string of companies to market but later hit trouble
TONY RUDD, who has died aged 93, was a financial journalist who became an entrepreneurial – and ultimately controversial – corporate financier. He was also the father of Amber Rudd, the current Home Secretary.
Rudd made his name writing for the Manchester Guardian before turning his hand to the business of bringing smaller companies to the stock market. A notable early deal, in combination with the stockbroking firm of Rowe Reeve, was the 1968 flotation of Rotork Controls, an engineering venture created by the socialite Jeremy Fry. The issue caused a minor sensation when the shares more than doubled in early trading before falling back just as sharply.
The following year, Rowe Reeve was folded into a new firm, Rowe Rudd & Co, with Tony Rudd at the helm. Engaging and free-spirited, he had a nose for high-growth business potential and was an iconoclastic force in the City’s early-1970s boom, bringing a succession of new names to market – often on skimpy prospectuses but with persuasive stories to tell. Conditions turned adverse after the oil crisis of late 1973 but as share prices gradually revived in the second half of the decade, Rowe Rudd maintained an energetic market presence.
The last phase of Tony Rudd’s business career was full of troubles, however. Having discovered in 1981 that he was losing his sight to glaucoma and shingles, he announced that Rowe Rudd would withdraw from stockbroking to focus on corporate finance work. But thereafter he was increasingly caught in controversy.
He was criticised by Department of Trade inspectors for his role in the affairs of Bryanston Finance, a 1970s “fringe bank”; and an investigation into the 1982 takeover of an investment firm, Greenbank Trust, by a company owned by Rudd and his business partner eventually resulted in them being found “totally unfit to be directors”.
His dealings were repeatedly trawled over in Private Eye and elsewhere. He was stoical in response, acknowledging past mistakes.
Riley Anthony Winton Rudd was born on April 24 1924, the son of a commercial traveller from Cape Town. His parents divorced and both returned to South Africa, entrusting Tony’s upbringing to a great-aunt.
He was educated at Blundell’s School in Devon and went up to University College, Oxford, to read Politics, Philosophy and Economics, but left in his first year to volunteer for the RAF. After training in Canada, Rudd was assigned to No 305 Polish Bomber Squadron, flying two-man De Havilland Mosquitos.
The squadron was based, from November 1944, at Cambrai-epinoy in northern France, and made its last sorties over Germany in April 1945, on one of which Rudd’s aircraft was shot down by an American fighter plane. He ended the war as a POW, and would remark during difficult passages of his later career that “friendly fire”was nothing new to him.
After demobilisation he returned to Oxford, and on graduation he was accepted into the Bank of England – but on the day he was due to join, September 19 1949, he found its doors locked for a special bank holiday following the previous evening’s announcement by the Chancellor Sir Stafford Cripps of a dramatic devaluation of the pound.
Rudd represented the Bank in the United States from 1952 to 1953, but left in 1955 to switch to journalism. He covered the Suez crisis as the Guardian’s shipping correspondent and as assistant to the paper’s City editor, Richard Fry, he was peripherally involved in the 1957 “Bank Rate Tribunal” – an enquiry as to whether a recent change in Bank Rate had been leaked in advance to the press, provoking a flurry of dealings in the gilts market. Fry had referred in the paper to “one or two people who seem to have got wind” of the rate change; when pressed, he cited Rudd as having heard the rumour from the senior partner of a stockbroking firm.
Rudd was a lively market commentator who won a Wincott award for his investment letters from Rowe Rudd in 1976 and was a columnist for both Investors Chronicle and The Spectator in the early 1980s. Typical was a comment on a leap in share prices just before Easter 1981: the market, he wrote, “went through the barrier like an express train. Furthermore it did so when a fair proportion of those who would normally have been busy assisting at this joyous task were stuck in their cars trying to make an early getaway to some country seat or other. Many a broker suffered the indignity of hearing the news on the radio.”
This was a cameo of Rudd’s own weekly exodus to the 18th-century Chalcot House in Wiltshire, which he had acquired in 1969 when, as his wife put it, “we were looking for a country cottage and ended up buying this enormous house”. In disrepair, the property had been on the market for years; the Rudds demolished a Victorian wing and completed a stylish refurbishment just before the 1974 crash curtailed their resources. But the cellar was well stocked, and Chalcot made a highly convivial family home.
Tony Rudd married Ethne Fitzgerald in 1952, having met her as a fellow Oxford undergraduate. Ethne became a magistrate and long-serving secretary of the Kensington Society – in which capacity she was a fierce opponent of the first plan for a memorial to Diana, Princess of Wales, in Kensington Gardens, which one report said “would have meant concreting over several acres of grass”.
Rudd overcame his blindness by memorising wedding speeches and lessons to be read in church; he enjoyed opera, ballet as a listening experience, and art exhibitions with Ethne as his describer. She died in 2008 and he is survived by their son Roland, chairman of the public relations group Finsbury, and daughters Amber, Amanda and Melissa.