Michael Allsopp
Master of foxhounds who combined success in the City with being ‘the godfather of partygoing’
MICHAEL ALLSOPP, who has died aged 86, was a towering postwar figure in the City of London and, with his wife Pat, a devoted master of the Old Berks foxhounds, serving as their president from 1984 until 2016; one of the bravest men across country in his day, either with the Old Berks or on his visits to the Quorn, his fiscal and foxhunting activities were often lubricated by his favourite champagne, in a pint mug.
His father, Ranulph “Sammy” Allsopp, an elegantly attired Edwardian figure, was a gentleman stockbroker who brought up his children hunting with the Puckeridge from their home, Alsa Lodge near Ugley on the Essex and Hertfordshire border. On Boxing Day, Sammy would give the young foot followers halfcrowns, newly minted from the Bank of England. His mother, Allsopp delighted in telling his friends, chaired the “Ugley Mothers’ Union”.
Like his father, Mike Allsopp was witty, irreverent and wise. He was known, among his children’s friends, as “the godfather of partygoing”. Yet his successful career, coupled with more than 50 years’ service to the Old Berks hunt, revealed a more serious side.
One of four children, Michael Edward Ranulph Allsopp was born on October 9 1930. He was educated at Maidwell Hall prep school in Northamptonshire, where he was head boy, and at Eton, where he met the Guinness heir and future amateur champion jockey Gay Kindersley, who would become his best man and lifelong friend. The Allsopps were originally from Alsop in Derbyshire and descended from Henry VII. Michael was a kinsman of the former Christie’s chairman Lord Hindlip and his daughter, the television personality Kirsty Allsopp.
At Eton Michael became a voracious reader of the English classics, a love which remained with him throughout his life, but admitted he was no sportsman. He suffered the ignominy as a “wet bob” of stroking a bumping four which was “bumped” six times in four days. After leaving school, he did his National Service in the 7th Hussars based at Catterick and afterwards enjoyed a happy association as a captain in the territorial Wiltshire Yeomanry.
At Catterick, he was re-united with Kindersley, who invited him to Luggala, his mother’s magical and somewhat louche Strawberry Hill Gothic Irish hunting lodge in the Wicklow Mountains. Preparing for his 21st birthday party, Kindersley instructed Allsopp to bring some Volpar gels, a form of contraception banned in Ireland. Misunderstanding him, Allsopp appeared with three packets of wine gums.
After a short stint as a trainee at Brown Shipley, he joined Allen, Harvey & Ross where he soon mastered the technicalities of the market. “He certainly looked the part, with top hat crammed down over unruly hair, double-breasted coat with silk lining and a complexion reflecting a hard day in the hunting field,” his friend Andrew Merriam recalled. “He was the ideal subject for a Vanity Fair Spy cartoon.”
With an ear for market gossip, Allsopp became chairman of Allen, Harvey & Ross in 1968, acquitting himself with distinction in the difficult times of the 1960s and 1970s. In 1976 he became chairman of the London Discount Market Association and then chairman of Dunbar, the private bank, and then Granville, the small investment bank. Both the banks were in Pall Mall, near his favourite watering holes of White’s and Pratt’s.
But Mike Allsopp was a countryman at heart. In 1953 he married Patricia Berners, whose family had owned land in and around Oxford Street and Marylebone since 1654. After living in Burghclere in the late 1950s, they made their home, surrounded by children, horses and dogs, at the Berners’s Little Coxwell estate in Oxfordshire, where he served as County Councillor for the Faringdon division (1985-89).
In 1964 he became joint master of the Old Berks foxhounds, a position he held until 1984 with a short gap due to work commitments, but during which he continued to act as field master. “I have never seen a braver man across country,” noted the hound breeder, Martin Scott, whose father WWB Scott was also a master of the Old Berks.
Mike Allsopp was joined in the mastership by his wife Pat (1964-76), and three of their four daughters, Kykie (who predeceased Mike in 2015), Davina and Jessica, became joint masters after them. On his retirement from the mastership he hunted for 10 seasons with the Quorn “to see how the other half lives”. If he had a meeting in London the night before, he was often to be found fully “booted and spurred” at King’s Cross station, heading for Leicestershire. On his return, there would be champagne at White’s or Pratt’s, waiting for him in a pint mug.
He is survived by his wife and by three daughters.
Michael Allsopp, born October 9 1930, died April 30 2017