Oliver Jessel
Flamboyant City dealmaker with a ‘Midas touch’ who fell to earth in the economic crash of 1974
OLIVER JESSEL, who has died aged 87, was a high-flying City dealmaker whose industrial and financial empire came to grief in the crash of 1974.
Jessel was a debonair, pipe-smoking 1960s man-about-town, with expensive tastes and boundless self-confidence. He achieved business fame in his mid-thirties as a takeover player with a Midas touch, and a successful entrepreneur in the fast-growing field of unit trusts.
His name was often bracketed with that of Jim Slater, founder of the Slater Walker group, which could be said to have set the trajectory that Jessel followed. In their heyday both men were regarded with some awe for their avowed determination to make British industry more efficient and for their success in making money for themselves and their investors.
After the disintegration of their businesses and personal fortunes in the aftermath of the stock market collapse and “fringe bank” crisis that followed the tripling of crude oil prices in December 1973, both were seen in a different perspective – as asset-strippers and share gamblers who had stoked the boom that made the bust inevitable.
At its peak, the Jessel group was worth more than £400 million. But it was brought down in late 1974 when its life insurance arm, London Indemnity & General Insurance, was unable to meet redemptions by policyholders and Jessel was ordered by regulators to make a capital injection to save it. Many other holdings had to be sold at rock-bottom prices to staunch the hole and the shares of his master company Jessel Securities were suspended. Though some City commentators still spoke in his favour, Jessel’s long run of luck had run out. Thereafter his corporate involvements were low-key and he largely disappeared from public view.
Oliver Richard Jessel was born in New Zealand on August 24 1929 into a dynasty descended from Zadok Jessel, a wealthy London merchant of the early 19th Century. Zadok’s youngest son, Sir George, was the first British Jew to attain high judicial office, as Master of the Rolls in 1873. Sir George’s sons acquired a peerage and a baronetcy; his grandson founded the prominent stock broking firm of Jessel Toynbee, and his great-nephew Richard, Oliver’s father, became a highly decorated naval commander.
Oliver’s mother Winifred was the granddaughter of Marcus Samuel (first Viscount Bearsted), the hugely wealthy founder of the Shell oil company. Oliver was educated at Rugby, having spent the early wartime years evacuated to Rannoch in Perthshire. He studied briefly for the bar and did National Service in the RNVR before turning his hand to business, establishing an investment company in 1954 to manage his own inheritance.
His first entrepreneurial ventures were self-service grocery stores in Paddington and Mayfair, and a stake in a greyhound racing track. In the late 1950s he tried farming battery chickens, until fire destroyed his sheds and birds. Finally in 1960 he arrived in the City and found his métier in the game of buying and rationalising undervalued businesses.
Jessel Securities was launched on the stock market in 1965, principally as a “finance and issuing house” – a small merchant bank combined with an investment holding company. Oliver Jessel’s modus operandi was to identify companies whose share price stood at about half what he estimated their assets to be worth per share, build a position until he was ready to launch a takeover, then boost the successful parts of the acquired business while “sorting out the unprofitable sides” by closing or selling them.
Among his first targets was France Fenwick, a shipbroking and insurance firm; that was followed by Demerara, a West Indian sugar producer, and by many others that could be loosely grouped into the industrial, commodity and property arms of his fast-growing portfolio. After early setbacks, Jessel Securities’ share price tripled between 1967 and 1969, cementing his reputation.
Next he became active in the steel industry, completing a series of mergers and reorganisations to create the steelmaking conglomerate Johnson and Firth Brown. Elsewhere, he held a large stake in Associated Fisheries, Britain’s largest trawler operator.
Meanwhile, Jessel’s unit trust activity grew both by acquisition and through the launch of innovative specialist funds. In the early 1970s the Jessel Britannia brand emerged as a leader in the sector and was also one of the better performers when the stock market crash came, Oliver Jessel having spotted the fall before many of his rivals and diverted unit-holders’ funds into gold, commodities and cash.
Other investors were avid watchers of Jessel’s market manoeuvres – though some were caught out when he withdrew a proposed bid for Staveley Industries in 1972, leaving speculators with heavy losses. Jessel himself took big bets on other people’s bid battles, reaping huge windfalls in some and
– as when he sought to intervene in the takeover of the house-builder Bovis by the shipping giant P&O – hefty losses in others.
After the demise of Jessel Securities, he remained active in corporate finance until the late 1980s as chairman of a number of smaller companies, and lived a relatively quiet life in rural Kent. His younger brother Toby, who also worked in Jessel Securities, was for 27 years a backbench Conservative MP.
He married, in 1950, Gloria Holden, who survives him with their son and five daughters.