Sir Peter Reynolds
Industrialist who was chairman of Walls then of Rank Hovis Mcdougall, maker of Mother’s Pride
SIR PETER REYNOLDS, who has died aged 88, was chairman of Rank Hovis Mcdougall in the era when it was Britain’s biggest flour miller and bread maker. Reynolds made his first career with Walls, the sausage and ice cream manufacturer that was then part of the Unilever conglomerate. By 30 he was chairman of the company, and in 1971 he was invited to move to the much larger Rank Hovis Mcdougall, of which Walls was a customer for the milled products that went into its sausages. At RHM he became managing director and right-hand man to the last family chairman, Joseph Rank.
Founded by Joseph’s grandfather in Hull in 1875, RHM had grown in the postwar era to encompass food brands ranging from Mr Kipling cakes and Bisto gravy to the ubiquitous Mother’s Pride – of which Joseph Rank declared confidently, “The white sliced loaf is what the housewife wants.” Expansion continued despite the difficult economic conditions of the 1970s, and Reynolds established himself as a forceful chief executive, liked and admired by colleagues though occasionally volcanic in temper. Not one to court publicity, he “spent his career avoiding contact with the gentlemen of the Press”, according to one profile.
He succeeded Joseph Rank as chairman from 1981 to 1989, remaining as deputy chairman thereafter. In the latter phase of his tenure RHM became a takeover target, and Reynolds saw off a first hostile approach in 1988 from a New Zealand company, Goodman Fielder Wattie.
During the bid battle, play was made of the contrast between Reynolds’s “baronial” style – which included beagling in the Chilterns and conducting business from a flat in London’s Park Lane – with that of his opponent Pat Goodman, from a family of small-town Kiwi bakers. When Goodman reportedly felt under-dressed for City meetings, Reynolds directed him to his own Savile Row tailor.
As RHM’S performance faltered in the recession of the early 1990s, a new bid arrived from Hanson Trust, only to be capped by one from another aggressive takeover player, the Tomkins group, which prevailed in late 1992. Reynolds stood down from the board the following year.
The son of a naval officer, Peter William John Reynolds was born in Singapore on September 10 1929, spent part of his childhood in Bermuda, and was educated at Haileybury College. After National Service as a lieutenant in the Royal Artillery, he joined Walls as a management trainee in 1950.
In his later career, Reynolds’s nonexecutive directorships included Guardian Royal Exchange Assurance, Boots, the car hire firm Avis Europe and the Nationwide Anglia building society. He served on numerous public committees for the food and drink industry, and on the industrial development board for Northern Ireland.
He was also a member of the Peacock Committee, whose 1986 report on the financing of the BBC disappointed elements of the Conservative government which had commissioned it by failing to call for the scrapping of the licence fee and the introduction of advertising.
Although Reynolds was a supporter of Margaret Thatcher (and RHM was a donor to Tory Party funds) he proved reluctant to see the BBC commercialised: “Peter has travelled the world,” said a source within the committee, “and he hasn’t liked what he saw on television there.” Recognising the impact of satellite and cable technologies, the committee did however recommend a long-term shift towards a subscription model for the BBC and more competition in broadcasting generally. In doing so, their report succeeded in pleasing almost no one, Labour’s spokesman declaring that “it should go straight into the waste paper bin.”
Reynolds was appointed CBE in 1975, and knighted in 1985. He was high sheriff of Buckinghamshire in 1990, and spoke out latterly against the coming desecration of the county’s landscape by the HS2 rail project.
Peter Reynolds married, in 1955, Anne Johnson, the daughter of a colonial officer, who died in December 2016. They had two sons, Mark and Adam, and the family was struck a shocking blow when both were diagnosed in childhood with muscular dystrophy, a genetic disorder which in due course also afflicted Mark’s son and daughter, though not Adam’s two daughters. The two boys were not expected to live beyond their teens, but thanks to their parents’ tireless efforts to find treatments and exercise regimes, both were able to lead fulfilled lives, Mark making a career in advertising and charity work and Adam as a sculptor; they died within a month of each other in 2005.
Sir Peter Reynolds, born September 10 1929, died October 19 2017