Sir Alan Dawtry
Influential Westminster chief executive who saved Dolphin Square from redevelopment
SIR ALAN DAWTRY, who has died aged 102, was one of the most influential figures in English local government as town clerk, then chief executive of Westminster City Council from 1956 to 1977; he was also largely responsible for the council intervening in the 1960s to save the Dolphin Square apartment complex from becoming a hotel.
Nicknamed “the headmaster” by his councillors, Dawtry was rated by one of his successors “the last of the great patrician town clerks who commanded their councils and were held in awe by their members”. Combining charm with Yorkshire grit and a memory sharp to the end, Dawtry never learnt to drive – Westminster provided its chief officers with chauffeured limousines until Shirley Porter stopped the practice – and first married at 82.
He played a crucial role in persuading the ragbag of councils then governing the capital to cooperate with the creation in 1965 of the Greater London Council and the 32 metropolitan boroughs. Westminster itself absorbed St Marylebone and Paddington.
But it was for his role in saving Dolphin Square – where he was a tenant for 61 years – for its residents that Dawtry is best remembered. The complex – in his view “no ordinary block of flats” – had been built in the 1930s to house the political class; tenants had included General de Gaulle, Princess Anne and Harold Wilson.
In the early 1960s Dolphin Square fell on hard times, and tenants feared the company that owned it would convert it into a hotel. Determined to prevent this, Dawtry persuaded the council to buy it for £4.5 million and lease it to a non-profit making trust.
Dawtry was active in the Dolphin Square community, and from 1985 to 1999 was vice-chairman of the trust. He consequently had to endure internet smears as he neared his century, after a complainant named “Nick” alleged to police that a flat in the complex had been the centre of a paedophile ring involving senior Tory politicians.
No wrongdoing by Dawtry was ever suggested, but he was dragged into the online traffic because of his involvement in managing the complex – owned since 2006 by the American group Westbrook Holdings.
Alan Dawtry was born in Sheffield on April 8 1915, the son of Melancthon and Kate Dawtry, and educated at the city’s King Edward VII grammar school and Sheffield University, where he took an LLB in 1937.
Dawtry qualified as a solicitor and joined Sheffield Corporation’s legal department. On the outbreak of war he was commissioned into the Royal Artillery. When the French army collapsed in 1940, he led his men across country to Cherbourg, finding one ship still in the harbour because its captain was dead drunk. Dawtry arrested him, then navigated the ship across the Channel to safety.
He took part in the Algerian and Tunisian campaigns, then in the bitterly contested landing at Salerno and the equally bloody Anzio landing, in which he and his fellow combatant Denis Healey earned military MBES.
Ending the war in Milan as a lieutenant-colonel on the staff of Field Marshal Alexander, Dawtry was informed that the bodies of Mussolini and his mistress Clara Petacci were hanging upside down outside a filling station. He gave orders for them to be cut down.
Demobilised in 1945 – though he continued as a Territorial – he resumed his work as a Sheffield Corporation prosecuting solicitor. Three years later he moved to Bolton as deputy town clerk, and in 1952 took up the same position at Leicester. In 1954 he was appointed town clerk of Wolverhampton.
In 1956 Dawtry was chosen from 56 applicants to succeed Sir Parker Morris as town clerk of Westminster. During the handover, Morris, the father-in-law of Roy Jenkins and originator of the national standards for public housing named after him, insisted on Dawtry addressing him as “Sir Parker.”
For almost two decades, Dawtry was secretary of the Metropolitan Boroughs Standing Joint Committee and its successor the London Boroughs Association. Though Westminster was a Conservative council, this body generally had a Labour majority, and in 1963 he had to tell Sir Keith Joseph that the boroughs would refuse to cooperate with his Greater London Plan.
After local government outside London was reorganised in 1974, Dawtry co-founded the Society of Local Authority Chief Executives, serving as its president in 1976.
In 1977 Westminster bought a new computer system from Sperry Rand, Dawtry handling the negotiations. The company was so impressed that when he retired early soon afterwards, blaming successive rounds of government spending cuts, they invited him to chair Sperry’s UK and Irish divisions.
In 1980 he vetoed the deployment of an otherwise global Sperry Rand advertising campaign featuring the Charge of the Light Brigade and the sinking of the Titanic, considering it “not right for British consumption”. He stood down in 1986 when Sperry Rand merged with Burroughs to become Unisys.
Dawtry served as president of the London Rent Assessment Panel from 1979 to 1986, a council member of the CBI and a member of the Clean Air Council.
He was appointed CBE in 1968, knighted in 1974, and held decorations from Afghanistan, Austria, Belgium, Brazil, Chile, France, West Germany, Greece, Italy, Iran, Japan, Jordan, Liberia, Luxembourg, Malaysia, Nepal, the Netherlands, Sudan, Thailand and Zaire.
Alan Dawtry married Sally Chalklin, a fellow resident of Dolphin Square, in 1997; she survives him.
Sir Alan Dawtry, born April 8 1915, died January 27 2018