Dundas Hamilton
Determined stalwart of the Stock Exchange who took the fight for capitalism to Labour and the TUC
DUNDAS HAMILTON, who has died aged 98, was a leading figure in the London Stock Exchange during the dark days of the 1974 bear market and its aftermath. As a prominent partner of the stockbroking firm of Fielding, Newsonsmith, Hamilton became a deputy chairman of the Stock Exchange in 1973. Share prices plunged after the oil crisis in December of that year and continued to do so throughout 1974. The market’s pessimistic mood and limited ability to raise capital for industrial companies in such conditions brought attacks from trade unionists and Labour politicians, led by the industry minister Tony Benn
– to which Hamilton, though never less than impeccably courteous, responded with vigour.
When the TUC leader Len Murray attacked City “speculators” in August 1974 for “doing the country no service”, Hamilton replied that “very obviously” Murray and his cohort were illinformed and that he would gladly offer them “a teach-in” on how the City worked. The malaise in share prices, he added, was in large part down to the uncertainty of returns for investors “due to government interference” and “the attack on capitalism that has been launched by certain ministers”.
In a speech at the Mansion House some months later, Hamilton turned his fire on industrialists who had joined the chorus of criticism from the Left – pointing out that the City’s “central purpose … was to provide a service to investors” and that if it failed to do so it would also cease to generate capital for industry.
In January 1976 Hamilton was a candidate for the chairmanship of the Stock Exchange, but the younger, reform-minded Nicholas Goodison was preferred by the Exchange’s Council; some thought that Hamilton’s “occasionally outspoken views” counted against him.
James Dundas Hamilton, known to friends and family as Dun, was born on June 11 1919. His father Arthur, a Scot of stern views (believing, for example, that women who wore make-up were not to be trusted), was known as “Wee Hammie” in the Stock Exchange, where he was senior partner of the broking firm of Carroll & Co.
Dun recalled an idyllic childhood in the leafy environs of Hook Heath near Woking, encircled by golf courses and tennis clubs. He was educated at Rugby and won an exhibition to Clare College, Cambridge, to read Natural Sciences. In 1939, after only a year there, he enlisted in the Royal Artillery.
He was commissioned and posted to the Berkshire Yeomanry. In May 1941 he transferred to the School of Artillery at Larkhill in Wiltshire to assist in the formation of the Army Photographic Research Unit, which later came under the umbrella of the War Office intelligence directorate MI7. In that specialism he was briefly attached to HQ 21 Army Group for the D-day landings. He went on to serve in France and Ceylon, where he was attached to Mountbatten’s HQ for the planning of landing sites in Malaya, and was promoted lieutenant colonel.
Following his father into Carroll & Co after demobilisation, Dun found himself in a Dickensian environment. His modernising ideas for office administration fell on stony ground. As for the dress code: “If I’d worn a striped shirt and a soft collar, people would have said ‘Why have you come to work in your pyjamas?’”
In 1951 he diverted briefly to politics, standing in the general election as the losing Conservative candidate for East Ham North. In the same year he moved to the larger firm of Fielding, Son & Macleod at the invitation of its senior partner Frank Douglas – an enormous man who owned “a Rolls and a Bentley and always had a loader with three guns instead of two”.
Hamilton joined the partnership and created a department dealing with pension funds as an important new source of business. The firm merged to become Fielding, Newson-smith in 1958, and Hamilton was its senior partner from 1978 until the “Big Bang” in 1986, when he oversaw the firm’s sale to Natwest.
In his spare time Hamilton wrote radio plays, made a television series based on short stories and published a novel, Lorenzo Smiles on Fortune. His books Stockbroking Today (1968) and Stockbroking Tomorrow (1986) are valuable reading for finance students.
A keen sportsman, Hamilton raced with the Kandahar ski club at Mürren in his youth, played golf into his eighties and was a member of the All England tennis club.
Dundas Hamilton, who was appointed CBE in 1985, married Linda Ditcham in 1954. She died in 2008 and he is survived by their two daughters.
Dundas Hamilton, born June 11 1919, died January 28 2018