Peter Wilmot-sitwell
Well-liked City dealmaker whose old-school style belied keen intelligence and twinkling humour
PETER WILMOT-SITWELL, who has died aged 83, was one of the City of London’s most popular and respected dealmakers, as the senior partner of the stockbrokers Rowe & Pitman and subsequently vice chairman of Warburgs, the leading British investment bank to emerge from the “Big Bang” revolution of the 1980s financial scene.
In style, Wilmot-sitwell was an archetype of the late-1950s City he had first joined: a ruddy-faced Old Etonian who favoured plain English food and a Brigade of Guards tie, and whose clipped speech mannerisms earned him the nickname “Captain Mainwaring” – though close friends called him “Petesy”.
But he also had a twinkling sense of humour that made him universally liked by market peers – including those who encountered the steel beneath the lightness of manner. “Deceptively intelligent”, according to a senior colleague, he was also, as the City historian David Kynaston wrote, “unfrightened of change”.
Rowe & Pitman was often labelled “the Queen’s stockbroker” but its major business – in which it was repeatedly voted top in City surveys – was in the buying and selling of equities on behalf of institutional investors. Wilmot-sitwell’s specialism was the “dawn raid”, in which the sales force under his crisp command would surprise the market with aggressive large-scale buying (within the applicable rules) of a target share in order to gain advantage in takeover battles.
One reporter called the first of these, in February 1980, “one of the most remarkable Stock Exchange coups of all time”. On behalf of the South African mining giant De Beers, Rowe & Pitman snapped up 11 per cent of Consolidated Gold Fields, at a cost of £100 million, within 35 minutes of the market’s opening. Protests and minor rule changes followed, but so did more raids: in June 1981, the firm bought 14.9 per cent of Eagle Star Insurance on behalf of Allianz of Germany in just eight minutes. Next, the rubber and palm oil producer Guthrie Corporation was effectively taken over by a Malaysian government agency in three hours.
As Rowe & Pitman’s senior partner from 1982, it fell to Wilmot-sitwell to steer his colleagues through the choices offered by the forthcoming Big Bang reforms, which would allow “dual capacity” (broking and jobbing, or market-making, side by side) and corporate ownership of Stock Exchange firms.
Initially the City expected a tie-up between Rowe & Pitman and the merchant bank Morgan Grenfell, with which it had deep connections. But instead Wilmot-sitwell opted in January 1984 for “maximum flexibility” by securing a capital injection from an industrial client, Charter Consolidated, and signing a joint venture with a jobber, Ackroyds & Smithers – which had already allied itself with another merchant bank, SG Warburg.
But the tide was flowing towards the integrated investment banking model, akin to the big Wall Street firms – and Wilmot-sitwell was persuaded of its merits, provided it was backed by sufficient capital. A few months later, plans were announced for the full takeover by Warburgs, as soon as rules permitted, of Rowe & Pitman, Ackroyds and the gilt-edged broker Mullens – an amalgam of powerful businesses and assertive personalities in which Wilmot-sitwell’s integrity, amiability and natural leadership were essential to the formula.
He became joint chairman of the group’s securities arm on its formation in 1986, and was sole chairman from 1990 until his retirement in 1994; he was also vice chairman of the parent company.
Peter Sacheverell Wilmot-sitwell was born on March 28 1935, the son of Captain Robert Wilmot-sitwell RN (who died when Peter was 11) and his New Zealand-born wife Barbara, née Fisher. The family home was in Kent but earlier Sacheverells, Wilmots and Sitwells were landed Derbyshire families connected by marriage in the 18th century; Peter’s distant kinsmen included the literary Sitwell baronets of Renishaw, Osbert and Sacheverell, and their sister Edith.
Peter was educated at Eton and greatly enjoyed National Service as a lieutenant in the Coldstream Guards, chiefly at Wellington Barracks in London, before going up to Worcester College, Oxford, to read Modern History. He took a Third but achieved a half-blue in fencing – a sport in which he went on to represent England, once describing himself as “the fastest man in the world over two feet”.
After coming down in 1958, Wilmot-sitwell spent a year as a trainee at Hambros Bank before being recommended to Rowe & Pitman, where he became a partner a few days after his 25th birthday. He was discreet about Rowe & Pitman’s and his own connection to the Royal family, but it was confirmed by one anecdote which entered City folklore.
On Saturday January 4 1975 – after the London stock market had fallen more than 70 per cent in a relentless two-and-a-half year bear run amid dire economic conditions – he was invited to shoot at Sandringham, where the Queen Mother asked him how his firm was faring in such times.
He replied that the general situation was “worrying”, to which she responded, on Sunday morning, by revealing that she had prayed in church for the market to improve. It fell again on Monday but by midweek it had turned and was “roaring upwards in a crescendo of buying”, as one of Wilmot-sitwell’s colleagues recalled; within two months the index more than doubled.
There were few major City episodes of the 1980s in which Wilmot-sitwell did not have a hand, from the Westland saga (in which Rowe & Pitman acted for a “mystery buyer” of shares in the helicopter company) to the flotation of Eurotunnel in the depressed stock market of November 1987, when Warburgs struggled to find underwriters for the £770 million share offer.
Eventually Wilmot-sitwell was asked to try Robert Maxwell – with whom Warburgs generally refused to do business, but whose marriage to a Frenchwoman, it was thought, might incline him to the cross-channel venture.
Wilmot-sitwell and the Eurotunnel chief Sir Alastair Morton duly presented themselves in Maxwell’s Holborn penthouse – and the following morning the newspaper tycoon committed to taking
£25 million of the stock for the Mirror pension funds which he controlled (and later plundered). It was a turning point for the flotation, and within two years the shares delivered a handsome profit for investors.
In later years Wilmot-sitwell was a member of the board of the London Stock Exchange and a non-executive director of WH Smith, the merchant bank Close Bros and the mining groups Minorco and Anglo American.
Peter Wilmot-sitwell was a keen sportsman, a generous host at his homes in Hampshire and Cornwall, and a great encourager of the young.
He is survived by his wife Clare, whom he married in 1960, and by their daughter and two sons. Clare was the daughter of Ralph Cobbold, a celebrated Cambridge cricketer of the 1920s, and stepdaughter of Brigadier “Joe” Vandeleur, who commanded the 3rd Battalion Irish Guards in Operation Market Garden in 1944. For many years she was lady in waiting to the Duchess of Kent.