Eddie Davies
Industrialist who spent millions of pounds on Bolton Wanderers
EDWIN “EDDIE” DAVIES, who has died aged 72, deployed an industrial fortune in support of a range of good causes and as the owner of Bolton Wanderers football club.
Davies was chief executive from 1984 and chairman from 1987 to 2006 of Strix Group, an Isle of Man-based company that manufactures thermostat controls for electric kettles. Under the leadership of Davies – initially working with the company’s founder, John Taylor – Strix achieved worldwide sales of £100 million and won numerous Queen’s Awards for exports and innovation.
The sale of the business to private equity interests, in two stages in 2000 and 2005, gave Davies the time and resources to pursue his many other interests. A keen collector of cloisonné (decorative enamelled metalwork, particularly from Japan), he assisted the Victoria & Albert Museum with a number of exhibitions, projects and gallery refurbishments, and became a trustee in 2006.
The V&A connection also brought him to the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew, where he funded the Davies Alpine House and Exploration House, was a trustee from 2010, and chaired the fundraising foundation.
He was also a benefactor of the Alliance Manchester Business School. Having studied Portuguese there in the interests of boosting Strix’s business in Brazil, he saw the need for improvements to what is now, as the Eddie Davies Library, one of the best business-school libraries in Europe. He also funded a professorship of enterprise and innovation management and became chairman of the school’s advisory council.
Davies’s involvement with Bolton Wanderers, the team he supported all his life, was ultimately less happy. He joined the club’s board in 1999 and became its major shareholder in 2003, enabling it to buy players such as the French striker Nicolas Anelka. But a relatively golden era – and tenure in the Premier League – ended in 2012.
As the club’s fortunes declined its debts mounted, including unpaid tax bills as well as huge loans from Davies himself which he eventually agreed to write off. When a consortium acquired the club from Davies for £1 in early 2016, the insolvency specialist who brokered the deal told local media that taking account of all his past dealings with the club, “Eddie’s net loss is approaching £175 million”. He was reported to have offered the new owners a bridging loan to stave off another crisis a few days before his death.
Edwin Davies was born Kevin Keenan in Salford on June 18 1946; he was adopted by Edwin and Hannah Davies and brought up at Little Lever, near Bolton. Educated at Farnworth Grammar School – where he was a talented footballer – he went on to take a first in maths and a doctorate in engineering at Manchester University before qualifying as a management accountant.
His working life began as a production engineer with Avon Rubber and continued with Scapa Group, a manufacturer of adhesive products, where he rose to assistant managing director before moving to Strix.
Davies and his second wife, Sue, also made investments in an equestrian estate and stud at Pewit Hall in Cheshire where, working with riders such as Mary King and Billy Twomey, they bred and trained horses for the British and Irish teams. Their contributions began at the 2006 World Equestrian Games in Germany and continued in the 2007 and 2011 European Championships, as well as the Beijing and London Olympics.
Eddie Davies was appointed OBE for services to industry in 2000 and raised to CBE for his philanthropy in 2012.
He married first, in 1969, Jean Ellison. The marriage was dissolved in 1987 and he married secondly, in 1989, Susan Chinn, née Crellin, who survives him with a son and a daughter of the first marriage.
Eddie Davies, born June 18 1946, died September 11 2018