Sir Leslie Young
Businessman who oversaw the 1980s regeneration of Liverpool
SIR LESLIE YOUNG, who has died aged 93, was a leader of Liverpool’s business community as chairman and managing director of one the city’s most prominent businesses, J Bibby & Sons; he also chaired the Merseyside Development Board, which was a catalyst of regeneration in the 1980s.
Originally a Lancashire seed milling business, chiefly producing cattle fodder, J Bibby became a public company after the Second World War and diversified into vegetable oils, soaps and paper. It remained under dynastic management until the mid-1960s, when, with younger Bibby generations having reportedly produced “14 daughters but no sons”, the board appointed a non-family managing director, Murray Milne, who launched into an expansion described at the time as “little short of breathtaking”.
Milne bought up grocery brands, invested in Italian poultry and recruited a cohort of new-broom managers that included Leslie Young, previously an up-and-coming executive of the Courtaulds textiles group. He joined in 1968 to run Bibby’s agriculture arm and was promoted to managing director in 1970 when Milne departed after profits collapsed.
Young’s first priority in the senior role was sharp retrenchment; but having sold off the grocery portfolio to secure an injection of cash, he embarked on more focused growth in areas of Bibby’s traditional strengths. He succeeded as chairman in 1979 and continued to reshape the group as a profitable and balanced conglomerate. He retired in 1985.
In 1980 Young had been picked by Michael Heseltine, the Environment Secretary, to become chairman of the Merseyside Development Corporation, charged with revitalising 2,000 acres of docks and warehouses left by the decline in sea trade as one of Europe’s largest sites of industrial dereliction.
The corporation took on an even more politicised role after the 1981 Toxteth riots. The centrepiece of the regeneration project was the Albert Dock, which became the home of Tate Liverpool. Broader progress was symbolised as Young’s term of office came to an end in 1984 by the Liverpool International Garden Festival.
Leslie Clarence Young was born at Eltham in south-east London on February 5 1925. His father, Clarence, was a civil servant in the Ministry of Labour; Leslie’s mother Ivy, née Prout, was the daughter of a Thames lighterman.
Leslie completed his education at the London School of Economics before joining Courtaulds in 1948.
He was later a director of the National Westminster Bank (1979-90) and chairman of its north-west regional board. He was a member from 1986 to 1990 of the Court of the Bank of England to which he brought reports on the state of the economy in his home region, and chairman of the British Waterways Board.
He was a deputy lieutenant of Merseyside, and was appointed CBE in 1980 and knighted in 1984.
Young enjoyed fly-fishing and walking. In 1949 he married Muriel Howard Pearson, who died in 1998, and, in 1999, Margaret Gittens, who survives him with a son and daughter of the first marriage.