Roddy Dewe
Financial PR and marketing guru who helped to sell some of the Tories’ highest-profile privatisations
RODDY DEWE, who has died aged 83, was a pioneer of financial PR and the marketing wizard behind the success of some of the Thatcher era’s most ambitious privatisations.
In 1969 Dewe was working for a small PR consultancy called Angel Court when he met Nico Rogerson, a former Financial Times journalist, in a Savile Row tailor’s. The pair shared a taxi back to the City and decided to go into business together as Dewe Rogerson; early clients included Scottish Widows, Hambros Bank and Legal & General.
In those days, Dewe recalled, the PR man’s place was to wait beside the photocopier for the client company’s board to hand down a pronouncement which he would then dutifully relay to the outside world. But Dewe and Rogerson and their partners, John de Uphaugh and Tony Carlisle, brought a creative energy and originality to their work that made them an essential component of the advisory team for any major transaction.
Dewe Rogerson’s first privatisation role was in the £224 million sale of shares in Cable & Wireless in 1981. The much larger assignments that followed demanded new communication skills to reach a mass market of potential retail investors. They included the
£4 billion British Telecom flotation in 1984 and the £5 billion British Gas sale in 1986 – in which Dewe Rogerson masterminded the “Tell Sid” advertising campaign, which attracted 4.6 million applications.
Dewe himself was also an adviser to Guinness in its controversial 1986 takeover of Distillers. He “knew everyone and knew how to fix things in his clients’ favour”, according to one contemporary. A man of twinkling eye and inquisitive mind, he also had “that charming, almost lost, trait of actually enjoying work and looking like he was enjoying it”. His access and influence in high corporate and media circles paved the way for the PR titans of the modern era.
Roderick Gorrie Dewe was born at Kohat in India’s North West Frontier region (now Pakistan) on October 17 1935 and endured a nomadic wartime childhood. His mother Rona, née Heggie, was the second of five wives of his father, Douglas Dewe, an Army doctor. The family moved to Malaya in 1938 and fled to Singapore when the Japanese invaded; Douglas and Rona were divorced in 1942 but both became prisoners of war.
Young Roddy and his baby brother Michael escaped to Ceylon (now
Sri Lanka) with their father’s then girlfriend, Peggy Frampton, who became a mother to them for the duration, while Roddy attended a succession of schools around India. After the war he rejoined Rona briefly in England before voyaging with his father to South Africa and Rhodesia.
In 1954 he was back with his mother, by now remarried and settled in Jersey, and went to University College Oxford to read PPE. Undergraduate life was lived to the full – playing rugby, cricket and hockey and motoring up to jazz clubs in London; Roddy and two friends having subscribed £8 each to buy a car.
After graduating Dewe returned to Salisbury, Rhodesia to take a job in the Treasury of the Federation of Rhodesia and Nyasaland, then moved to Bombay, where he worked on a newspaper. Back in England in 1960, he was briefly a teacher before finding his métier as a protégé of Philip Syrett, whose firm, Angel Court Consultants, was an early exponent of financial PR.
Besides corporate work, Dewe Rogerson advised the SDP on its 1981 launch. In the early 1990s the firm expanded to New York, Hong Kong and Tokyo, and when it was sold in 1998 to the owners of its competitor, Citigate, partners and staff shared a payout of £27 million. With some 1,200 corporate clients, the merger created one of London’s top three PR players.
Dewe was a keen golfer and clubman (though he was blackballed from the Garrick) and a devotee of cryptic crosswords. In retirement he moved from London to the former railway station near Biggleswade which he had bought many years earlier as a weekend getaway, and wintered at an idyllic beach house in Sri Lanka, where he loved listening to the waves at night while watching fireflies and stars.
Roddy Dewe married Anne Beach Thomas in 1964; she survives him with their son and daughter.
Roddy Dewe, born October 17 1935, died March 18 2019