Sir David Plastow
Formidable businessman who revived the fortunes of Rolls-royce Motors in the turbulent 1970s
SIR DAVID PLASTOW, who has died aged 87, led a renaissance of Rolls-royce Motors after the collapse of its parent and took the historic car company into a successful merger with the Vickers engineering group, of which he became chief executive and chairman.
Plastow was only 38 when he was promoted to managing director of Rolls-royce’s cars division on January 1 1971. It was just ahead of the planned unveiling of the Corniche model – and, as it turned out, a month before the dramatic fall into receivership (and subsequent nationalisation) of the parent company, whose larger business was in aero engine manufacture, and whose finances had been overstretched by the development of the RB211 engine.
“We went bust and it all went up in smoke,” Plastow recalled. But the receiver allowed a glossy launch event for the Corniche to go ahead in the South of France and gave Plastow a £1 million budget to continue developing the ultra-expensive two-door Camargue, which would come to market four years later.
“In the short term, what we had to do was to show that Rolls-royce Motors had not been trampled down by the aero problem. We had to go like hell to sell as many cars as we could in order to give the impression that everything was fine. And it worked.”
The viability of the car factory at Crewe was proved, and in 1973 it was floated on the stock exchange as an independent company. Though output was small, its Rolls-royce and Bentley marques stood as beacons of excellence and export success amid the strike-torn landscape of the British motor industry of the time.
When Plastow became president of the Society of Motor Manufacturers & Traders in 1976, one columnist wrote that any Labour minister who chose to regard him as “just another golfplaying fanatic who sells ridiculously expensive cars with the help of a plummy accent and Savile Row suits is in for a shock”.
Tall, upright, courteous to a fault, Plastow did indeed have the attributes expected of a successful salesman for one of the world’s most exclusive brands. But he described himself as “a very ordinary sort of bloke” and gave much of the credit for Rolls-royce’s revival to the team around him.
His origins were relatively modest; his training was on the shop floor, where he was always at ease talking to his workforce, and his achievements were based on discipline, determination and drive rather than showmanship. A stickler for punctuality and detail, he was described by one industry peer as “a
formidable character who could walk into a top job anywhere”.
That reputation was widely seen as part of the rationale behind the 1980 merger of Rolls-royce and Vickers, the Tyneside engineer and maker of Chieftain tanks, for which Rolls-royce already supplied engines. One commentator noted that “Rolls-royce has the brains and Vickers has the money,” while another called the deal (valuing Rolls-royce at £40 million) “the most expensive British management transfer on record”.
Having recently had its shipbuilding business nationalised, Vickers was cash-rich but reckoned to lack talent at the top. Rolls-royce, by contrast, needed capital to complete the launch of the Silver Spirit and Bentley Mulsanne, but had the advantage of being run by Plastow, who was already a non-executive director at Vickers.
He became chief executive of the combined company and was its chairman from 1987 to 1992 in what was for the most part an era of solid success for both sides. Rolls-royce and Bentley sales reached an annual peak of 3,500 cars during the 1980s boom – although in the recession that followed that figure fell.
Plastow’s last task as chairman was to announce that the car company, which had fallen into losses, was for sale. No serious buyers came forward at the time, but later in the decade BMW acquired Rolls-royce while Bentley went to Volkswagen.
Plastow’s first reaction to the separation of the marques, together since 1931, was “one of horror … I was so cross I almost wrote a letter to The
Daily Telegraph.” But he recognised the global sales power of the two German owners and observed in 2015 (in an interview with The Spirit, the Rolls-royce enthusiasts’ magazine) that “both brands are looking bigger and stronger all the time.”
David Arnold Stuart Plastow was born on May 9 1932 at Grimsby, where one grandfather was a fishing magnate and the other chairman of Grimsby Town FC. David’s father Stuart – whom he described as “Victorian, strongly principled and very direct” – owned a local car dealership. A second mortgage on the family home paid David’s fees to Culford School at Bury St Edmunds, where he was head boy and captain of cricket.
David began his career as an apprentice machinist-fitter with Vauxhall at Luton in 1950, and spent two years’ National Service in an Army vehicle repair shop at Warminster. Having progressed from shop floor to sales, it was when he delivered a Vauxhall Velox to the Scottish motor show in 1957 that he met a counterpart from the Crewe factory and was recruited to become Rolls-royce sales manager for Scotland and the North, rising to marketing director in 1967.
In his later career Plastow was greatly in demand for his boardroom skills. He became deputy chairman of Guinness in 1987 as part of the team that restored the brewery group’s reputation after financial scandal. On retiring from Vickers he became chairman of Inchcape, the motor distribution group – pointing out to the press that he would be keeping the silver, long-wheelbase Bentley Turbo R that came with his previous job.
At various times he was deputy chairman of TSB and a non-executive director of Lloyds TSB, GKN, Legal & General and Cable & Wireless, and was active in representative bodies that included the CBI council and the British Overseas Trade Board. He was chairman of the Industrial Society, which campaigned for better shop-floor relations (1983-87), of the Medical Research Council (1990-98) and of the Royal Opera House Trust (1992-93).
He was also deputy chairman of Bupa, chancellor of the University of Luton and long-serving chair of the governors of Culford School. He was knighted in 1986.
A competitive but sociable golfer, Plastow was a member of the R&A and Royal St George’s and a past president of the Senior Golfers’ Society. He supported Hampshire cricket and Harlequins rugby, and in his Rolls-royce days he was president of Crewe Alexandra FC.
David Plastow married, in 1954, Barbara (Barbie) May, who had been a secretary at Vauxhall; they met in a works drama production. She survives him with their son and daughter.