Barry Reed
Decorated Korean War veteran who as boss of Austin Reed brought dynamism and flared trousers
BARRY REED, who has died aged 89, was chairman and managing director of Austin Reed, the menswear chain founded by his grandfather, after winning an MC as a platoon commander in the Korean War.
The eponymous Austin Reed (1873-1954) was a pioneer of 20thcentury retailing who used stylish marketing as well as attention to quality to build a brand with enduring appeal to the clothes-conscious rising executive class.
His first shop opened at Fenchurch St in the City in 1900 – initially as a branch of his family’s established business as hatters and hosiers in Reading – and a flagship Regent Street outlet followed in 1911. “We are pre-eminently a shirt house,” he declared, though he also sold a wider range of hosiery, haberdashery, hats and raincoats.
That range expanded in the 1920s to include “New Tailoring”, a euphemism for off-the-peg suits and formalwear, and in the 1930s branches were installed on Cunard liners for the sartorial convenience of a glittering transatlantic clientele.
The firm made Winston Churchill’s wartime “siren suits” and acquired a first royal warrant as hosier to George VI. After the war, Austin’s son Douglas took charge – and it was Douglas’s son Barry, as a director from 1958, who brought new dynamism to the brand as men’s fashions changed with the social tide of the 1960s.
At a time when sons no longer necessarily wanted to dress like their fathers, Barry led the creation of an in-store department called Cue, inspired by Carnaby Street, which – as his father
reported to shareholders – brought in a breed of shopper “who we never saw before”.
To Douglas’s greater surprise, the bolder, closer-fitting lines (and flared trousers) even appealed to many of the firm’s older customers.
Barry Reed was managing director of Austin Reed from 1966 to 1985 and chairman from 1973 to 1996. Under his leadership the branch network extended throughout the UK, the brand reached across the Atlantic and the first womenswear department, called Options, opened in the early 1980s.
The business flourished
throughout his era, but faded in the decades that followed; though the brand still exists, the original Austin Reed company fell into administration in 2016.
Barry St George Austin Reed was born in Hertfordshire on May 5 1931, the eldest son of Douglas Reed and his wife Mary Ellen, née Philpott. Barry’s middle brother Laurance became a Tory MP; the youngest, Peter, also joined the family business.
Barry was educated at Rugby and commissioned into 1 Battalion Middlesex Regiment for National Service. From November 1950 to May 1951, he commanded a platoon without a break and with “great dash and determination”, according to the citation for his Military Cross: “He never hesitated to get to grips with the enemy.”
At Kapyong (Gapyeong) – on a key route for Chinese forces pushing south towards Seoul – in the early hours of April 25 1951 the battalion’s D Company was advancing to protect the flank of an Australian command post that was in danger of being overrun when they came under heavy fire.
Amid darkness and confusion, four of six men in Reed’s lefthand section were wounded, but “at great personal danger to himself ” he rallied the section and drove off the attack, saving the company from being encircled and enabling it to withdraw with all its wounded.
Reed left the Army to gain experience in the menswear trade at Harrods, in Europe and in North America before joining Austin Reed in 1953. Swiftly promoted to merchandising director, he brought to the executive group, mostly of Douglas’s generation, what the company’s historian described as “first-hand knowledge of what a young man really fancied in the way of dress”.
Meanwhile he remained a territorial officer until 1960, retiring with the rank of major. In 2010 he was an honoured visitor to South Korea as a member of a Commonwealth veterans group.
In his later career, Reed was president of the Menswear Association and the Royal Warrant Holders Association, Master of the Glovers’ Company (1980-81), chairman of the Retail Alliance and active in numerous other trade bodies. He was also a regional board director of Natwest for the City and West End, and a deputy lieutenant for Greater London. He was appointed CBE in 1988.
A major change for Austin Reed at the end of the 1960s was the move of its office headquarters and main factory from London to Thirsk in North Yorkshire. Barry Reed acquired a handsome home nearby at Crakehall and – though still prominent in the London retail scene – established himself as a genial presence in Yorkshire country life.
He was active in the diocesan synod and board of finance for Ripon and Leeds, and president of the Vale of York Conservatives.
Barry Reed married first, in 1956, Patricia (always known as “Mike”) Bristow, who died in 2002, and secondly, in 2005, Mary Rose Farquharson (née Lee Warner), who survives him with a son and daughter of the first marriage.