Dick Sargent
Popular Oxford don who went on to found the economics department at Warwick University
DICK SARGENT, who has died aged 96, was one of the foremost economists of his generation, loved for his humanity, wit and decency as well as his academic brilliance.
Loss and bereavement throughout his early life strengthened his resolve and he became a respected Oxford don before founding the economics department at Warwick University.
John Richard Sargent, an only child, was born on March 22 1925 at Edgbaston in Birmingham into a prosperous middle-class family. His father John was an education officer from London while his mother Ruth (née Taunton), a gifted tennis player, was the only child of a Birmingham businessman.
She died of cancer when he was seven and he went to live with his maternal grandparents, his grandmother Agnes, a social worker and JP, proving a kind, lively substitute mother.
Aged eight, Dick went to boarding school, first at the Dragon in Oxford and later at Rugby.
In 1939 his father went to India as education adviser to the government and was later knighted for his service. The young Sargent did not see him again until after the end of the war. He faced further heartbreak when his grandmother died of cancer in 1941.
Despite these setbacks, he showed typical resilience, excelling at Rugby where he specialised in classics, became head boy and won a scholarship to Christ Church, Oxford. An enthusiastic joiner-in, he was leading lady to Robert Hardy’s Lord Peter Wimsey in the school play, Busman’s Holiday.
Sargent served in the Navy for the last two years of the war, and a fortnight after D-day in June 1944 he relished the hazardous task of escorting the components for a Mulberry harbour across the Channel. “We couldn’t think what was happening,” he recalled, “a mass of slow-moving tugs towing huge lumps of concrete and enormous reels of piping. Fortunately the Luftwaffe was otherwise occupied, but on one occasion we had to dodge some shells from the German batteries on their side of the Dover Strait.”
After joining a frigate at Colombo in Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) in 1945, he enjoyed the challenge of navigation using only traditional methods.
He would later tell his family: “When you chaps are fiddling about with your car satnavs, I recall rather smugly that I got the ship all the way from Karachi to Portsmouth with the aid of a compass and a sextant – and, of course, the stars above.”
At Oxford Sargent took a First in PPE and in 1949 married Anne Haigh, who later became chairman and then managing director of her family firm, J&J Cash Ltd, a Coventry-based business that made woven nametapes.
Two years later he was appointed economics Fellow at Worcester College and proved so popular that his students often joined the family on Cornish holidays, jokily copying his catchphrases like: “That is a view that has been held.”
Among his pupils was the teenage Rupert Murdoch, at the time reputedly more interested in politics than economics.
In 1965, after a short spell at the Treasury, Sargent became founding Professor of Economics at Warwick University, assembling a strong team in the new department, with an emphasis on mathematics and econometrics.
One outstanding student, the future cabinet secretary Gus, now Lord, O’donnell, said: “He really did inspire me and was a very good teacher and economist.” Sargent was touched when the university created a Chair in Economics in his name in 2018.
With the department established, and finding his time dominated more by administration than economics, he left in 1973 to become Group Economic Adviser at Midland Bank in the City.
He handled the culture change, from cardigan to pinstripe suit and from academe to working for a demanding new boss nicknamed “God” throughout the bank.
Soon afterwards he set up the Clare Group of economists, assembled at the nadir of the British economy in 1976 to propose ways out of the abyss. He also carried out unpaid work for publicsector pay-review bodies. With typical resourcefulness, Sargent once stood in at short notice to chair the J&J Cash AGM as his wife was ill.
Although the company was facing a contentious takeover bid which had divided the family shareholders and he had had little time to prepare, he was praised for his skilful chairmanship.
Despite describing work as his recreation, he was a hands-on father to his three children and later his grandchildren, relishing cricket practice on the lawn or loading ponies into trailers. He loved poetry and enjoyed composing limericks to entertain the family, such as:
There was a young man of Thermopylae
Who challenged his Dad to Monopoly When his Dad won the game
He said ‘Ain’t it a shame
That you’ve never quite mastered it properly?’
A keen gardener, he liked building dry stone walls, as well as watching cricket, theatre and opera. Pantomime was a particular favourite and he was disappointed when his grandchildren eventually grew out of it, feeling he could not go on his own.
Sargent’s first marriage ended in divorce, but within a couple of years he found lasting love with Hester Campbell, the widow of an Oxford don. They married in 1980 and lived in Islington until he retired from the bank, then moved to Fulbrook in the Cotswolds.
He was bereft when Hester died suddenly in 2004 but he continued working, writing a book and numerous articles up to 18 months before his death.
Dick Sargent is survived by his three children.
Dick Sargent, born March 22 1925, died March 14 2022