The Daily Telegraph - Saturday
Jeffrey Rose
Car enthusiast and RAC chief who modernised both the Pall Mall club and the breakdown service
JEFFREY ROSE, who has died aged 92, was a reforming chairman of the Royal Automobile Club until he fell out with his board over the issue of demutualisation; he was also a prominent figure in international motorsport.
Rose was a long-time car enthusiast, but originally joined the RAC to play squash at its Pall Mall clubhouse. In 1977 he was enlisted on to a committee charged with rescuing the club from near bankruptcy; having made an impact in that role he became deputy chairman and succeeded as chairman – the first full-time salaried holder of the post – in 1981.
He oversaw healing of past wounds, as well as extensive renovation, improved catering and a renewal of the clubhouse lease from the Crown Estate. He also brought modernisation to RAC Motoring Services, which provided roadside breakdown assistance for more than five million associate members.
Having presided with aplomb over a lavish centenary programme in 1997, he was approaching retirement – but his actual departure came, as the club’s own magazine recorded, “in a quite unexpected manner”.
In March 1998, without consulting his board, he wrote to the RAC’s 12,000 full members recommending the demutualisation and stock market flotation of the motoring services arm, which he estimated to be worth £240 million, representing a potential £20,000 windfall per member.But the board promptly sacked Rose as chairman and suspended his membership – while revealing that it had appointed advisers to work on a similar proposal at a higher valuation.
A headline-making fracas ensued, in which Rose lobbied dissident support for the removal of the board, which nevertheless proceeded to an auction of the motoring subsidiary in which Cendant Corporation from New Jersey emerged as top bidder at £450 million.
But the bid fell away after ministers insisted that Cendant should sell the Green Flag breakdown service it already owned, and the business was finally sold to Lex Service group in May 1999 for £437 million, yielding £34,000 per member.
Again quoting the club itself, “the passage of time would eventually heal relationships… Jeffrey was appointed a vice president and life member of the club and remained a convivial presence in Pall Mall.”
Jeffrey David Rose was born in Southend on July 2 1931 to Samuel Rose, a jewellery designer, and his wife Daisy, née Bentley. Having been head boy of Southend High School, he was commissioned in the Royal Artillery for National Service.
A Left-winger in his youth, Rose read law at the London School of Economics and was chairman of the LSE Labour Society. But after his father’s death in 1954 he gave up hopes of reading for the Bar, so as to earn money to support his mother and himself. A holiday job in a firm that insured television sets – in those days expensive to buy and sometimes very expensive to maintain – led Rose to start in the same field, in Leeds, where he acquired a fleet of repair vans and later moved into television rental.
After selling the business, he ventured into discount retailing and became active in property development and investment. That took him back to London – and to Paris, where his last transaction before taking up the RAC reins was the purchase of three grand hotels on behalf of Sir Maxwell Joseph’s Grand Metropolitan group.
Paris was also the base of the Féderation Internationale de l’Automobile, the governing body of motorsport. Rose was a vice-president from 1983 until 1993, when he stood for the presidency against the former racing driver Max Mosley.
Mosley’s behind-the-scenes lobbying outflanked the challenge from Rose, who eventually withdrew, having (according to one report) “fail[ed] to realise that in the foreign world, elections are not won from the platform but along the corridors.”
Rose returned to the FIA vice-presidency from 1994 to 1996. He was also involved in the British Road Federation, the Institute of the Motor Industry and the Institute of Advanced Motorists, and was chairman of the Commonwealth Motoring Conference.
He chaired the Brain and Spine Foundation, was a trustee of Brooklands Museum, a council member of the Prince’s Youth Business Trust and a past master of the Worshipful Company of Coachmakers and Coach Harness Makers.
He was appointed CBE in 1991. In later years he lived in Albany, off Piccadilly, and enjoyed good food and wine, music and reading, particularly PG Wodehouse. His 90th birthday was celebrated in the RAC’s Great Gallery restaurant – for which as chairman he had commissioned a redecoration worthy of Versailles.
Rose married first, in 1958, Joyce Clompus; the marriage was dissolved in 1999, and that year he married secondly, Helga Dusauzay (dissolved 2001). He is survived by two daughters and a son of his first marriage.