William ‘Bill’ Birch Reynardson
City businessman and chairman of Garsington Opera who published his fascinating wartime letters
WILLIAM “BILL” BIRCH REYNARDSON, who has died aged 93, was a soldier, lawyer, City businessman and countryman, with a passion for hunting and opera, serving as a popular chairman of the South Oxfordshire Hunt and chairman of Garsington Opera.
Well-connected, with a wry sense of humour, from his father Birch Reynardson inherited Adwell House, an early 18th century house in Oxfordshire set in seven acres of gardens – which he opened annually to support local charities. A traditionalist in matters of taste, he once asked a friend what he thought about the hi-tech Lloyd’s Building. When his friend said he liked it, Birch Reynardson responded: “You’re a pseud, I’m afraid.”
He was a partner at Thomas Miller, the shipping law and insurance firm, and for many years was vice-president of the Comité Maritime International. He had no betters when it came to steering meetings towards consensus. In the summer of 1982 he had to present a major report to Saudi Arabia’s minister for ports, on a draft maritime law for the Gulf Cooperation Council.
Over nearly an hour he took the minister section-by-section through 100 pages of legalese and at the end the minister expressed complete agreement with everything he had said. Birch Reynardson confided to a colleague afterwards that he had forgotten to bring his reading glasses and had conducted the presentation entirely from memory.
When there was a downturn in the shipping market in the mid-1980s, he sold the flat in Victoria that went with the job of senior partner, and gave up the firm’s butler and chauffeur as well as the weekly seats at Covent Garden.
Bill Birch Reynardson was born on December 7 1923. His father, Lt Col Henry Birch Reynardson, had been wounded at the Battle of Ctesiphon in Mesopotamia in 1915 and after the war worked as military secretary to Lords Athlone and Clarendon, Governors General of South Africa, where Bill spent his early years.
He was educated at Eton and Christ Church, Oxford, where his Law studies were interrupted by war. After winning the Belt of Honour at Sandhurst he was posted to Algiers to join the 9th Lancers. In June 1944 his regiment was posted to Italy, where he was involved in fierce action at the Battle of Coriano Ridge.
In October he was hit by mortar fire and ended up having three fingers amputated in a Rimini hospital, where he shared a room with Winston Churchill’s son Randolph and Evelyn Waugh: “They never stopped talking (seldom to me) and constantly drank whisky day and night. I was glad to move on.”
During the war, Birch Reynardson was “walking out” with Lorna Bailie (who later married Sir Gordon Palmer of Huntley & Palmers). For five years, between 1943 and 1948, Lorna wrote to her boyfriend almost every week (all her letters to him at the Front were burnt in Birch Reynardson’s tank) and she received 242 letters in return.
These formed the basis of a book Birch Reynardson wrote in 2008 called Letters to Lorna which provided a fascinating insight into the destructiveness of war.
After returning to Oxford to finish his degree, he was called to the Bar in 1952, practising briefly before joining the Chamber of Shipping and then Thomas Miller in 1960. He was senior partner from 1981 to 1988.
When the Torrey Canyon spilt its cargo of oil on the Scilly Isles in 1967 it was Birch Reynardson who teamed up with Lord Devlin to draft the Civil Liability Convention on which most international oil spill compensation law has been based since 1970.
He presided over the expansion of Miller’s, and several new businesses were started, including the Bar Mutual, which insures barristers in England and Wales against professional negligence claims.
In 1950, he married Nik Humphries, the daughter of General Sir Thomas Humphreys, with whom he had three children, moving into Adwell in 1959. He was appointed High Sherriff of Oxfordshire in 1974.
In the late 1980s, despite protestations from his wife, he began staging opera in the gardens of Adwell, and it came as some relief to her when Leonard Ingrams suggested that opera should be held at nearby Garsington instead. Birch Reynardson joined the board of Garsington in 1989 and became chairman on Ingrams’s death in 2005. He was instrumental in helping the opera move to his friend Paul Getty’s Wormsley estate.
Birch Reynardson was involved in many aspects of life in Oxfordshire and in 1997, when the government threatened to close down the local hospital in Watlington, he and a group of friends formed a trust which bought the hospital from the NHS and rebuilt it to modern standards. It is now a thriving care home.
He retired from Thomas Miller in 1992 and was appointed CBE.
His wife, who supported him devotedly, died in 1997 and some years later he moved from the big house to the Garden House, where he was looked after by his loyal housekeeper, Lorrie, who had worked for the family for 60 years.
Birch Reynardson is survived by two daughters and a son.