Tony Garrett
Leading tobacco industry executive and music lover who promoted business sponsorship of the arts
TONY GARRETT, who has died aged 99, was a leader of the British tobacco industry and – as a matter of commercial pragmatism as well as personal enthusiasm – a pioneer in business sponsorship of the arts.
Garrett was chairman and managing director of John Player & Sons from 1968 and chairman of its parent Imperial Tobacco – part of the wider Imperial Group, which also owned consumer brands such as Golden Wonder crisps and Courage beers – from 1973 to 1979.
The group’s leading cigarette brands, Embassy and Players No 6, accounted for a large chunk of the UK market in an era when more than half of British men and an only slightly lower proportion of women still smoked. But the connections between tar and nicotine, lung cancer and heart disease were by then well established, and cigarette marketing was increasingly constrained.
Television advertising had been banned in 1965, but sports sponsorship offered an effective way of building brand visibility. Garrett – both a keen sportsman and in those days an Embassy and small-cigar smoker – was instrumental in attaching the John Player name to cricket, rugby league and golf competitions as well as the Lotus Formula 1 team, though new rules obliged the company to remove its “JPS” livery from the cars in 1975.
Garrett also loved music, and in 1976 he collaborated with Lord Goodman to found the Association for Business Sponsorship of the Arts (later Arts & Business) – for which Imperial Tobacco initially provided office space and secretarial staff. Other companies were gradually recruited to what was for most of them at that time an unexplored opportunity, and ABSA awards were instituted to celebrate the most imaginative sponsorships.
The new venture recognised that commercial support for the arts could rarely be altruistic. Companies expected payback in terms of image and connections – and encountered some hostility from those who felt the arts should by rights depend on taxpayer subsidy rather than the whims of businessmen’s tastes.
But public funding was becoming permanently squeezed, while Goodman was able to point out after a decade as ABSA chairman (with Garrett as his deputy) that he had never seen an example of artistic interference by a corporate sponsor: fears that Gilbert and Sullivan would be substituted for Wagner, or Hamlet given a happy ending, “have turned out to be wholly baseless”. The amount of corporate cash directed to the arts, estimated in 1973 to be as little as £250,000, rose by the mid-1980s, with ABSA as a catalyst, to more than £20 million – and multiplied thereafter.
The youngest of three brothers, Richard Anthony Garrett was born near Cardiff on July 4 1918 and educated at King’s School, Worcester. In 1936 he started work at WD & HO Wills of Bristol, one of 13 companies that had come together in 1901 to create Imperial Tobacco.
Already a territorial soldier, Garrett was called up at the beginning of the war and commissioned into the 2nd Royal Gloucester Hussars in January 1941. He later served as a captain with the 22nd Dragoons, landing in Normandy on D Day plus two after 36 uncomfortable hours at anchor offshore. His squadron fought across the Low Countries into Germany, their tanks finally going “flat out down an autobahn” to a position north of Bremen. Garrett was mentioned in despatches at the end of the war alongside his brother officer and friend, the actor Ian Carmichael.
Returning to Wills, Garrett became a product development manager and played a part in the highly successful 1962 launch of Embassy Filter, which came with coupons redeemable for gifts. He was general manager for Scotland, based at Gartocharn, before moving to Wills’ sister company John Player & Sons in Nottingham. There he launched another new brand, Players No 10 – Britain’s cheapest cigarette, at 3s 10d for 20.
He returned to Bristol as deputy chairman of Imperial in 1972. After retiring from the group, he was chairman of the diary publisher Dataday and vice chairman of HTV, the independent television franchise for Wales and the west of England. He was a trustee of the Royal Opera House and Glyndebourne, where Imperial sponsored a series of productions in the early 1980s, with the “JPS” livery adorning the lorries that transported the London Philharmonic to and from the Sussex opera house.
Garrett was also chairman of the Bath Festival, and from 1980 to 1987 chairman of the National Association of Boys Clubs, for which he led a £1 million fundraising drive. He was appointed CBE in 1987.
As a young man, Garrett was a powerful second-row forward for Clifton rugby club (where he was later president) and played four times for Gloucestershire, including in the 1949 county championship final, lost to Lancashire. In later years he was also president of Bristol & Clifton golf club, where he played until he was 91.
Tony Garrett married, first in 1946, Marie Dalglish; she died in 1999 and he married secondly, in 2000, Nancy Wise, who survives him with a son and two daughters of the first marriage, a third daughter having predeceased him.
Tony Garrett, born July 4 1918, died October 24 2017