Sir John Craven
Financier who was instrumental in many of the mergers during the City ‘Big Bang’ of the 1980s
SIR JOHN CRAVEN, who has died aged 81, was one of the City’s most influential dealmakers, having brokered many of the marriages of banks and stock exchange firms that formed the Big Bang revolution of the mid-1980s.
After a stellar early career in the Eurobond markets with Warburgs and Credit Suisse White Weld, Craven formed his own advisory firm, Phoenix Securities, in 1981 to specialise in bespoke advisory work and capitalraisings. Trusted by his City peers, discreet and independent, he was perfectly placed to intermediate in the take-your-partners scramble that followed the announcement in 1983 of rule changes – known as Big Bang and effective from October 1986 – that would allow British and foreign banks to buy up stockbroking and jobbing firms with the ambition of creating securities trading houses akin to the giants of Wall Street.
The Phoenix team had a hand in some two-thirds of all the significant deals that followed across the sector. In some cases their role was to persuade banks – including Americans such as Chase Manhattan, which in due course acquired two broking firms, Laurie Milbank and Simon & Coates – of the attractions on offer. In others, they sought to steer partnerships such as the leading jobbers Wedd Durlacher (bought by Barclays at a bumper price) towards the most suitable new owners.
“We always tried to get the partners to focus on longer-term issues such as the strengths and weaknesses of the banks they would join,” Craven recalled, “but I’m bound to say it was not always possible to convince them to think of anything other than top dollar.”
With Craven having had such a central role in this self-reinvention of the City, his reputation stood high – and in 1987 he was approached to become chief executive of Morgan Grenfell, the merchant bank that had stained its name and shed a layer of senior management after the Guinness share scandal. He accepted on condition that Morgan Grenfell bought Phoenix Securities, but found challenges awaiting him on several fronts, not least in the coolness of his reception when he took command.
A low moment came in December 1988 when he took the decision – the most difficult of his life, he said later – to close Morgan Grenfell Securities, formed at Big Bang from the brokers Pember & Boyle and jobbers Pinchin Denny, which was losing £1million a week. Some 770 jobs had to be axed and emotions ran high: “We had one or two young chaps bashing down computer screens, and one joker before he left phoned the weather announcement in Sydney and left the phone hanging. We found it 24 hours later.”
When a sale of Morgan Grenfell itself looked inevitable, Craven’s deal-making instinct came into play to secure £950 million from Deutsche Bank at the end of 1989. Again, some colleagues were disgruntled: “Somebody said this is a terrible defeat,” Craven observed. “I think it is a tremendous achievement.”
In fact the relationship with the new German owners worked well, at least in the initial years. With Craven now chairman, Morgan Grenfell was able to expand in Europe and further afield and, as Euromoney magazine put it, “prove its critics wrong”.
John Anthony Craven was born at Leominster on October 23 1940, the son of William Craven, an engineer, and his wife Hilda, née Magness. When William’s work took the family to South Africa, John was educated at Michaelhouse near Pietermaritzberg, returning to England in 1958 to read Law at Jesus College, Cambridge.
After graduating he took off – like many bright young men of his generation – for Canada, where he trained as an accountant in Toronto and worked for the leading investment bank Wood Gundy. In 1967 he returned to London, having been talent-spotted to join the fast-rising firm of SG Warburg & Co, specialising in eurobond issuance and becoming a director two years later – reputedly the youngest in any City merchant bank at that time.
The hothouse pressure of working for the bank’s founder Siegmund Warburg eventually wore Craven down, and he left in 1973 to join Credit Suisse White Weld, an American-swiss venture that was also making a name in the City under another euromarket pioneer, Stanislas Yassukovich. After a stint in Tokyo, Craven succeeded Yassukovich as chief executive but departed in 1978, having opposed a merger which created the new firm of Credit Suisse First Boston.
Driven and determined, formidable in his grasp of detail and capacity to dictate flawless deal documents at speed, Craven was at his best working with small, hand-picked teams in advisory roles and negotiations. But he did not relish the limelight – “the cult of the personality in finance has gone much too far,” he once observed – or the boardroom politics of larger organisations.
He rejoined Warburgs in 1979 in the expectation of becoming chairman, but when that role went to another Siegmund protégé, David Scholey, he moved to become head of European investment banking at the US giant Merrill Lynch – where he found his autonomy constrained and his surroundings uncongenial.
He and another senior recruit, the City grandee David Montagu (Lord Swaythling), famously refused to use Merrill’s in-house lunch facilities, declaring: “The Savoy Grill is our canteen.” Craven swiftly moved on, gathering an able group of friends and former colleagues around him at Phoenix.
He retired in 1997 from what was by then Deutsche Morgan Grenfell and which soon afterwards would drop Morgan Grenfell’s name altogether. He was also at various times chairman of Patagonia Gold, Lonmin (formerly Lonrho) and Tootal, a director of Rothmans and Reuters, and a board member of the Royal Marsden NHS Trust.
He was chairman from 2003 to 2007 of Fleming Family & Partners, having helped the family in 2000 to negotiate the £4 billion sale of their bank, Robert Fleming, to Chase Manhattan, while at the same time rescuing its celebrated Scottish art collection.
John Craven was knighted in 1996. He was a keen skier, and in later years, encouraged by his third wife Ning, he found relaxation in playing the piano.
He married first, in 1961, Gill Murray, with whom he had a son and a daughter, and secondly, in 1970, Jane Stiles-allen, with whom he had three sons. Both marriages were dissolved, and he married thirdly, in 2005, Ning Chang, who died in 2009. He is survived by his five children.