Travers Reid

Visionary businessman who launched research into childhood stammering

BUSINESSMAN TRAVERS Reid, who has died aged 89, proved his entrepreneurial flair with the launch of his women’s fashion firm Travers Tempos. Back in the UK after attempting aliyah in 1977, he opened The Perfect Pizza, followed by several other pizza take-outs and restaurants.

But having suffered from stammering all his life, he set up a charity to boost research and help children and young people gain access to help denied him during his own childhood. His vision: a world without stammering.

He joined Speech and Language Therapist Lena Rustin to launch The Association of Research into Stammering in Childhood in 1989, raising funds to provide information videos, raise awareness and develop therapy programmes.

It became a unique, ongoing partnership between the charity and the NHS. In 1991 Travers contacted Michael Palin, whose father suffered from stammering, and two years later the Michael

Palin Centre for Stammering Children, was born. Today it is an internation centre of excellence, helping thousands of children and young people to overcome and deal with their stammering.

Travers visited the Centre regularly, meeting children, young people and their families, keenly supporting the team of therapists, the teaching and research programme, and proving that personal and professional potential can be reached despite having a stammer.

He founded the annual Travers Reid Award to encourage and celebrate research into stammering conducted by student speech and language therapists. In October, 2015 Travers was made a Fellow of the Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists.

He received many plaudits, met Prince Charles at Clarence House, and attended two receptions at 10 Downing Street, and the House of Commons. In May last year, despite poor health, he and his wife attended the 30th anniversary celebration of his charity.

Travers Reid was born Boris Rabski in Whitechapel to Selena and Barney Rabski and grew up in Hayes Middlesex, educated at Townfield School, Hayes and Ealing School of Art where he studied graphic design. He met Sandra Lewis in Brighton and on December 28, 1958, they married, last year celebrating their 60th anniversary. Travers was noted for his sense of humour, loving Bilko, Only Fools and Horses, Dads Army and Monty Python. He was a devotee of Jazz and Yiddish, airplanes, boats and cars. Travers took pride in his grandchildren, and going on Israel tour and birthright trips meant a great deal to him.

Michael Palin, described Travers Reid in The Telegraph as a “successful businessman and a very funny, warm and altogether lovely man” who asked if he would support the establishment of a centre for the particular treatment of stammering in children.

“My father’s silent suffering came immediately to mind. Here was just the sort of thing that might have changed his life: a therapy whose aim was to spot a stammer from the first moment it manifests itself, which can be as early as three years old.

“I agreed, and the Michael Palin Centre for Stammering Children opened in the Finsbury Health Centre in central London. We had one full-time and one part-time therapist. And there was nowhere else quite like it in the country.”

Nearly 18 years later the centre has 10 full-time therapists and in 2008 received £340,000 in government funds to extend the centre’s expertise nationwide. Discussions are in progress to create something similar in the north of England. The invaluable political clout of former Labour Shadow Chancellor Ed Balls, now Merseyside Mayor, with his own experience of stammering, led him to secure unprecedented government backing for the work of the Centre.

Travers is survived by his wife Sandra, children Rina Davis and Richard Reid and grandchildren Samantha Davis, Toby Davis, Aaron Reid and Josh Reid RINA DAVIS

Travers Reid: born August 8, 1930. Died October 17,2019