He was a shrewd and gregarious for all those things which are now so frowned upon in today’s dreary, box-ticking corporate world.
Here was a man who followed his hunches, disliked swearing, believed strongly in making dull things fun and enjoyed a glass (if not a bottle) of champagne every day of his adult life – right up to his death, announced yesterday, at the age of 100.
Along the way, Sir Patrick Sergeant also made the world of finance comprehensible to a new breed of investor, to the delight of millions of grateful Daily Mail readers over many decades.
For Sir Patrick was the visionary journalist who invented and built Euromoney magazine into one of the world’s pre-eminent financial publications, helping to transform the Eurobond market from a fringe pursuit into a global phenomenon.
As City editor of the Daily Mail, he developed the idea of personal finance as something for everyone.
Thanks to him, owning a share or building up a nest egg was no longer an opaque and impenetrable process for the wealthy. Rather, it was open to all through this newspaper’s award-winning Money Mail section.
Much imitated since, this was pioneering stuff in the Sixties when Sergeant took charge of the financial pages. Today’s ordinary shareholder is in his debt.
As a young man, he had served in the Royal Navy during the Second World War and as a ‘blue button’ (junior clerk) on the London Stock Exchange.
By the time he finally retired from life as a journalist and, latterly, as a main board director of major companies which always valued his wisdom, he had come to know prime ministers, presidents, chancellors and titans of trade, industry and finance. Yet he never pulled his punches when criticism was in order.
Long into old age, he was still enjoying tennis, the odd cigar, champagne and, above all, family life.
He died on Wednesday at the family home, in Highgate, North London, which he shared with his wife, Gillian, through 72 years of marriage, until her death earlier this year.
The couple are survived by their daughters, Harriet, the author and journalist, and Emma, the distinguished painter, war artist and royal tour artist whom Prince Charles commissioned to sketch several trips, including the first royal tour of Ukraine.
As Viscount Rothermere, chairman of the Daily Mail and General Trust plc, said yesterday: ‘Sir Patrick Sergeant personified the best of the British. From his heroics in WWII to being a legendary City editor of the Daily Mail to becoming the founder of a billion-pound company, he was, and is, an inspiration to so many of us who loved him very much.
‘He was a huge presence, mentor and inspiration in my life. Sir Patrick never lost his sense of fun and optimism, love of hard work and duty to his readers, shareholders and employees; but, he always knew that his family came first and mattered the most.’
Sir Patrick was born on March 17, 1924, to George Sergeant, a wealthy coal merchant, and his wife, Rene. According to family legend, Rene went into labour while on a ship returning from France, cementing her son’s lifelong love of the sea.
His mother’s family were devout Catholics and he was sent to the Jesuit public school, Beaumont College, Windsor, where he excelled at sport, especially cricket, until his father ran into financial difficulties and he was forced to leave.
With war on the horizon, he enlisted as a Royal Navy cadet, showing a strong aptitude for code-making and code-breaking before going to sea at 18 as a lieutenant in the Royal Navy Volunteer Reserve.
After serving in the Atlantic convoys, he took command of a corvette. ‘He always said that he was very lucky in the war. The worst thing he remembered was finding a lifeboat full of dead men,’ Emma recalled yesterday.
‘His attempts at introducing the crew to a healthier diet were a disaster. But one of the reasons he never swore in later life was that he had endured so much swearing in the Navy that he said it put him off for life. The worst he would ever say about someone was that they were a ‘twit’.’
During one leave ashore, he was attending a family reunion in London when an enemy bomb injured the guests so badly that his grandmother never recovered. Sergeant himself received facial injuries and was lucky not to be blinded by a shard of glass above his eye.
After the war, he embarked on a career in the City, starting at the bottom with long-established brokers Mullens & Co, but soon realised his talents lay elsewhere.
In 1948, he tried his luck as a journalist, joining the City desk of the News Chronicle. Those early years shaped his belief that ‘journalism is about people bringing their imagination to writing on subjects they understand’.
The Chronicle was absorbed into the Daily Mail where, in 1953, Sergeant became deputy City editor, but did not confine himself to dry reports of the ups and downs on the markets.
After the death of Stalin, he took himself off to report on potential business opportunities in the USSR, even turning his experiences into a book, Another Road To Samarkand. It opened his eyes to the need for financial journalism to adopt a global outlook.
Promoted to City editor, in 1966 he hatched the idea of ‘family finance’, both for the benefit of the readers and as a means of driving advertising revenue. As a result, this paper’s Money Mail section was born. Three years later he persuaded the Mail’s proprietor, the 2nd Viscount Rothermere, to invest in a new publication aimed at the international capital markets.
Euromoney was launched and, through fine writing and innovative ideas – such as the introduction of awards for funds or finance ministers – it became required reading for all the major players on the world stage.
Sergeant was a fixture at every annual meeting of the International Monetary Fund where his champagne reception was a welcome antidote to some of the more earnest conference sessions.
In due course, Euromoney went from being a small British start-up to gobbling up its much larger American equivalent, Institutional Investor.
Immaculately dressed and a man of great charm and good humour, Sergeant was often mistaken for one of the City or Wall Street grandees about whom he was writing.
His journalism won him awards, while his business acumen and Euromoney bonuses made him Britain’s highest-paid journalist during the boom times of the Thatcher years.
After he retired from the Mail in 1984, he joined its parent company’s board, where he remained for years afterwards. Throughout it all, his greatest love was family life.
‘We adored being with him and every holiday was a great adventure,’ Harriet recalls. ‘He was particularly keen on skiing and liked the finest powder snow, though the guide was always under instruction to find the broadest slopes as he had quite a wide turning circle.’
When, during a holiday in Thailand, Harriet expressed a determination to follow him into journalism, her father set her a task: she had to approach the Chinese embassy in Bangkok and ask if they would like to buy the British embassy and then ask the British embassy if they were prepared to sell the building to the Chinese.
‘It was terrifying but it was great training for later life. However difficult a story might be, the main thing was just to turn up. As my father would say: ‘If you turn up somewhere, something always happens’.’
There was one pursuit, however, in which Sergeant was ruthless, even with his own family. ‘I had to give up family tennis in the end as he was just too competitive,’ Emma recalls. ‘He was always determined to win.’ A keen member of the All England Club, he would organise an annual tournament with a family friend who ran the tennis department at Eton.
‘Patrick loved tennis and used to bring a team of City friends to play against the school’s 1st VI,’ recalls one, who was at the school during the Eighties.
‘It was always after A-Levels so there would be a pretty lavish picnic and Patrick’s hospitality was legendary with the best wine. One year, the entire team had such a good time they were later found fast asleep in a field.’
Such was Sergeant’s determination to win, even in his 80s, that he once turned up with an oddly familiar tennis partner – former Wimbledon champion, Pat Cash.
Ultimately, it was that same competitive instinct which ensured he delivered the best for his staff, who were devoted to him, for his employers and, above all, for his readers.
Looking back on the recipe for success, he reflected: ‘If we were to succeed, we must be different, educational and entertaining.’