He was one of a generation on whose shoulders and intellectual foresight the ACT of today is founded.” Paul Rose
These trailblazers built a formidable library of theory and practise which was both academic and highly practical in a way which had not been done before. The world of finance does not look the same from the perspective of a bank as it does form a corporate treasury.
Derek was a born Londoner who trained as a Chartered Accountant with Touche Ross and qualified with prizes in the exams. After a period in industry he returned to Touche Ross as a treasury management consultant. He became a prolific developer of ideas in the field of treasury both within and for the ACT and for Touche Ross creating a ground breaking treasury consultancy group. In the 1980s he joined the tax/technical committee of the ACT and soon became its Chairman. He was a prolific writer of books on treasury matters and wrote at least 8, four of them for the ACT: The Aspects of Financial Instruments, Financial Risk Management, Risk Management and Control of Derivatives, and jointly with John Grout, Foreign Exchange Risk for Non-Financial Corporations.
In the early 1990’s he went on to the Council of the ACT becoming Vice Chairman in 1993 which was a crisis recession year for the ACT. Trevor Harrison was Chairman of Council that year and carried the ACT through the crisis with some considerable risk taking and marvellous support from Derek who become a firm friend and the following year took over as Chairman with Trevor as President. Jeremy Wagner writes about this:
Derek was a very clever fellow. He was one of the ACT bigwigs who interviewed me for the Director General job in 1995 – in a City pub! Who do you know at the Bank, they asked me. I realised this didn’t mean my local Barclays branch so it was just as well that one of the deputy governors had been a colleague when I worked at The Economist. Derek always seemed to have a book for the ACT on the go which I was told he usually wrote whilst on holiday!”
Derek was a quiet and generally self-effacing professional but had a sharp Londoner’s sense of humour and didn’t suffer fools gladly.
His hobby was fast cars and motor sport including building his own kit car, as Ian Smailes recalls:
I knew him in the 90’s when he was lead consultant to our organisation on improving our cash forecasting. Though his treasury expertise was beyond question, the thing that impressed me most was the fact that he had built a Caterham Seven from scratch. I asked “how did you get on with the wiring looms?” He said “They didn’t match the wiring diagrams. So I rang the helpline and told them.” They said “Oh, they never do.” So he asked “How do I do it then?” They said “Trial and error”. He said “But that could take a week!!!” They said “That’s quite good going!” So he was a man of many parts and will be remembered and missed.”
The ACT have made a charity donation in Derek’s name.
