Derek Coombs was a shrewd businessman who made a fortune on the back of a well-timed move into high street finance in the late 1970s. He was also a man of liberal sensibilities and broad political and cultural interests.
The two sides to him came together often in his career, but most importantly in one of the final acts of his eventful and fruitful life—in his decision to become the main financial backer of the fledgling Prospect magazine in the late 1990s. Without that decision it is very unlikely that the magazine you are now reading—heading for its 20th anniversary—would exist at all.
After his political career as a one-term Tory MP for Birmingham Yardley (1970 to 1974), Derek continued to take an interest in public affairs, as a kind of Whiggish centrist, and one increasingly without a party political home. He was disillusioned with the harshness of the Margaret Thatcher turn in the Conservative Party and with its increasingly anti-European Union instincts, yet he never felt completely comfortable with Labour. Along with many such people he saw in Tony Blair’s New Labour the possibility of a new dawn, combining the best traditions of the two main parties.
But in the run up to the political watershed of 1997, Derek had another concern: the declining quality of the British media under the influence of Rupert Murdoch. In his typically hands-on quest to do something about this he decided to become a small press baron himself.
Initially his aim was to buy his way into an existing magazine. In characteristically cross-party manner he knocked at the door of both the Spectator and the New Statesman. He ended up buying neither, though he got quite close with the New Statesman, where his past Conservative commitments counted against him. There were also discussions with Roy Hattersley about reviving Punch magazine and with Martin Jacques, the former Editor of Marxism Today, about launching a new centre-left weekly to challenge the New Statesman, which had become a shadow of its former self.
Fortunately, from the point of view of this magazine, these talks came to nothing. But news of them had leaked into the gossip columns, and as I and Charles Seaford, Prospect’s first publisher, were knocking on doors trying to raise £350,000—the minimum we thought we needed to launch Prospect—Derek’s name was added to our list of potential investors.
By chance I had met Derek once before as a teenager on holiday with my father in Davos when both were competing in the annual skiing race between British and Swiss MPs. That connection was not much help in bridging the rather large gap between our publishing ambitions. Derek wanted to create a politically-engaged news magazine. I had in mind an essay-based monthly that was more about understanding the world than changing it.
One of Derek’s regrets was that he never went to university. It meant that he was often underestimated by his opponents, something he became adept at exploiting.We agreed to disagree but Derek was clearly impressed enough with our idea, and perhaps more important our hunger to succeed, to invest £100,000 in the start-up. Alongside our army of small investors that made Derek the largest single backer of Prospect right from the start, though initially with only about 20 per cent of the equity.
We were in some ways an odd couple: the impatient businessman schooled in the university of life and the unworldly ex-Financial Times journalist yearning to publish long essays on the dilemmas of contemporary liberalism. Our relationship had to navigate many disputes and conflicts—especially in those early days—but a mutual respect developed that saw us through the rough patches.
Derek was used to getting his own way, a quality that had underpinned his business success, but he gradually came round to the view that there was a cultural (and perhaps even commercially viable) space for an American-style intellectual monthly. And that was just as well because when our initial capital ran out—which, despite operating on the thinnest of shoe-strings, it did after issue eight—we needed him to back us further.
There were plenty of others to declare (in a phrase I came to hate!) that we were a “succès d’estime” but very few people who were prepared to extend support with their hard earned cash. Derek was not the only one and the Schwepcke family deserve an honourable mention in the Prospect story. But when it came to boardroom control, Derek was not someone who liked to share. His single-mindedness ensured he became Chairman and de facto majority shareholder of the magazine until he sold his stake in 2008 (his wife Jennifer remains a director).
In those years from 1996 to 2008 Derek helped to steer the magazine from fragile newcomer to established voice and his contrarian instincts matched our own. He was always full of energy and ideas, and when it came to selecting personnel had a shrewd eye for an effective “doer” (the highest praise in the Derek lexicon). He also wrote several trenchant commentaries for the magazine on subjects ranging from London traffic to the causes of the First World War.
Derek’s life was a busy and blessed one. He was born in Solihull in 1931 into what came to be one of the leading Birmingham business families. His father Clifford, originally from South Wales, was a self-made man who started the S&U (standing for sports and utilities) department-store chain in 1938. Derek, after Bromsgrove school and national service with the Royal Artillery Company, entered the family firm but prospered there mainly through his own efforts.
In 1959 he married Patricia O’Toole, sister of the actor Peter, with whom he had two children: Sian (1967) and Fiann (1968). The O’Toole connection gave him a taste for Irish politics and for life as a cultural impresario.
These were years of adventure, too. Through his friendship with the film director John Huston he ended up being present in the Havana Hilton in January 1959 when Fidel Castro gave his first television interview (to Ed Morrow). And two years later, while visiting his brother-in-law on the set of Lawrence of Arabia in Jordan, he dined with Kim Philby shortly before his defection.
It was through involvement with the business side of Peter O’Toole’s acting career that Derek nearly bought the film rights to the first four James Bond films. But the project was abandoned when Peter did not warm to the Bond role. When a related television project also fell through he returned to the family firm for a period while continuing to work on his own ideas, one of which, a property business created with the developer Nicholas Siviter, flourished as Hardanger Properties.
The Coombs family had meanwhile crowned their success at S&U by buying the local football team, Birmingham City FC. Clifford became Chairman in 1965 and Derek’s elder brother Keith took over from him some years later. The family sold the club in 1989.
One of Derek’s regrets was that he never went to university. It may have been a blessing in disguise; it meant that college did not tidy up the rough edges to his entrepreneurial spirit or the spontaneity of his thought processes. It also meant that he was often underestimated by his opponents, something he became adept at exploiting.
So, at the end of the 1960s, instead of dropping out and growing his hair he was, with the backing of Edward Boyle, the former Conservative Education Minister and a Birmingham MP, successfully seeking selection to become the Tory candidate for Yardley.
He won the seat from Labour by a mere 120 votes in the 1970 election that took Edward Heath to Number 10. Derek was a liberal Tory and a loyal Heathite, sharing the Prime Minister’s support for entry into the European Economic Community.
His brief parliamentary career will be remembered for two things. First, his private members’ bill abolishing national insurance for poorer working pensioners. (This was later extended to all pensioners.) It was the first private members’ bill passed without the support of the government. Second, as the Northern Irish troubles deepened in the early 1970s, Derek became involved in some of the attempts to open a dialogue with Irish republicans. He also visited the Price sisters in the Maze prison as they recovered from their hunger strike. Some of his fellow Tory MPs thought he was too friendly to the nationalist cause and dubbed him the “Sinn Féin member of the Tory party.”
In February 1974 Derek’s seat reverted to Labour and in the same year both his parents died. He now took a more active role in S&U and successfully led the company into the high street finance business at the dawn of financial de-regulation.
Jennifer says he is the only person she has ever heard shouting out a reply to a rhetorical question in a vicar’s sermon.In the early 1980s he divorced Patricia and two years later met the actress Jennifer Lonsdale, whom he later married and with whom he had two more children: Jack (1987) and Adam (1990). He found domestic happiness living between a beautiful 17th-century manor house, Stepleton House, near Blandford Forum in Dorset, and a handsome London house in Cheyne Row.
His later years were marked by two tragedies: his own diagnosis with dementia in 2003, and the death of his younger son Adam in a gap year accident in India in 2010. Derek, in his own favourite word, was a “doer” but he also relished an argument. Jennifer says he is the only person she has ever heard shouting out a reply to a rhetorical question in a vicar’s sermon.
He loved being at the heart of things in both business and politics. I recall him telling me once in the early 2000s that he had written to Tony Blair about some pressing matter of the moment and I remember thinking “what a complete waste of his time.” Then a few weeks later he bounced into the Prospect office waving a long and thoughtful reply from Blair himself. I sometimes underestimated him too.
Having been cared for in recent years by Jennifer as he became increasingly incapacitated, he finally died, peacefully, at the heart of his loving family at Stepleton, on 30th December 2014. Something of his restless spirit lives on in the magazine.
