Worthy cause that lured Huge-Wallet out of Square Mile

Chris Blackhurst
24 Jun 2009

As the former chairman of Robert Fleming Securities, Thomas Hughes-Hallett is used to grand, sweeping vistas from office windows.

Even so, this one, from his seventh- floor corner room in Vauxhall, is hard to beat, taking in the river, Houses of Parliament, Big Ben and, further east, his former City stamping ground.

I say former because Hughes-Hallett is one of the few City grandees to cross the great divide, to leave the mega-deals and bonuses behind and devote himself to working full-time for a charity - in his case, heading Marie Curie Cancer Care.

Does he ever miss his previous existence? Hughes-Hallett laughs. "I've got used to staying in rooms with three beds. One of the things you discover in this job is that Travelodges always have three beds."

Tall and lean, with designer glasses, he conveys a sense of enjoyment - and quiet refinement. It's a mood that is reinforced by the piece of furniture in the corner of his room: an exquisite 17th-century harpsichord.

At least that is what it looks like. "It's a brand new original, as it were," he says when he sees me admiring it, "a copy of one that was made in 1668 and is in the Russell Collection in Edinburgh.

"Of course," he murmurs, "1668 was a boom year for harpsichords. Many of them were destroyed in 1666, in the Great Fire of London." Of course.

He was at a craft fair in Suffolk, got chatting to the man on the wooden instruments stand and asked him what was his dream.

The stallholder replied: to build a keyboard he'd seen in the Russell Collection. Hughes-Hallett commissioned him, all £8000 worth.

The inside of the lid is a detailed painting, after Samuel Palmer ("my favourite artist") depicting Hughes-Hallett's life.

There's his cottage in Suffolk with wife Juliet (she runs Dress for Success, a charity helping disadvantaged women to find work and in London they live in Notting Hill) standing at the door, children, various dogs, fields and the sweeping River Ore.

He shuts the lid. "What does that remind you of?" Er, a coffin. "Precisely," he says, chuckling. "I was away when it was delivered here and you can imagine, considering what we do and who we are, that all hell broke loose when it turned up in reception."

He was born in 1954. His father was an "impoverished land agent who looked after the estates of the rich". School was Eton. Was he a scholar? "Oh no, an ordinary boy."

So his Dad wasn't that hard up then. His mother, Penelope, was an academic and author, an expert on Jane Austen.

Hughes-Hallett went to Oxford, to study Byzantine history. "I love talking and arguing and had dreamed of being a barrister for years. It's like a lot of plans - the reality is never as good. I did my training, then my first case was an 11-week incest trial.

"There was a hung jury, the judge ordered a retrial, which would last another 11 weeks. I just couldn't face going through that again so I left. I decided to go into the City, to Schroders, and had five very happy years there."

His bliss came to an end in the most tragic circumstances. "My first child, Emily, died a cot death. She was 10 months."

He pauses. "When something like that happens, you want to change your life.

"A lot of people get divorced, move house I changed jobs. I was among a group who started an investment bank from scratch. Was it a moment of madness? Yes. Did I nearly kill myself in the process? Yes again."

The bank was Enskilda Securities and it became one of the star houses of the late Eighties and Nineties, involved in tonnes of bids and placings.

As one of its bosses, Hughes-Hallett earned the City nickname Thomas Huge-Wallet. "They were," he acknowledges, "quite profitable years. I was financially very fortunate."

The bank succeeded, he says, "because while we weren't that clever, we were very young and remorselessly workaholic. We were very lucky but you do, to an extent, make your own luck."

Then, his friend and fellow Enskilda founder, Spencer Maizels, came down with cancer (at the end of his life, he was nursed by Marie Curie).

"A year before that, I was on the trading floor in Stockholm and keeled over. I was having a heart attack.

"It was my daughter's fifth birthday (after Emily died, he went on to have three more children) and my poor wife had to leave her and fly to Sweden. It turned out I'd had a gigantic panic attack. I was just knackered really."

Maizels died and Enskilda was taken over by Scandinavia Bank. Hughes-Hallett became chief executive of SE Bank International.

"The Bank of England said to me, nicely, 'do you realise you're in charge of the 12th-largest bank in Britain?' I thought, 'Blimey, I need to get out of here - nobody has ever trained me in the running of a balance sheet.

"I could be wet or brave and okay, I was wet, but I was also right. Recent history shows that bankers don't have sufficient experience of commercial banking because they've been promoted through their investment banking stream."

Flemings asked him to run its equities business and he stayed for seven years. In 2000, Chase bought Flemings. "I was 46, and again I was left thinking I'm not very good at this job. I was 20 years older than some of the people working for me.

"I was a bit nervous about the derivatives business - two of our employees worked at Harwell, the nuclear research station. I asked myself, 'Can you be as quick as them? How can you hope to do any risk analysis?'"

One of his sons, Arthur, had a bad stammer as a child, which was cured by the Michael Palin Centre for Stammering Children. Hughes-Hallett helped with the centre and also with a housing charity.

"My wife said: 'You enjoy your evening jobs more than the day job - why not go and get a proper job you enjoy?'" He was offered two on the same day - Marie Curie and heading Barclays private banking in the UK.

He held a family conference. The boys said Barclays and his daughter and wife said Marie Curie. Then he rang Maizels' widow. "She said, 'You've got to do Marie Curie."

He arrived, he says, "full of trepidation". He's in charge of 5000 staff, 175,000 volunteers and a budget of £135 million, which he must raise from scratch each year.

"It was £60million when I joined." In 2007, he persuaded the trustees to extend the charity's reach beyond cancer, to caring for anyone who is terminally ill.

He loves what he is doing. "I thought I might not have transferrable skills but they've turned out to be a virtue.

This job is also about leadership, motivating people, raising money and managing a business. It's not hugely different to running securities for an investment bank."

He adds: "The big difference is there is more point to it and I'm working with nicer people."

Each year he raises the costs of his own salary - last year, he rode a bike from Tallinn in Estonia to St Petersburg. Like all charities, his is suffering in the recession.

Part of his solution "is to think like a banker, so I've set up local Marie Curie funds all over Britain and they're going really well".

He claims to be amazed that more bankers don't follow him. "They hate their jobs but they're scared, they lack the confidence to do it."

He's beaming. I try to remember:when did I last meet a banker who smiled so much and gave the impression of being so contented in their own skin?

LIFE AND TIMES OF - THOMAS HUGHES-HALLETT

Born: 1954.

Education: Eton, Oxford.

First job: trainee barrister.

Key moves: Schroders 1978–82; Enskilda Securities, 1982–93 , CEO from 1991; chairman Robert Fleming Securities, 1993–99; chairman, English Churches Housing Group, 2000–04; chairman, Michael Palin Centre for Stammering Children; CEO Marie Curie Cancer Care.

Hobbies: Music, tennis,
cooking, walking.