Stephen Wheatcroft (original) (raw)

The economist Stephen Wheatcroft predicted and narrated the rise of the civil aviation industry after the war and later played a key role in the foundation of British Airways in 1972.

An affable and stylish man, Wheatcroft caught the zeitgeist with his 1956 book The Economics of European Air Transport that foresaw the coming age of cheap air travel that would revolutionise tourism. He had already built up an encyclopaedic knowledge of the industry having served for seven years as commercial planning manager at British European Airways (BEA).

From 1967 to 1969 he served as technical adviser to the inquiry into Britain’s civil aviation industry under the chairmanship of Sir Ronald Edwards. The Edwards Report did not recommend the immediate amalgamation of BEA and BOAC — the British Overseas Airways Corporation, which operated flights outside Britain and Europe — but that came within a couple of years. Wheatcroft joined Edwards on the board of the new British Airways in 1972 as director of economic development. He was appointed OBE in 1974, and also served as chairman of British Airways Helicopters.

When Lord King, often described as Margaret Thatcher’s favourite businessman, was appointed chairman of British Airways in 1981 to prepare for privatisation, the left-leaning Wheatcroft was an early victim of his famously aggressive approach to management. The two did not get on. Wheatcroft departed in 1982, but remained active in the industry as a highly respected and much sought after consultant.

Stephen Frederick Wheatcroft was born in Edmonton, north London, in 1921 the son of Percy, a carpenter, and Fanny. He was a scholarship boy at the Latymer School in Edmonton, and then went to the London School of Economics, where he took a first in economics. When the university decamped to Cambridge during the war, he took great pleasure in rowing on the Cam.

Just before leaving the LSE to join the war effort, he had a conversation which determined the course of his career. His supervisor was the Nobel prizewinning free-market economist Friedrich Hayek, who would later wield such a profound influence on the thinking of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. He suggested to Wheatcroft that when the war was over he should return to the LSE to take up graduate studies in civil aviation, which was then in its infancy as a global industry.

When he graduated, and having told Hayek that he would return to the LSE, he was commissioned in the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve, training as a Fleet Air Arm pilot in Canada. He joined HMS Indomitable, the aircraft carrier. The Indomitable was based in Trincomalee in Ceylon (Sri Lanka), and in early 1945 it led Task Force 63 in Operation Meridian, the bombing of Japanese-held oil refineries in Sumatra.

Like many, he was not very forthcoming about his war experiences. “The only thing he mentioned was an occasion when he had mistimed a landing and had gone off the edge of the carrier and into the sea,” said his son Geoffrey. The captain asked his first lieutenant who was flying it. “Wheatcroft, sir,” he replied. The captain said: “Well, leave him there,” but quickly relented.

Wheatcroft returned briefly to the LSE at the war’s end, but was soon hired by BEA, where he played a pivotal role in the growth and development of the airline. He then spent two years as a research fellow at the University of Manchester, where he worked on The Economics of European Air Transport. The book was hailed by The American Economic Review as “the best economic analysis of air transport yet.”

Following the book’s success, Wheatcroft worked as an independent consultant for governments and airlines in Canada, India, Afghanistan and the West Indies, while still assisting BEA as an economic adviser. He was also a consultant to the World Bank.

He formed the consultancy Aviation and Tourism International in 1983 with Professor Geoffrey Lipman, who came to value his infectious humour.

Wheatcroft would always return from his many trips around the world laden with gifts for his family — clothes from the Far East or calypso records from Trinidad. He had met Joy Reed at the LSE when they were successive presidents of the student union. They married in 1943 and had three children. Geoffrey is an author and journalist, noted particularly for Le Tour, an acclaimed book on the Tour de France, and his lethal skewering of the Tony Blair government, Yo, Blair!. Marilyn is a television producer at the BBC, while Andrew works in IT.

Wheatcroft was devastated when his wife died in 1974, but through his love of skiing he met Alison Dessau; they married later that year. They had two sons. Oliver works with Geoffrey Lipman in the Sun Programme, which strives for the sustainable development of travel and tourism. Chris, is a manager of Angels Den, an investment platform which matches backers and businesses.

Wheatcroft loved opera and was an avid reader: one of the last books he read was a biography of John Maynard Keynes. He remained a socialist, even if his left-wing ideas softened later in life. He lived long enough to rue the rise of Jeremy Corbyn.

He also took up bridge again; he had stopped, his son Geoffrey said, “because he said he’d played so much in the navy during the war while he was waiting for something to happen.” It was a typically self-deprecating remark.

Stephen Wheatcroft, OBE, economist and aviation expert, was born on September 11, 1921. He died on April 26, 2016, aged 94