6 days ago
Anthony Solomons obituary: combative chairman of Singer & Friedlander
Chasing his daughter round the garden of their north London home, Anthony Solomons fell heavily against the wall of the house, fractured his skull and broke his arm in five places. 'I was irritated with him because of a comment he had made,' said Jennifer, 'so I threw a jug of water at him and he slipped as he came running after me.' Solomons had to cancel a driving holiday in France and a trip to the IMF conference in Washington. He was not pleased with her.
Solomons, universally known as Tony, took a similarly pugnacious approach to the many hurdles he encountered as the chairman of Singer & Friedlander, one of the last of the City of London's independent merchant banks. One commentator described him as 'forceful and occasionally combative': it appears he was never reluctant to give an errant employee the full benefit of his superior wisdom. 'He was tough and direct to work for,' said a longstanding colleague, John Hodson. 'He had not a lot of obvious softness, but he got results, and was immensely loyal to those around him.'
In 1998, the year before Solomons stepped down, The Times said: 'Singer is one of the unsung heroes of British banking. It is no longer just a rather fuddy-duddy merchant bank: banking accounted for less than a quarter of 1997 profits. These days, the core is stockbroking and the future lies with fund management. It is in the nature of Tony Solomons, its entrepreneurial chairman, never to stand still.' Insurance broking and long-term care were other areas that attracted Solomons, and he later diversified into property.
But he sometimes made misjudgments, admitting 'we got egg on our faces' through making loans to Peter Clowes, the key figure in the Barlow Clowes scandal, to buy Buckley's Brewery. Barlow Clowes was a financial adviser that promised to invest the savings of mainly retired customers, including ultra-cautious former nurses, teachers and civil servants, in what they had been persuaded was low-risk UK government stock. But he drew them in with promises of unrealistically high interest rates and operated a Ponzi scheme that stole millions of pounds to finance the directors' extravagant lifestyles. It collapsed in 1988 owing £190 million to 18,000 investors. Solomons said he did not expect Singer to lose any money from its involvement.
His belief in venture capital made him an early advocate of what is now known as private equity, acquiring, managing and reshaping companies to resell or float on the stock market. That made Solomons a natural supporter of the Thatcher government's 1980s privatisation campaign, but it also landed him in a spot of trouble.
In 1985 Solomons was at the centre of a dispute over the British Telecommunications (now BT Group) stock market launch when it emerged that he had made £25,000 from a direct allocation of shares at the special flotation price. 'It was not at all clear that the BT flotation would be a success,' he said. 'And there was a great deal of arm-twisting about taking underwriting. Singer & Friedlander was offered five times the normal amount, and I took 50,000 shares.' Most public applicants were offered only 800. He sold the shares soon afterwards, and gave the profits to charity.
While Solomons stressed that he had acted fairly and honestly throughout, Singer admitted an error of judgment in allocating BT shares to its directors, and said internal rules had been changed to prevent a repetition.
The bank went through several owners before regaining its independence in 1987. Solomons stepped down from Singer in 1999, and the bank was finally sold six years later to Kaupthing Holdings, an Icelandic financial group. But Kaupthing collapsed as a result of the 2008 global financial crisis and Singer was wound up. An Isle of Man-based compensation scheme was not closed until last Nathan Solomons was born in London in 1930, the elder son of Leslie Solomons, a wholesale tobacconist, and Leslie's cousin, Susie Schneiders. They had a younger son, Kenneth, who went on to own a garage firm.
Leslie died in 1938, and when war broke out the brothers were sent to prep school in Devon. Uncles kept an eye on them while Susie ran the carpool for the London branch of the Women's Voluntary Service. Tony and Kenneth went on to Oundle School in Northamptonshire, where Anthony remembered 'the food was awful and the rugby good'. Bizarrely, it being wartime, the boys were made to sing classical German lieder.
Tony postponed National Service to qualify as an accountant with the firm Wilkins Kennedy. He joined the Dorset Yeomanry as a second lieutenant and was sent to Korea for the last three weeks of the war there. He was a keen marksman and reckoned to have paid for his mess bills with winnings from poker dice.
He returned to live with his mother and brother in Hampstead, north London, working for an oil company, Lobitos, where he became chief accountant, played rugby and tennis, and joined the Young Conservatives. There he met Jean Golding, whom he married in 1957. They had two daughters, Nicola, a lawyer, and Jennifer, a public relations executive. Jean developed Parkinson's disease and died in 2018.
In 1958 Solomons switched from oil to merchant banking. His uncle Barnett found him a job with Singer & Friedlander, where he became the chief executive in 1973 and the chairman three years later.
A keen collector of watercolours, he established the Sunday Times/Singer & Friedlander watercolour competition, intending that it would be a source of pictures for a corporate collection at Singer. For several years it became a leading showcase for that style of painting. After the bank folded, the Royal Watercolour Society took over the sponsorship until the competition ended in 2020.
Solomons's other passion was horse racing, and he was part of a consortium that made a failed bid for Epsom racecourse in 1994. He was a regular at the Cheltenham Festival, placing a £200 bet each year with the pledge that any winnings would go to the Injured Jockeys Fund.
It was a while before he let Jennifer forget the water jug incident. 'I was not too popular at home,' she said, 'nor at the bank. I kept a low profile, leaving early in the morning and getting back late. They'd never seen so much of me at my office.'
Anthony Solomons, merchant banker, was born on January 26, 1930. He died on July 3, 2025, aged 95
