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Christopher Foyle Obituary

Foyle at the reopening of the family bookshop in 2014. In the course of a varied career he helped Stelios Haji-Ioannou to start easyJet DAVID M BENNETT/GETTY IMAGES; ALAMY

Genial businessman who built a global air freight empire and later revived his family’s famous bookshop on Charing Cross Road

Monday August 15 2022, 12.01am, The Times

In 1962, fresh out of public school, Christopher Foyle worked on the chaotic shop floor of his autocratic aunt Christina Foyle’s eponymous bookshop on Charing Cross Road, London.

As a trainee manager, he saw what a mess the place was in. Its inefficiency was a joke, and its staff notoriously uninformed, underpaid and mutinous. Customers had to navigate a labyrinth to buy a book: find the book, queue to get a handwritten invoice, queue to pay at a cash desk without a machine, then queue a third time to collect the book. It was a “Kafkaesque” procedure that was, Foyle said, reminiscent of the department store GUM in Moscow.

Its oddity made Foyles, founded in 1903 and self-styled “the world’s greatest bookshop”, a London landmark. One rival coined a slogan: “Foyled again? Try Dillons.”

Christina, obdurately anti-modernisation, clung to the shop’s focus on its monthly literary lunches, where 2,000 ladies in hats would assemble at Grosvenor House, or in wartime, the Dorchester, to hear authors such as HG Wells, Evelyn Waugh, JB Priestley and Kingsley Amis launch their books over salmon mousse and chocolate pudding. It was said that she had invited Hitler to speak; in fact, she had merely asked him not to burn books but to send them to her to sell.

Her nephew lasted ten years at the shop, including a linguistically useful three years in the book trade in France, Germany and Finland. However, once he realised that his aunt would never give him any responsibility or a salary of more than £1,600, he decided to leave the company and try his luck in the outside world.

He turned to his first love: aviation. He had learnt to fly gliders at the age of 15, and had always loved aircraft, so in 1977 he set up Christopher Foyle Aviation, a small air-taxi service with one second-hand plane, run from a small house in Luton. This grew into a large fleet, Air Foyle HeavyLift, providing global freight services for companies such as TNT. In 1989, after two years of negotiations in Kyiv and Moscow, he was the first person in the West to strike a deal with the Soviet Union to fly Antonov AN-124s, then the world’s biggest aircraft, transporting turbines, generators, trucks and military tanks. He also air-lifted refugees and emergency aid during the first Gulf War in 1991.

His company was such a success that he never imagined going back to the family firm until in 1999, the childless Aunt Christina, now aged 88, summoned him to her deathbed and, six days before she died, appointed him a director on the spot. She left him neither her £60 million estate nor her beautiful and historic house. Everything was consigned to a charity, now known as the Foyle Foundation, which dispenses grants for education, health and the arts in Britain.

Foyles on Charing Cross Road in October 1958, four years before the young Christopher began working there
ROSEMARY MATTHEWS/BIPS/GETTY IMAGES

Foyle, a tall, ebullient figure with a gift for philanthropy as well as for business, seized the reins and set about transforming the bookshop. He opened new branches, set its fortunes on a viable course, and made it a saleable commodity when in 2018 it became part of James Daunt’s Waterstones empire, though it retains its name.

William Richard Mervyn Christopher Foyle was born in London in 1943, elder son of William Foyle and his Vienna-born wife Alice (née Kun), a successful independent publisher. His father died when he was 14, so Christopher regarded his grandfather, William, who had founded Foyles in 1903 with his brother Gilbert, and paid the boy’s school fees at Radley, as his idol. With shoulder-length white hair and wearing a cravat with diamond pin, gold fob watch and waistcoat, William would arrive at Foyles in his chauffeur-driven Rolls-Royce Silver Wraith and “exhibit bonhomie” by handing out £5 notes to sales staff. Each Friday he would take friends and family to lunch at a restaurant in Piccadilly. “The orchestra would see him and immediately change to his favourite tune, which was The Happy Wanderer,” Christopher recalled.

William Richard Mervyn Christopher Foyle was born in London in 1943, elder son of William Foyle and his Vienna-born wife Alice (née Kun), a successful independent publisher. His father died when he was 14, so Christopher regarded his grandfather, William, who had founded Foyles in 1903 with his brother Gilbert, and paid the boy’s school fees at Radley, as his idol. With shoulder-length white hair and wearing a cravat with diamond pin, gold fob watch and waistcoat, William would arrive at Foyles in his chauffeur-driven Rolls-Royce Silver Wraith and “exhibit bonhomie” by handing out £5 notes to sales staff. Each Friday he would take friends and family to lunch at a restaurant in Piccadilly. “The orchestra would see him and immediately change to his favourite tune, which was The Happy Wanderer,” Christopher recalled.

In 1983 Foyle married Catherine Jelleyman, a former nurse, daughter of a Baptist minister and professor of theology in the West Indies. By a previous relationship Foyle already had a son, Alexander, who is now a publisher in Cologne. Catherine survives him along with their daughters: Charlotte runs a clothing company, Annabel lives at home and Chrissie works in film.

Foyle saw as his idol his grandfather, William, the co-founder of Foyles NIGEL HOWARD/EVENING STANDARD/SHUTTERSTOCK

At his accession to chief executive of Foyles, its turnover had dropped to £9.5 million and was declining at 20 per cent a year. Foyle had to find at least £4 million to modernise the flagship store. “It looked terrible. There was paint coming off the walls, the whole place was a mess. There was no financial management of any kind. There were three elderly ladies writing up the figures in manual ledgers.” The first thing he did was issue staff with contracts. His brother Anthony, an accountant, uncovered a huge invoicing fraud, perpetrated by long-term employees, that had been going on for years. In 2006 Foyle appointed as his deputy Sam Husain, a “wizard” accountant who managed to make sense of the company’s byzantine finances.

His aunt’s 1984 book, So Much Wisdom, had included under the heading, “The Conduct of a Business”: “There can be no permanent success unless the head be an autocrat”, and, drawing from Paul Getty’s How to be Rich (1965), “there is nothing that can ever take the place of cash”. Ignoring such shibboleths, Foyle set up a website, and began to open new branches, including on London’s South Bank and at Westfield shopping centre in Stratford, east London. In 2003 Foyles turned its first profit in decades.

Although he had enjoyed Foyles lunches — at one he attended as a child, Hugh Cudlipp spoke and Randolph Churchill called Cudlipp “the pornographer royal” — they had never made money and he replaced them with in-shop book launches. The last he hosted featured Margaret Thatcher, accompanied by Carol in case her mother faltered; she spoke perfectly, without notes.

The famous friends of Foyle, left, included Gyles Brandreth, right

In 2005 Foyle persuaded the family trustees to let him buy, at the market rate of £1 million, the 12th-century Beeleigh Abbey, near Maldon, Essex, on a 400-acre estate. Foyle had always loved Beeleigh. “At 12 or 13, I used to dine with my grandparents, and we would drink Châteauneuf du Pape and play cards,” he said. “It was all terribly grown-up and exciting.”

Foyle’s first job was to get rid of the smell, since Aunt Christina had allowed her 16 cats to relieve themselves wherever they liked. This took two years, with limestone flagstones imported from France and rotten floorboards replaced with reclaimed Victorian oak timbers. Foyle could not afford all the books his grandfather had collected, including first folios of Shakespeare and beautiful illuminated medieval texts. He bought 40 per cent of them and sold the rest at Christie’s. The restoration of Beeleigh would win a national heritage award.

Foyle’s interests and friendships were manifold. “He was the soul of generosity and hospitality, who genuinely liked to make others happy,” as one friend put it. He organised archaeological digs at Beeleigh, and also liked skiing, piloting his Piper Aztec and Comanche aircraft and studying “anomalous phenomena”. He even backed the wildlife photographer Jeremy Holden to search for the orang pendek, a creature said to inhabit the mountainous forests of Sumatra and Borneo.

He became good friends with authors including Gyles Brandreth and Graham Hancock, whose perspective on pre-history appealed to Foyle’s inquisitive nature. He was a benefactor and mentor to many, including Stelios Haji-Ioannou, helping him to start easyJet. In 2018, when the Foyles relocated to Monaco, his friend the Duke of Edinburgh, patron of the Air League, said: “There aren’t many aeroplanes in Monaco.” And so Foyle started up an Air League branch there, offering flying and gliding scholarships.

He wrote his own books, including a history of Beeleigh and a history of British aviation in the jet age entitled Pioneers to Partners, co-written with Leo Marriott, with a foreword by the duke. Having long been a collector of odd words, he published two volumes of Foyle’s Philavery, which compiled unusual words and their definitions, such as amanuensis (literary assistant), vespiary (wasps’ nest) and whilom (erstwhile). His favourite was kakistocracy, a system whose rulers are the least competent, least qualified and most unprincipled citizens. He also wrote warmly of the callipygian — those with a well-shaped rear.

He made light of his cancer, which forced the Foyles to return to Britain last year. His aunt’s aversion to making him her heir (“When I go, Foyles goes” was her plan), had obliged him to build a business of his own. “That was really the making of him,” his wife said.

Christopher Foyle OBE, aviation chief and bookseller, was born on January 20, 1943. He died of acute myeloid leukaemia on August 10, 2022, aged 79