Oliver Marriott obituary: journalist turned property developer
Oliver Marriott, a tall, looming, donnish iconoclast, was one of the few journalists to switch from writing about business to succeeding in it. From financial editor of The Times, he sprang into property development and then became a wealthy lord of the manor.
He ended the journalistic phase of his life with two landmark books that made his name and opened the door to fresh opportunities. The first, The Property Boom, describes the meteoric rise and fall of the often unscrupulous opportunists who transformed post-war London in the compulsive wheeling and dealing of the frenzied 1960s property market. It was one of the first books to explain the complex financial engineering that banks used to help put deals together, and the men who took advantage of that, with scant regard for niceties. Several of his targets felt sufficiently stung to threaten legal action, but it nevertheless became a classic text for business courses.
A year later, in 1970, he followed it with Anatomy of a Merger, co-authored with a Times colleague, Robert Jones, to chronicle how another big character, Arnold (later Lord) Weinstock, led General Electric Company’s government-blessed takeover of Amalgamated Engineering Industries and English Electric to create a global industrial powerhouse.
The Property Boom brought Marriott to the attention of Jeffrey (later Lord) Sterling and Bruce McPhail at Sterling Guarantee Trust (SGT), and they realised that he was the person to complete their team. While they negotiated deals, Marriott analysed quoted companies to identify the ones owning properties worth far more than their share price, which SGT rapidly acquired at depressed prices.
Early on, he spotted the potential to be had from redeveloping Gamages department store, a labyrinth of drab, bolted-together buildings in the retail desert of Holborn Circus between London’s West End and City, and turned it into a modern mix of offices and shops. After overcoming the threats posed by the 1973 secondary banking crisis, SGT merged with the shipping giant Peninsular & Oriental Steam Navigation, which was also sitting on extensive properties.
Meanwhile, Marriott embarked on what turned out to be his life’s project: the purchase and restoration of Grimston Garth, a late 18th-century “Strawberry Hill gothic” manor house with castellated corner towers, that had lost its lustre and was being used as a research centre by the household goods firm Reckitt & Colman. On the East Yorkshire coast near Hull, the house and its predecessors had been owned for centuries by the Grimston family, distant relatives of the Marriotts. Oliver’s elder brother, Richard, who became lord-lieutenant of East Yorkshire, bought another ancient mansion a few miles further north and they became friendly rivals.
Oliver Digby James Marriott was born in West Sussex in 1939, one of four children of Rowland Marriott and his wife Evelyn (née Caillard). Rowland worked in Lloyds Bank before the Second World War, joined military intelligence during the conflict and worked for MI5 up to the 1960s.
Rowland and Evelyn had four children, of whom Oliver was the youngest. Richard (obituary, March 6, 2021) was a stockbroker and asset manager in the City before moving to East Yorkshire, dying in 2021. Under her married name Jane de Falbe, their sister, who died in 2022, had six children and wrote a 1988 historical biography, My Dear Miss Macarthur. The middle brother, Charles, was a professional soldier turned stockbroker.
After Eton College, Oliver was ruled unfit for National Service following a head injury playing cricket. He signed on at the Labour Exchange, forerunner of today’s jobcentres, which found him work clerking in an aggregates company in Pimlico, though the family’s City connections soon helped him to move to the merchant bank NM Rothschild. In 1961, aged 22, he became the youngest councillor in the country when he was elected to represent Labour on Lutterworth rural district council in Leicestershire.
Bored with banking, he joined the property section of the Investors’ Chronicle. A friend there introduced him to Lif Kristina Rolandsdottir, daughter of the Swedish artist Roland Svensson. They married in 1964 and had two daughters: Flora, who worked for supermarkets and became a consultant, and Lucy, a teacher.
After a brief spell on the now-defunct Statist magazine, he was recruited in 1965 as a property specialist by The Sunday Times, and then financial editor of The Times. After leaving P&O, Marriott founded two smaller property firms, Churchbury Estates and Ilex, using the same techniques he had used at Sterling Guarantee to spot undervalued shares. Churchbury bought Law Land, and the combined group was itself bought by Greycoat, making Marriott rich. Ilex remained private, but was backed by big insurance and pension funds to do much the same thing. He was also a director of Shaftesbury, which as Shaftesbury Capital now owns property in Soho and Covent Garden.
Marriott spent many years restoring and tending to his estate in East Yorkshire
Marriott’s fondness for the political hurly-burly, combined with being strongly pro-Europe but anti-European Union, led him to stand in the 2005 general election as the Ukip candidate for Beverley & Holderness in East Yorkshire. He collected only 4.7 per cent of the poll, with 2,336 votes, and did not repeat the experience.
Apart from restoring Grimston Garth, Marriott’s hobbies were books, embroidery, cooking and laying miles of hedges. “You escape the world for a few hours,” he said of the latter, “but you’re creating something that has a use.”
Although he had left the cut and thrust of newspapers for what was then a dog-eat-dog London property world, he told one interviewer: “You can make up a bland quote if you like. I’ll be quite happy.”
Oliver Marriott, financial journalist and property developer, was born on August 27, 1939. He died on December 5, 2025, aged 86
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