Ian Taylor (1974) died aged 64 in June 2020, after a period of serious illness. The obituaries in national media demonstrated what a fascinating life Ian had led: ‘a reputation for swashbuckling deals’ and ‘a founding father of the modern commodity trading industry’ commented the FT. Said the CEO of Glencore: ‘one of the last of the pioneers who helped transform the oil trading industry’; and the Daily Telegraph: ‘an iconic figure, and one who was not afraid to go where others wouldn’t.’ 

Over the years, several King’s former pupils have succeeded at a very high level in the business world, but probably none to a greater extent than Ian Taylor. This was possibly so in terms of the personal net worth he built up, but it was certainly so in terms of the extent of his charitable giving out of it. He did not shy away from contributing sizeable amounts to political causes he espoused - for example as a founder member of the SDP in the 1980s, to the Cameron-led Conservatives, or to both the anti-independence side in the 2014 Scottish referendum and the Remain side in the 2016 UK referendum. Ian had Scottish heritage, it should be mentioned, and he never forgot it. For example, his committed support saved the Harris Tweed industry on the Isle of Lewis when it was on its last legs a few years ago, his investment enabling it to reorganise and now, in relative terms at least, prosper.

But perhaps the most consistent beneficiaries of Ian’s charitable giving have been the arts and medicine. He was chair of trustees of the Royal Opera House, and gave ‘between £2m and £3m each year to the arts, particularly to make drama more accessible to the young.’ It cannot be a coincidence that Ian was a very committed member of Graham Wilson’s drama society when at King’s.  As a very serious throat cancer sufferer in recent years, Ian also showed himself utterly determined to enable others in the UK to benefit from the revolutionary treatments that he had to go to Switzerland to experience; he funded further relevant fundamental research in this area through the medium of Cancer Research UK.

Ian was a very successful King’s student - school captain, in fact - in the year of 1974 leavers that was one of those years with lots and lots of talent, in lots of different fields. He achieved excellent A Level results, as well as featuring both in school drama and the 1st XV as a terrier-like back-row player and authoritative captain. Both areas of interest were carried on both at Oxford and later, too. He left King’s for Merton College, Oxford, to read Politics, Philosophy and Economics, and then joined Shell as a graduate trainee. His seven years with Shell were very influential, partly in that they gave him his first experiences of the industry world-wide, including as they did spells in Venezuela and Singapore.

It was only when Ian was not keen on the role he was given by Shell when he returned to London that he left to join Vitol, then a fairly small Dutch company, in 1985. He occasionally reminded several of his friends from the King’s of their insistence at the time that he was making a mistake in leaving an oil major for an uncertain future with a small trading outfit! He duly became president and global CEO of a huge, private, commodity-trading company, with offices in 40 different countries, the largest independent oil trader in the world, with a reported turnover of £184bn in 2018. ‘I’m not sure I have any secret’, Ian was quoted in an extensive Times profile piece in June, 2019; ‘I just work hard, travel a lot - and I’ve never liked losing’.

Another quote from the FT’s obituary: ‘one of the most colourful businessmen of the past 50 years, from supplying fuel to people others felt may not have been appropriate buyers to drinking fine wine with Fidel Castro’. Ian had occasional brushes with scandal too - alleged dealings with Serbian warlords and sanction-breaking with Iraq both featured in tabloid newspaper headlines linked to him, though it should be said that Ian strongly refuted the sensationalist charges hinted at - but Ian was a man who defied easy characterisation. He also refused to take Vitol out of private ownership, so that its employees were its shareholders, in what was the largest private company in the world. As a result, both Ian and his fellow employees were able to gain huge rewards - it is estimated that his top 350 employees earned over £10billion during his time as CEO.

Another aspect of Ian Taylor that will resonate with former pupils is that he was always very keen to maintain friendships over long periods of time, and to respect and sustain commitment to his roots. The Scots connection was one of these, but so were his ongoing friendships with several fellow King’s pupils and Merton students, even when he moved into the sphere of the ‘great and the good’. Loyalty to Manchester City FC was another strand of his life that he never lost. He stayed grounded in Wimbledon as his family grew up too, and made further significant charitable contributions to local causes on top of his national ones. Ian was exceptionally successful, but also, in the words of the Telegraph, ‘he remained a man of great principle, and was also widely both liked and admired as a human being’.

Ian helped to found the School's Quincentenary Bursary scheme when it was launched in 2002. His very generous donation has helped more than 80 pupils since then. Ian continued to visit the school and to support its fund-raising efforts, and he saw the new school in its construction phase. He was dedicated to seeing children from Macclesfield joining the school who would otherwise not be able to attend.