Sir Christopher Bland, the former chair of the BBC board of governors and a City grandee with a reputation for being a tough, uncompromising dealmaker, has died at the age of 78.
His friend, the author Robert Harris, paid tribute to a “terrific character, a real force of nature”.
Born in Japan in 1938, Sir Francis Christopher Buchan Bland grew up in Northern Ireland. He was educated at Sedbergh school in Cumbria, where he did not consider himself well-liked by his peers. “I was a clever boy but not very popular,” he told The Big Issue in 2014. “I was noisy, quick with my tongue and I wasn’t good at rugby, which is what really counted in those days.”
He studied at Oxford, during which time he became an Olympic fencer. After national service with the Royal Inniskilling Dragoon Guards he became a management consultant with Booz Allen Hamilton in the 1960s, at a time when he also started dabbling in Conservative party politics.
He went on to forge a glittering career in the City that saw him take directorships with many companies, including the National Freight Corporation, National Provident and Storehouse. At the same time, he became a leading light in the arts and media worlds, cultivating a series of increasingly prominent positions in important institutions.
In 1972 he became deputy chairman of the Independent Television Authority, later renamed the Independent Broadcasting Authority, and then went on to become the chairman of London Weekend Television.
But it was as chair of the board of governors of the BBC, a position he held between 1996 and 2001, that he will perhaps be best remembered. The BBC journalist Huw Edwards tweeted yesterday: “Many of us remember him as an exemplary chairman.”
After the BBC he became chairman of BT, a post he held for six years.
In 2004 his position as one of the UK’s most influential and connected business leaders was confirmed when he became chairman of the Royal Shakespeare Company.
A lover of fine wines with his own vineyard in France, Bland was also the chairman and co-owner of Leiths School of Food and Wine.
Those who worked for him said he was an unflinching, formidable presence who rarely sought compromise: Bland himself admitted there was “some truth” in the claim that he had a short fuse.
However, in later years, he appeared to develop a softer side, using his retirement to take a creative writing course and write a novel, Ashes in the Wind. Asked once if he had any advice for his teenage self, Bland said he would have told him to become a writer, not a businessman. “Forget all that other stuff. I took the long way round but I have started the creative life at the age of 76 so it’s never too late.”