the times | Saturday December 4 2021 85
Readers’ Lives
drama. He brought the plane down
safely with damage to only the
propellers and one wing and his
passengers stepped out unhurt.
Two hours later Ted was seen
walking his dog. Asked for a
comment, he would say nothing moreCool-headed pilot who made a landing in Trinidad on two wheels
than that it was “quite a normal
landing in view of the circumstances”.
Ted’s cool temperament in the face
of drama had already been tested. In
his twenties he was training in a
Gloster Meteor when its canopy blew
off and struck the tail. The Meteor,
the RAF’s first jet fighter, had a poor
safety record — there were 143
crashes in 1953 alone — but Ted
realised in this instance that by flying
left-hand orbits, or circles, he could
maintain his height and navigate to
the nearest airfield. There he aligned
his final orbit with the runway and
landed safely. In the new year
honours the following year Ted was
awarded the Air Force Medal.
Born in 1924 in Pontefract, West
Yorkshire, Ted was the youngest of
five, arriving soon after the cot death
of his brother Edwin. His father,
George, was a master plumber and his
mother, Annie Ellen (née Allard), ran
the house, which George had built in- Ted went to King’s School in
Pontefract, where he played cricket
and rugby. He left in 1940 at the age
of 16 to train at the Air Crew
Reception Centre in Scarborough and
moved on to the elementary flying
training school in Wolverhampton.
He was one of eight out of the 50 to
make it to pilot-navigator at
Wolverhampton and spent three
further years training, including in
Yorktown and Calgary, Canada. The
war ended before he saw action and
he returned to RAF Coltishall,
Norfolk, with 141 Squadron to fly
wooden-framed Mosquitos.
In 1952 Ted joined the British
Overseas Airways Corporation
(BOAC) and was seconded to Kuwait,
Beirut and Trinidad, where he met
Betty Fisher, an air stewardess for
British West Indies Airways. They
married in 1958 and had three
daughters, all born in Trinidad:
Patricia, a retired nurse; Susan, a
speech and language therapist; and
Margaret, a manager at the Open
University. The family stayed on the
island until five years after its
independence in 1962 and then
settled in Harpenden, Hertfordshire.
Ted spent the rest of his career
flying Boeing 737s for Britannia
Airways out of Luton and reached
the rank of fleet captain. On
retirement he received the Queen’s
Commendation for Valuable Service
in the air.
Ted spent much of his free time
thereafter playing golf and travelling
to Europe with his wife. He was a
kind and supportive figure and for
several years he volunteered to pick
up and drop off those attending his
local day centre. There was little that
fazed him. After all, as a training
captain in the 1970s he had had to sit
by a junior as the engines were cut off
at 30,000ft and coolly ask him to turn
them back on.Ten minutes before coming in to land
in Trinidad in 1966 the pilot Captain
Eric Barff was notified that the
aircraft’s right undercarriage had
failed to open. The Viscount, a
four-engined turboprop aircraft, was
carrying 34 passengers from Grenada.
After a tense discussion with the
control tower, Ted, as he was known,
decided to make a forced landing
using the two working wheels — the
left front and the nose.
First, to avoid a potential fire, he
needed to burn up fuel. That meant
circling the airport for two hours,
which gave the island’s radio station,
Radio Trinidad, time to broadcast the
news. When the aircraft eventually
descended, Ted found the runway
filled with fire engines and
ambulances, as well as scores of
villagers who had come to witness the
Ted Barff, 97
Ted Barff was notified that the right
undercarriage had failed to openboarding school in the Matabeleland
region of Rhodesia. Frequently
beaten, he resorted to wearing a layer
of protective rabbit skins under his
trousers. In one incident he attached
a trigger for an explosive to a
teacher’s motorbike. As the teacher
turned on the ignition while waving
to his girlfriend, the device exploded
in his prized flowerbed.
While atoning for another
misdemeanour Michael was ordered
to climb a tree, from which he fell
30ft and broke ten bones. It meant six
months recuperating. Three years
later he walked out of the school and
took the train back to Salisbury.
Plumtree responded by expelling him,
to which his response was: “You can’t
expel someone who has already left.”
He had already bought a car with the
profits from a business selling
homemade sweets (coconut ice and
fudge) to fellow pupils.
When Michael worked for Merrill
Lynch the family moved to Hong
Kong and then to Singapore, but in
his theatrical style — or his folie des
grandeurs as his wife called it — he
bought an 18th-century château in
Provence that he and Marie-Thérèse
spent years renovating to the highest
of standards. They kept Château de
Tourreau for 35 years, using it in the
summer as a break from Asia as well
as a place where he could hold
business conferences.
Michael wrote three books: An
Investment Manual for Fixed Income
Securities in the International and
Major Domestic Capital Markets
(1983); Asia-Pacific: A View on Its Role
in the New World Order (1993) and an
engrossing memoir, A Raindrop in
the Ocean (2017). After leaving the
banking world he invested in several
start-ups, including the development
of electric vehicles and industrial
electric drones in Asia and an
ecommerce platform for Africa.
Charming and charismatic, Michael
was also maddening and provocative.
It was, he said, his way of revealing
people’s real side. Nonetheless, the
zen-like qualities that he learnt from
the monastery stayed with him. He
had little anxiety and few regrets. A
negative patch in his book did not
exist; for Michael it was merely “an
interesting experience”.to become head of Asia and Africa at
CSFB, and then chairman of Merrill
Lynch Asia Pacific.
Michael Dobbs-Higginson was
born in Salisbury in Southern
Rhodesia in 1941. His grandfather had
taken to the country while serving in
the British Army during the Boer
War, and after losing a leg in the First
World War chose to settle there and
run a dairy farm. Michael’s father,
William, ran an importing business
and his mother, Elizabeth Dobbs, was
a US-qualified osteopath. He was the
eldest of three: his brother, Brian,
became a doctor and his sister, Ann,
moved to Canada.
The first inklings of Michael’s
wayward nature came to light when
he was sent to Plumtree, a single-sexMichael Dobbs-Higginson in Japan in the 1960s and, left,
with his wife, Marie-Thérèse, and grandchildren in FranceCo, which was later
taken over by Credit
Suisse First Boston
(CSFB). It was a wise
decision that suited his self-
confidence, talent for financial
strategic planning and ability to read
people. He became the “go-to” banker
to the main Japanese banks, in those
days still relative outsiders in the City,
and enabled Japanese institutions to
raise billions of dollars of long-term
funding in the euromarkets.
He also helped to persuade the
Indian government to open the
country to western investment, and
facilitated large-scale infrastructure
projects there as well as in Africa and
southeast Asia.
Within ten years Michael had risenAs an undergraduate in 1959 Michael
Dobbs-Higginson put an abrupt end
to six months of studying medicine at
Trinity College Dublin and, with no
previous sailing experience, set forth
with a more experienced sailor across
the Atlantic in a 7m-long sloop armed
only with a sextant and a book of
navigation equations. It was the start
of a four-year round-the-world
adventure.
In the US he worked his way up
through the country taking on a
number of jobs, including as a
newspaper photographer, stevedore
and department store glove salesman;
in Canada he found work as a
lumberjack.
Japan was Michael’s next
destination and, coinciding with his
quest of personal exploration, he
spent a period in a Buddhist
monastery, surviving sub-zero
temperatures and barely eating. Over
18 months he moved on to two other
monasteries, became fluent in
Japanese, received a dan (black belt)
in the samurai sword-fighting
discipline kendo and, under the
tuition of Abbot Nakamura of the
Shino-Temple monastery in Koyasan,
was enrolled as a lay monk. He was
the first westerner to be accepted in
the monastery’s 1,200-year history.
“The whole experience had been a
deep-end immersion from which I
emerged stronger and with a different
outlook,” he wrote.
The attraction to Japan was
Zen Buddhist
monk turned
banker and
entrepreneur
profound and after a period in
London where he met the French-
born Marie-Thérèse Israel, he
returned with her to the country.
They married in 1969 and set about
building a house in the Japanese
countryside. Michael also founded a
real-estate company and a travel
agency with an American partner. In
Japan the couple’s first two children
were born: Julien, a cultural
curator and producer, and
Justine, a partner in a
private equity firm.
Their third child,
Charlotte, is an art
buyer for
Hermès.
Yet things
were to change
dramatically
when one day
Michael walked
into a building
that he and his
partner were letting
to the Libyan embassy
to find operatives
bugging the floor. He learnt
that his partner worked for the CIA
and, after confronting him, was told
to either join him or leave Japan and
hand over his share of the company.
Choosing the latter, he hurried back
to Britain with his wife and two-year-
old son, abandoning everything. His
month-old daughter was picked up in
Tokyo by her French grandmother
who took her back to France for
a few months.
In London Michael decided on a
more solid career choice for his early
thirties. He started in 1973 as a junior
investment banker at White Weld &Michael Dobbs-
Higginson, 79
Remembering loved ones
M
wCo,
taken
Suisse F
((CSFB). It
ddecision that s
confidence talent forcer, and
n a
.tng
assyHe learnt
orked for the CIAIf you would like to commemorate
the life of a relative, friend or
colleague, call 020 7782 5583 to
discuss the content and cost, or
email: [email protected].
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