William Davis obituary

An editor of Punch magazine and adviser to Margaret Thatcher, William Davis, who has died aged 85, was a pillar of the British establishment, but one with a remarkable background.

In financial terms, he was among the most successful journalists of his generation. He was a regular broadcaster and his company launched British Airways’ successful and lucrative High Life magazine.

But no one who heard the clipped patrician tones in which he presented BBC Radio 4’s World at One in its earliest days (1965-71), or as the first presenter of the long-running BBC2 Money programme (1967-69), would have guessed that he had been born and grew up in Nazi Germany, and had served as an unwilling junior member of the Hitler Youth movement.

His transformation from Gunter Wilhelm Adolf Keese to Bill Davis, as he was commonly known after his arrival in Britain at the age of 16, was an act of considerable will to become thoroughly British. His lifelong drive and fascination with wealth and the rich is probably attributable to the considerable poverty and deprivation he experienced as a teenager in postwar Germany, where starvation led to him eating grass and dandelions and selling blackmarket cigarettes.

“You saw death and destruction at a very early age,” he told Desert Island Discs in 1988. “I did not see my parents for a good many years. I did not know as a child whether I would be alive the next morning. I have always been grateful for the good things that have happened to me. I don’t take them for granted.”

A native of Hanover – “I was born in the same place as your ancestors,” he once told the Queen – he knew little of his father, Friedrich, who was conscripted into the German army and divorced his mother, Hilde Keese, after embarking on an affair with a Polish woman.

After the second world war Hilde worked as a cook in a British occupation army canteen, where she met and married a sergeant, John Davis, and moved to Britain. Her son followed them in 1949, anglicising his given name, dropping Gunter as too Germanic and Adolf for obvious reasons, and adopting his stepfather’s surname. He had a brother who followed a similar path to become John Davis, a personal finance editor with the Observer.

Working as an office boy at a City stockbrokers’ firm, William launched his ambition to become a journalist by answering an advertisement for a job at the Stock Exchange Gazette and rapidly progressing to subediting at the Financial Times. He was spotted by the elderly press magnate Lord Beaverbrook, who made him city editor of the Sunday Express at the age of 25, then within a year city editor at the Evening Standard. “I was always the boy who said I’d do it,” he said later.

In 1965, following Beaverbrook’s death, Davis was poached by the Guardian’s chairman, Laurence Scott, to become the paper’s financial editor for a smaller salary – making the unheard of demand of a Jaguar as a company car – but with a higher profile and a daily picture byline.

He updated the paper’s coverage, concentrating on personalities and money matters and introduced the first family finance pages in a national newspaper. The job boosted his personal celebrity and arguably the paper’s profile, but he rapidly had too many irons in the fire in broadcasting for the BBC to give the paper his full attention or commitment.

Tales were told of the occasion when he was supposed to be reporting from New York and, with the newsdesk anxious for his copy as deadline time approached, frustrated editors watched him pop up on the television to give his views to the BBC first. The interview ended with Davis insouciantly announcing that he had to go, not to file for the paper it transpired, but to catch a plane instead.

His subsequent appointment in 1968 as editor of Punch, the venerable humorous weekly magazine, came as a shock, particularly to its staff, for he was not known as a comic writer. Davis continued to provide the Guardian with letters of financial advice to a mythical Aunt Bertha: it was also a shock to the paper’s editor, Alastair Hetherington, when some years later he turned up to the magazine’s weekly lunch not knowing that Davis had just been “let go” by the features editor for recycling them verbatim.

Davis was brought to Punch in an attempt to stem its financial and circulation decline, but he had an uneasy relationship with its writers, not least Alan Coren, his deputy, who had been passed over for the editorship.

There was much grumbling: Miles Kington, one of its star contributors, admitted that he was given a hard time: “I remember him storming down the corridor complaining that everyone on the magazine was so literary – who wants literary humour? We were all horrified but actually I think he was right.” There was much chuckling when his German ancestry, hitherto hidden, came out and Private Eye rapidly christened him Kaiser Bill.

Nevertheless, Davis remained editor for more than nine years. When he left in 1977, Kington described it as the end of an error. But his new venture, as head of his own company, Headway Publications, which produced the British Airways inflight magazine – with glossy, high-end adverts for affluent travellers – and a number of other business periodicals was successful, and Punch contributors such as Kington found themselves producing articles there too. The company was sold to Robert Maxwell in 1987 for £6m.

By then, Davis was a regular adviser to Thatcher, seeing her privately in Downing Street on Sunday evenings to advise on her financial speeches, though avoiding giving her jokes. He was an admirer, excoriating the British tendency, as he saw it, to self-pity, self denigration and self-mockery.

“There is nothing wrong with success,” he said on Desert Island Discs. “I find in this country we still have a very curious feeling [about it]… whether it is envy or spite I don’t know … In a free society the great thing is everyone can join the rich if he makes the effort.”

In return Thatcher made him chair of the English Tourist Board and British Tourist Authority (1990-93). He also served on the board of Thomas Cook.

Making money, he said on another occasion, was “ridiculously easy” and he had homes at one stage in London, New York, Florida and Cannes. There were a string of books with titles such as It’s No Sin to Be Rich, The Best of Everything, The Rich: A Study of the Species and Have Expenses, Will Travel. He called his autobiography The Alien (2003), and at the time of his death was working on a book about how Adolf Hitler was sold to the German public.

With his first wife, Iris, Davis had two children, Susan and Simon, the latter of whom predeceased him. After that marriage ended in divorce in 1960, he lived with the journalist Margaret Allen, and they had a daughter, Jacki. In 1967 he married Sylvette Jouclas; she survives him, along with Susan and Jacki.