Obituary: Sir William Ryrie, UK Treasury and World Bank official

Sir William “Bill” Ryrie was an influential figure in the UK Treasury for 20 years, a civil servant who worked with five prime ministers.

He famously drew up the so-called Ryrie Rules on private investment in the public sector during Margaret Thatcher’s government. Those rules became increasingly outdated, eventually giving way to the Private Finance Initiative (PFI), but Ryrie later became globally respected as a senior official in the World Bank.

From 1984-93, he was executive vice-president and chief executive of the International Finance Corporation (IFC), the development stable-mate of the World Bank. Directly responsible to the World Bank president, his job was to advise on private sector investment in developing nations, making him one of the most senior Britons in the World Bank’s history.

Born in India to Scottish parents and educated at George Heriot’s school and Edinburgh University, Ryrie found himself doing for the IFC in Washington DC what he had done as a civil servant at the Treasury in Whitehall, promoting economic development through private investment, this time dealing with more than 150 “shareholder” nations rather than just one.

During his time in Washington, he would return to his native Scotland as keynote speaker at the International Forum of the Scottish Council for Development and Industry at the Gleneagles Hotel, where he warned Scottish business leaders to take a global view and learn from the rapid growth in many developing countries as a result of private sector investment.

After retiring from the World Bank and by then knighted (in 1982), Sir William became a major player in the City of London, sitting on many boards, including Ashanti Goldfields Co Ltd and engineering and architecture consultants WS Atkins. From 1994-2002, he served as vice-chairman of ING Barings Holding Company and chairman of Baring Emerging Europe Trust plc.

William Sinclair Ryrie was born in Calcutta on 10 November 1928, son of Scottish stonemason, lay preacher and missionary the Rev Dr Frank Ryrie, from Montrose, and Mabel Moncrieff Ryrie, née Watt, from Crieff, who had been teaching in India. Young William attended the Methodist-founded Mount Hermon school in Darjeeling, at the time considered the best school in India, where he remained, partly due to the ongoing war in Europe, until his  mid-teens.

Returning to Scotland, he went to George Heriot’s at Lauriston Place in the capital, before studying history at Edinburgh University where he graduated in 1951 with a first-class honours MA in history.

From 1951-53, he did his national service the hard way, serving as a lieutenant in the British Army’s Intelligence Corps during the “Malayan Emergency” – the communist insurgency – for which he was “mentioned in despatches.” On his return to the UK in 1953, he married Dorrit Klein and they would go on to have three children. The year the marriage was dissolved, 1969, he married Christine Gray Thomson, a girl he had met in Edinburgh in 1948, with whom he would later have a son.

On his return from Malaya in 1953, still only 24, Ryrie joined the Colonial Office, which seconded him to Uganda from 1956-58 to serve as a district officer in the north of the country, where he faced anti-colonial hostility from insurgent pro- independence groups.

He joined the Treasury in 1963, where he would serve for the next 20 years, including two years (1969-71) as principal private secretary to three consecutive Chancellors of the Exchequer – Roy Jenkins, Iain Macleod and Anthony Barber.

In his early Treasury years he was an aide to fellow Scot (later Sir) Alec Cairncross, and Ryrie recalled “tagging along with Cairncross, as bag carrier and note-taker, to meetings of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) in Paris.” In 1966, Ryrie was tasked with drawing up a contingency plan for a devaluation, which eventually occurred the following year.

It was as second permanent secretary for domestic economy at the Treasury that he drew up the famous Ryrie Rules in 1982. These rules, increasingly controversial, were gradually relaxed during the 1980s before being finally retired in 1992 and eventually replaced by the Private Investment Initiative. During his Treasury years, he also had spells in Washington as economic minister at the British embassy and as British representative at the International Monetary Fund (IMF), as well as permanent secretary at the Overseas Development Administration (ODA) of the Foreign Office. It was in these latter jobs that he was noticed and head hunted by World Bank president Tom Clausen and appointed chief executive and executive vice-president of the Bank’s International Finance Corporation in 1984.

After Whitehall and its “yes, minister” mentality, Sir William’s new job was a breath of fresh air. “Bill loved the job. He was a man of action and had always found the senior slots in the civil service frustrating,” his widow Lady Christine told The Scotsman.

“He had been giving thought-out advice that wasn’t always listened to, let alone followed, and not being able himself to implement anything significant.

“At IFC, it was very different. He was almost wholly in charge. He had a world-class international staff to advise and correct him – and they did. He travelled the developing world extensively from our home in Washington DC, becoming more and more convinced that helping the private sector in that world was correct.”

That philosophy was the theme of his well-received book First World, Third World, published in 1995 soon after his  retirement.

On retirement, Sir William and Lady Christine settled in the village atmosphere of Chislehurst, Kent, just south-east of London, spending holidays in a Highland home they had built in Gairloch, Wester Ross.

In Chislehurst, his pride and joy was the garden of his home, Hawkwood, and his beloved trees – cedars, maples, cypresses, yews, robinias, limes, birches, chestnuts, a wellingtonia and a 300-year-old English oak. His other great hobbies were hillwalking, classical music, opera and photography. “As long as he was about, Kodak remained profitable,” according to Lady Ryrie. “But once it became digital, that was it!” As his Parkinson’s worsened, the music remained his only hobby.

Sir William died at his Chislehurst home. He is survived by his wife Lady Christine (née Thomson), his children from the two marriages, Paul, Andrew, Ellen and Alexander, eight grandchildren, his brother Sandy and his sister Mona, a retired educational psychologist in Edinburgh.

PHIL DAVISON