Personal Assets is an investment trust run expressly for private investors. Its capital structure is the simplest possible for an investment trust, consisting only of Ordinary shares. Its investment objective is to protect and increase *(in that order)* the value of shareholders' funds over the long term and to earn as high a total return as is compatible with a risk equivalent to that of the FTSE All-Share Index. Since Personal Assets invests for the long term, the Board assesses performance not annually at the end of each accounting year but over rolling three-year periods.
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Born: 16 May 1940 in Edinburgh.
Died: 12 October 2008 in Edinburgh, aged 68
History offers some poignant examples of men who passed away in the hour of their greatest triumph. One such was Ian Rushbrook, who died suddenly but peacefully on 12 October at his home in Edinburgh. As Managing Director of Personal Assets Trust (“PAT”) Ian had over several years become convinced that a major dislocation of world banking and finance was looming. As he said with astonishing prescience to PAT’s July 2007 AGM (his lucid and searching expositions of the investment outlook were legendary), “Is the financial world sleepwalking into disaster? No. It’s worse than that. It’s walking into disaster, wide awake. The Federal Reserve, the US banking system, the US mortgage industry, the investment banks, the hedge and private equity funds, all know what’s happening; yet they carry on regardless . . . Credit, debt and liquidity have expanded to extraordinary levels and we are certain this expansion must reverse itself. And the catalyst for such a reversal won’t be a butterfly fluttering its wings over Peking. It will be a vulture, glutted on sub-prime mortgages, falling from its perch on a skyscraper over Wall Street.”
Ian’s warnings fell on deaf ears and sometimes earned him harsh criticism. Recent events have proved how right he was.
Ian was the son of Frank and Violet Rushbrook. His father, Dr Frank Rushbrook CBE, sometime Firemaster of Lothian and Borders and a world-renowned expert on ship fires, survives him; father and son co-operated this year with great pride in the erection of a much-deserved statue to James Braidwood, Father of the British Fire Service, in Parliament Square.
Ian’s childhood was shadowed by tuberculosis, which caused him to spend his life between the ages of 5 and 11 in hospital. Perhaps this experience reinforced his fierce independence and his determination to live life to the full.
After East Ham Grammar School and the University of Edinburgh, where he obtained a First in Physics while financing himself by playing poker, Ian studied at Cranfield and the London School of Economics before an attempt to gain research sponsorship from Ivory & Sime unexpectedly turned into the offer of a job. Ian enthusiastically accepted and found himself one of a number of eager young tigers during a remarkable period in the company’s history under Eric Ivory and James Gammell. In 1975, in difficult circumstances following a severe market crash, he took responsibility for the management of Atlantic Assets, an investment trust dedicated to achieving capital growth for private individuals. Before long, Atlantic and its daughter company, Independent Investment, were among the most successful trusts in the sector.
In 1990 Ian took over the management of PAT, which under the Chairmanship successively of Dick Anderson and Bobby White he ran as an investment trust expressly for private investors and dedicated, unusually, to protecting and then increasing (in that order) the value of shareholders’ funds. Over the 18 years during which he managed PAT the company’s funds grew from £5½ million to the present £160 million. He overcame the problem of the discount to net asset value at which investment trusts typically sell by a determination, now enshrined in the company’s Articles of Association, to eliminate it by vigorous and continuing share buybacks coupled to the issue of new shares if demand exceeded supply. Critics forecast that this would cause the company to shrink significantly in size. Instead, the confidence the discount control policy gave to shareholders saw PAT’s share capital increase fivefold.
Ian was a Conservative, a libertarian and a passionate believer in free markets, correctly attributing the blame for the present crisis not to under-regulation but to official interference in the shape of the US Federal Reserve’s irresponsible cheap money policy following the 9/11 bombings. He revered Lady Thatcher and was proud to have acquired, for a personal donation of £100,000, one of her celebrated handbags in an auction in aid of the charity, Breast Cancer Care. At the time he commented, “For over twenty years I have admired Lady Thatcher’s will power, drive and capability. What she did for Britain was phenomenal. She has never had anywhere near the level of credit that she deserves.” (It appealed to Ian’s ever-present sense of mischief that, in the same auction, Cherie Blair’s handbag raised only the modest sum of £490.) Ian and his wife, Anne, were as a result invited to lunch with Sir Denis and Lady Thatcher at the House of Lords, which Sir Denis afterwards described as “the most enjoyable lunch he had ever had with a couple he didn’t already know”. Thereafter, the Rushbrooks and the Thatchers remained in contact and Ian and Anne were guests at Lady Thatcher’s 80th birthday celebration in London.
A man of astonishing kindness and generosity (which he loved to conceal under a sometimes cynical exterior), a challenger and inspiring mentor of the young, a contrarian and intellectual iconoclast who revelled in debate yet whose Rolls Royce (or, as Ian would prefer, Porsche) intellect was always tempered by a whimsical, teasing and affectionate sense of humour, Ian had the good fortune to make a supremely happy marriage. Anne was his true soulmate, as he was hers. His bedrock was his family life with Anne and their three children, Tara, Frank and John, and their joy was increased recently by the arrival of Scott to Tara and Derek, and Andrew to Frank and Fiona. They, his father Frank, his sister Jean, his nieces and nephews and his cousins are in our thoughts and prayers.
Ian never doubted his own intellectual powers, but I’m not sure if he ever realised how wise and how loveable he was. His family, friends and colleagues knew, however, and find it hard to imagine life without him.
INTERIM REPORT 2007