SIR DAVID KIRCH (1936-2026)

Sir David Kirch, who has died 89, was a London property speculator who assembled what was thought to be Britain’s largest collection of provincial banknotes and the world’s most extensive personal collection of airship memorabilia; but he sold it all in the process of becoming one of the nation’s most generous philanthropists.

In 1973 he settled as a tax exile in Jersey... On reaching “three score and ten” in 2006, he decided to mark the milestone by distributing £100 Co-op vouchers at Christmas to every islander aged 70 and over – a commitment he honoured even on discovering that there would be 9,000 recipients.

He repeated the scheme in subsequent years – later upping the voucher to £110 – and established a charitable trust to provide homes for pensioners on Jersey. In 2012, on being diagnosed with cancer, he announced that he would leave £100 million, the bulk of his fortune, to the elderly of Jersey.

Observing that his two happiest encounters with money were, first, in the making of it, and second, in the giving away, he proceeded to liquidate his assets to fund his trust. He sold his Rolls-Royce in favour of a Mini, and auctioned his collection of nearly 4,000 English provincial banknotes issued by defunct 19th-century institutions such as Scarborough Old Bank, Glastonbury & Shepton Mallet Bank and many others, their £5 and £10 denominations often fetching four-figure prices. He also sold a more unusual collection of “skit notes” – historic joke banknotes with political or satirical themes, issued by entities such as “the Bank of Love”.

His 15-ton collection of airship relics, sold in 2012, included medals awarded to the crew of the R101 which crashed in France in 1930 and a singed beer bottle salvaged from the wreckage of the Hindenburg in 1937.

David Roderick Kirch was born in Wimbledon on July 23 1936, the son of Leonard Kirch and his wife Margaret. His father had done well as a wholesale meat trader, but chose to keep travelling by train at six o’clock to Smithfield because, if the other traders saw his chauffeured Rolls-Royce, “he’d never get the price he wanted”.

At Tonbridge School, David demonstrated a flair for selling stamps. His commanding officer on National Service agreed that he would make a better businessman than a soldier, and since “I wasn’t clever enough to go to university,” as Kirch recalled, he found a job in the Lloyd’s insurance market.

On the untimely death of his father, aged 59, Kirch inherited £5,000 and launched himself in the meat trade. When his firm was taken over by a Dutch company, who wanted his Kingston cold store rather than his business, he realised that property was a better bet than meat, and bought a stake in a Hampshire estate agency.

He joined forces with his brother Peter in 1962, and they borrowed heavily to buy up chunks of west London, specialising in properties with sitting tenants that could be converted to more lucrative short-term lets. One flat in Courtfield Road was rented to the Rolling Stones; the police stripped off the oak panelling in the drawing room during a drugs bust.

To read the complete article, see:
Sir David Kirch, reclusive collector of rare banknotes who gave £100 million to the elderly of Jersey (https://www.msn.com/en-gb/money/other/sir-david-kirch-reclusive-collector-of-rare-banknotes-who-gave-100-million-to-the-elderly-of-jersey/ar-AA1XEDh1)

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