Obituary: Clive Marks, OBE

As well as the OBE he was awarded in 2006 for his charity work and dedication to improving Christian and Jewish relations, Marks jointly received the 1999 Coventry Peace Prize for promoting peace and reconciliation.

The JC once said of him: “If there was such a thing as a Jewish honours list, then the philanthropist Clive Marks would deserve a life peerage to go with the OBE he already holds.”

His skills as a businessman and his cultural interests helped many businesses survive.

Born in London, the son of coat manufacturer Sidney Marks and his wife Jenny, he turned down a place at Cambridge University, where he dreamed of training for a career as an architect or historian, due to the inevitable family pressures of his generation.

His uncle warned him that if he chose architecture, his children would go without shoes. The young Clive entered his father’s business, became an accountant and worked for property magnate Arnold Silverstone, later Lord Ashdown.

Eventually, as administrator of the former Ashdown Trust, he oversaw £50 million of donations between 1977 and 2012. The renamed Lord Ashdown Charitable Settlement, of which he became a trustee, made an enormous contribution to Jewish education in the UK, until 2021 when he wound the trust down.

Marks also managed Sydney Bernstein’s trusts. According to journalist Sue Fox, whose husband was his partner in the office for nearly 40 years, “Both men were driven, often difficult but hugely successful entrepreneurs. Clive dealt with everything skilfully and with total discretion. He was inspirational”.

Clive Marks’ early musical talents — as a child he was offered a chance to study piano with the acclaimed French composer/ conductor Nadia Boulanger –- would later find expression in his personal involvement with several orchestras, including his trusteeship of the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and the London Philharmonic, and his chairmanship of the London College of Music.

The eldest of his three daughters, Katherine Patterson, recalls her father’s phenomenal musical memory, whether romantic, classical or contemporary, and he was particularly knowledgeable about rarely performed composers.

He enjoyed musical programming with conductor Vladimir Jurowski, encouraging him to include little-known composers in his repertoire. A director of Novellos, he numbered Joseph Horowitz, John McCabe, Sir Arthur Bliss, Sir Adrian Boult, and the Amadeus Quartet among his friends. He also lectured for more than four decades on the subject of music in the Third Reich.

One of his most outstanding achievements was his launch of Ort’s Music and the Holocaust website with Dr Shirli Gilbert, a senior lecturer in Jewish history at the University of Southampton. Marks described the website as bringing together “various types of music that were in the camps, ghettos and prisons, and looking at the lives of the composers —those sent to their murders and those who survived”.

In April 2014, he was invited to speak at a Holocaust memorial event in New York co-organised by the Holocaust and the UN Outreach Programme, the Permanent Mission of Israel to the UN and the World Jewish Congress.

Later he discussed his Holocaust website with the Ham and High, describing the flourishing of music at the Nazi show-camp Terezin – “which people are only beginning to know about so many years after the event”.

He referred to the opera Emperor of Atlantis, written in Terezin by Austrian composer Viktor Ullman and Czech librettist Peter Kien, which led to the murder of both men in Auschwitz shortly after its final rehearsal in 1944.

“It is believed that the Nazi authorities viewed the opera as a satire on Adolf Hitler — and that Ullman knew it would lead to his death,” he said.

He said the project aimed at charting the “neglected” history of brave musicians killed in the Holocaust, alongside those who survived and others who supported the Nazis.

“There were six orchestras in Auschwitz and groups of Jewish musicians would play to those being taken to the gas chambers. They went to their deaths more quietly, having been beautifully deceived by the orchestra,” he reflected.

“When you hear music from that period of the world, one realises how brave these people were. They performed until most of them were sent to their deaths.”

Domestic projects included saving the London School of Jewish Studies (the former Jews’ College) from bankruptcy and donating generously to the Reform movement.

And through the international ORT network, he funded schools in Latin America, and established the UJIA-Ashdown Fellowship, which helps students to study in Israel and the United States during their gap years.

Supported by his wife Adrienne Stone, a speech therapist whom he married in 1957 at Hampstead Synagogue, he managed a host of charitable trusts, including Jewish Care, Norwood, of which he was life president; the Council of Christians and Jews, of which he was vice chair; the London Jewish Cultural Centre, of which he was president; the London School of Jewish Studies, World Jewish Relief, Yakar, UJIA, the Ashdown Fellowship, the Jewish Music Institute and Jewish Continuity.

Essential to his business instincts was his keen sense of Jewish ethics, which prompted him to found the Jewish Association for Business Ethics, which offered a programme of talks and leaflet distribution.

Through the global education network World ORT, he funded schools in Latin America. Perhaps one of his major international achievements was his rescue of some 2,300 children from what is considered the world’s worst civil nuclear accident at the Chernobyl nuclear plant in 1986.

Both he and Adrienne also decided to get involved in the aftermath of unexploded anti-personnel mines in Cambodia after Pol Pot, which maimed so many innocent people. They became trustees of the Cambodia Trust, which focuses on prosthetics for victims of landmines and improving communication.

They frequently travelled to Cambodia and provided the first satellite phones there, as well as ensuring that the supply of prosthetic limbs would continue locally.

In his weekly blog, Rabbi Jeremy Rosen wrote last week: “In my long life in Jewish affairs, I have met very few prominent public figures who were or are righteous in the true sense.
“That is probably because being in the public eye too often means getting seduced by power, popularity, or egoism and avoiding taking a stand.

“One of them was Clive Marks who died two weeks ago at the age of 92 and I was fortunate to be able to speak to him on the phone at length a few days before he went and thank him for his friendship and all the good that he had done.

He was a modest, self-effacing man. He never stood on ceremony or allowed those who disagreed with him or his choices to deflect or deter him. He distributed his beneficence gently and smilingly like a fairy godmother.

“His benevolence extended to both Jewish and non-Jewish charities around the world. Yet, while others in Anglo Jewry became household names, Clive Marks remained almost unknown though he was one of the great benefactors of British Jewry of his age.”

Adrienne Marks has been in a care home for some years, where Clive visited her almost daily, played music and held her hand. Asked how he had the strength to do this he said simply “Because she would have done it for me.”

Ten days before he died Marks went to hear his grandson Sam Carl sing in The Rake’s Progress at Glyndebourne. He also met his great-granddaughter and held her for the first time.

He is survived by Adrienne and their three daughters, Katherine Parkinson, Lucy and Lizzie Marks, eight grandchildren and one great-grand-daughter.