He was an eccentric, larger-than-life accountant and property developer who grew rich advising companies how to avoid paying tax on their profits legally.
But Godfrey Bradman, who has died in his 86th year, also raised funds for a string of radical, arguably even left-wing causes, including the campaign to prohibit lead in petrol, which brought with it the friendship and admiration of the future King Charles III.
Following a lunch with the then Prince of Wales in the 1980s, Bradman announced the Self-Build Housing Initiative, through which funds were raised to enable poor people to build their own homes. Bradman was chairman of the Friends of the Earth Trust and the Campaign for Lead-Free Air.
In 1974 he ostentatiously offered Arthur Scargill’s National Union of Mineworkers some £2.5 million to end a strike. In 1987 he raised funds for the families of victims of the devastating fire at King’s Cross Underground station.
Three years later, as a protest against the Human Fertilisation & Embryology Bill, he arranged for every MP to be sent a plastic foetus.
And it is claimed he once paid for a tramp to stay at Claridge’s hotel.
But it was for his association with the redevelopment of the City of London, and the building within it of affordable housing, that Bradman will perhaps be best remembered. His company — Rosehaugh — was responsible for the construction of the breathtaking Broadgate Centre in the City, and the regeneration of bombed-out slum terraces behind Paddington and King’s Cross railway stations.
Rosehaugh also invested in the development of the Scottish Office in Edinburgh, the Chafford Hundred in Essex and similar housing projects in Newcastle, Southampton and Manchester.
Bradman’s long-term business partnership with Stuart (later Sir Stuart) Lipton might be described as volatile.
But its stunning, spectacular successes are undeniable.
Godfrey Michael Bradman was born in London to William, a fireman and Anne (née Goldsweig), who traced her identity to Jewish ancestors in Poland and Ukraine.
At the start of the Second World War the Bradmans moved to a primitive cottage in the village of Long Melford, Suffolk.
To support the family Bradman left school aged 15, and started work in a local accountancy firm, eventually becoming a chartered accountant himself, and setting up his own company as soon as he qualified in 1961.
He deliberately specialised in advising companies how to avoid tax legally. Famously (or perhaps infamously), in 1977 he saved the construction firm George Wimpey a tax bill of some £18 million – a sum equivalent to its annual profits. Labour Chancellor Denis Healey had to close tax loopholes retrospectively that Bradman had discovered and exploited. Two years later Bradman bought his way into Rosehaugh, which in time could boast a valuation of £800 million.
Bradman was vocally proud of his friendship with politicians of very different political persuasions.
Whilst living in upmarket Totteridge, in Jewish north-west London, he once hired the former Tory prime minister Edward Heath to conduct the London Symphony Orchestra in his back garden. He also spent £10,000 on a special edition of the Superman comic, Superman Bradman, for his son’s barmitzvah.
Bradman loved making grand gestures, and basking in the publicity they generated. But he never received an honour, unlike Sir Stuart Lipton.
Bradman was buried in the Willesden cemetery of the United Synagogue.
While studying for his accountancy exams Bradman was married – briefly – to one of the office secretaries. In 1975 he married Susan Bennett who survives him, together with the twin daughters and a son of this marriage, and a son and daughter from Susan’s previous marriage.
Godfrey Bradman; born September 9, 1936. Died December 25, 2022
