Raj Bagri joined the metal trade as a teenager on the docks of Calcutta. Fifty years later he was running the London Metal Exchange (LME). Sometimes known as “metal man”, he said that metal remained his favourite subject. Despite a fortune behind him — he owned one of the most expensive houses in London and was once estimated to be the fifth richest Asian in Britain — he was still checking the metal markets until the day he died.
With bushy eyebrows and a twinkle in his eye behind tortoiseshell glasses, he had a steely discipline for hard work. He insisted that he owed his success to one of his earliest roles in a metal company — as the mail boy. There, he digested the details of every telegram and letter that he opened.
He became the first non-Briton to be appointed chairman of the LME, a 140-year-old city institution that began in a Victorian coffee house above a hat shop in Leadenhall Market. “I’m very proud of my ethnic origins,” he once said, “but I’ve never flown the ethnic flag.” He regarded himself instead as “part and parcel of the international metal fraternity”; he wanted no special favours.
Perseverance was his trademark. He once spent so many days sitting outside the office of an American company that the chief executive decided he must be worth meeting. Modest and understated, he never drank or smoke. He preferred to buy a ticket to a cricket match so he could watch the game quietly from a bench with his son, and a packed-lunch sandwich on his knee, rather than from a corporate box. He claimed not to know how rich he was: “I’d rather be known by how good and bad I am.”
Raj Bagri was born in Bikaner, Rajasthan, in 1930, but grew up in Amritsar, Punjab. He lived on one side of the Golden Temple and his school was on another. He kept a pair of shoes in each because the quickest commute was barefoot across the courtyard. He witnessed the horror of partition in 1947. Amritsar was 30 miles from the new border and he watched families fleeing.
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His father, who died when he was young, worked in the wool business. Money was scarce and the family could afford to send only one of their two sons to school. As the younger brother, Bagri was sent to earn a living aged 15 as a metal trader apprentice at a company called Metal Distributors, in Calcutta.
His first task included going to the docks and clearing cargo, but he was soon volunteering in the office for people who wanted to go home early. “I found it fascinating,” he recalled. “Whatever metal I saw, I liked.”
He became aware that the centre of gravity for the trade was the London Metal Exchange and determined that he must get there. “The thought of making a lot of money was not in my mind,” he said.
Aged 19, he begged his boss to waste “a few thousand rupees” and send him to the Far East. He wanted to negotiate and sell directly to tin mining companies there rather than through the still British-owned trading houses in India.
“Luck was on my side,” he chuckled. “I got typhoid in Rangoon on my first leg.” Still feverish, he staggered into the British club in Penang where one man — a Mr McKay, he recalled — took pity. “He decided that because I was prepared to die for my cause the least he could do was to give me a deal.”
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Bagri next helped to set up headquarters in Bombay. In 1958, accompanied by his wife and daughter, he was sent to London with £3,000 in his pocket to establish an office.
At first a British managing director of another company told him: “Oh, Mr Bagri, you have come to drive us out of England.” He replied: “No more than you are driving us out of India.” However, soon the captains of industry at the LME — still largely run as an old boys’ network with business conducted through noisy “open outcry” sessions — had taken a shine to him.
When he applied for membership of the exchange in 1970, Bagri was advised to set up his own UK-based company — MetDist, which began manufacturing in Malaysia, where he built a copper wire plant. Within a decade he was making 50,000 tonnes of copper products a year. Although it remained largely unheard of outside the metal world, it soon became a significant player in the market.
As the longest-serving chairman of the LME, from 1993 to 2002 he presided over its modernisation, which included the introduction of an electronic trading platform in 2001. He led it through the 1996 Sumitomo copper crisis, when the global metals world was shaken by a rogue trader. He faced criticism for the affair, but insisted, “It would be a brave man who forecast that rogue traders were confined to history.”
His wife, Usha Maheshwary, was his constant support. She said that in their few meetings before the wedding in Calcutta in 1954 she knew he was going to do something with his life.
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In 1994 Bagri bought a 150-year Crown Estate lease on Hanover Lodge, a mansion designed by John Nash overlooking Regent’s Park. He spent millions of pounds renovating it, including installing an underground swimming pool that could be converted into a ballroom, and made headlines when he sold it for £120 million to Andrey Goncharenko, a Russian billionaire.
“I’m proud of my ethnic origins, but I’ve never flown the ethnic flag
However, the property was a business investment. His real home remained a still stately, but more modest, affair next door that he shared with his son Apurv, who became chief executive of MetDist in 1991, and his granddaughters. His daughter Amita, now a businesswoman, married into the Birla family, a merchant dynasty in India.
A supporter of numerous charities and temples — he set up his own foundation — Bagri chose his friends carefully and preferred small, private parties. He rose at 4.30am to make calls to colleagues and acquaintances in India. He left for the office by 9am, joined by his son in the car. Without fail the pair took lunch together for 45 minutes to discuss work — and family.
He could show a stubborn side when required during meetings. Once, negotiating a deal with Japanese businessmen in Tokyo that unravelled with only four hours before his flight, he declared that he was leaving in half an hour — come what may — to buy gifts for his grandchildren. The deal went ahead.
He surrounded himself with only “reasonable luxuries” — he believed expensive things should be admired, but not owned. He watched the news avidly each night, allowing his granddaughters to ruffle his hair as they sat on his lap. He listened to classical Indian music and read, although rarely fiction. Instead, he would devour books about management or economics.
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His only weakness was for brogues, which reflected his impeccable dress sense. He adored Indian shawls, which he bought on shopping trips when he returned to Bombay and Delhi for several months each winter.
Travelling around the world, he insisted that one meal a day must be Indian. His staff became used to locating the best Indian restaurants in each new city. He had a sweet tooth for Bengali desserts and a delight in reciting the Punjabi jokes he had learnt as a boy.
His generosity inspired loyalty. Once, as a young man in New York, he met an Indian student who had run out of money to buy gifts for his family at home. He gave the student all the money he was carrying. Decades later the pair were still in touch by letter.
Lord Bagri, businessman, was born on August 24, 1930. He died on April 26, 2017, aged 86