David Waller, City PR expert who wrote three acclaimed biographies of 19th-century figures– obituary

David Waller, who has died aged 57, was a financial journalist and corporate communications specialist who found time to write a trio of well-praised historical biographies.

After serving as Frankfurt correspondent of the Financial Times from 1991 to 1994, and later as deputy editor of that paper’s influential Lex column, Waller built a wide-ranging career in financial PR.

Working for Maitland Communications, he was at the sharp end of the financial crash as an adviser both to Lehman Brothers, the investment bank which went bankrupt, and UK Financial Investments, the government agency set up to hold stakes in bailed-out banks.

He went on handle media matters for the hedge fund GLG – and when it was acquired by Man Group in 2010, he took on the enjoyable role of overseeing the parent company’s sponsorship of the Man Booker literary prize, which led him to encounters with literary lions ranging from Philip Roth to Hilary Mantel.

From 2013 to 2016 he was director of external affairs for the Association of Financial Markets in Europe, a City trade association and lobby group.

Waller’s professional reputation was that of a deceptively high-powered operator as well as something of a Renaissance Man.

A modest, collegiate and apparently laid-back style disguised an appetite for tough assignments, a strong news sense, an impressive contacts book and a touch of showmanship when called for – all the attributes of a first-class corporate communications officer. He was also unusually erudite, one colleague recalling that “he always seemed to know the answer to any question, animal, vegetable or mineral.”

It was after completing, with distinction, a master’s degree in Victorian Studies at Birkbeck, University of London, in 2004 that Waller turned to historical authorship as a pastime that filled his evenings while his family watched television.

The degree subject had been intellectually enriching, he said later, but chosen for the very reason that it had “no relevance to my day job … I deliberately undertook a course that was not calculated to make me more employable”.

It did however lead him into colourful 19th-century byways that formed the background of his three exercises in biography. The Magnificent Mrs Tennant (2009), was a life of the London hostess Gertrude Tennant and was selected as a Daily Telegraph Biography of the Year.

The Perfect Man (2011) unearthed the remarkable story of the Victorian strongman Eugene Sandow – whose physique was said to cause “semi-delirium” among female audiences and who, on his first US tour, charged society ladies $300 each to run their hands over his muscles in his dressing room.

“Lively, colourful and fascinating” was the Telegraph’s appraisal, and next came Iron Men (2016), which revealed the pioneering role of Henry Maudslay’s early-19th-century Lambeth engineering works. For one reviewer, the book “encapsulated the industrial revolution” in a single slim volume.

David Ross Waller was born at Bowdon in Cheshire on November 26 1962, the younger son of John Waller, a merchant navy officer, and his wife Jennifer née Hyland, a physiotherapist.

David was educated at Manchester Grammar School and went on to read English at Balliol College, Oxford, where he shared a staircase with Ghislaine Maxwell and edited Isis, the university magazine.

Graduating in 1984, he embarked on accountancy training but did not enjoy it; so he turned to journalism with Accountancy Age and Investor’s Chronicle before joining the FT, where he found a first niche as the accountancy correspondent.

After his stint on the Lex column, Waller left journalism in 1996 to start his own financial PR firm, Chancery Communications, which he sold to Cardew & Co in 2002.

He remained briefly with the merged firm but had by then embarked on his Birkbeck studies, and went on to work for the investment bank Dresdner Kleinwort and the Munich-based insurer Allianz before joining Maitland in 2007. His last City role, after AFME, was with FTI Consulting.

David Waller’s first book Wheels on Fire (2001) was an investigative account of the 1998 Daimler-Chrysler merger. His last – co-authored with Rupert Younger – was The Reputation Game (2017).

Having spent many years advising companies and senior executives, he admitted he found himself “like a mental health professional unable to define the mind” – worried that he did not know how reputations were truly made or lost.

He and Younger set out to find cogent answers to that question for public and private life as well as the corporate sphere.

A voracious reader, a fluent German and French speaker and a pianist who had taken up the instrument in his thirties, Waller was also an outdoorsman who in his youth had loved climbing Pennine rocks.

On one occasion he led a team of urban PR colleagues in a challenge to climb 24 Lake District peaks in 24 hours: “David did not have the body of an athlete,” recalled one, but was “a trouper who trudged to the last summit with real determination.”

Stricken by cancer in his early fifties, he carried on – so wrote one of his sons – “climbing in his head until the end”.

He married Jane Welch in 1992. The marriage was dissolved in 2018 and he is survived by their two sons and a daughter.

David Waller, born November 26 1962, died September 21 2020