Galen Weston, leader of his family’s Anglo-Canadian business empire and owner of Selfridges – obituary

Galen Weston, who has died aged 80, was the head of the billionaire Anglo-Canadian dynasty whose fortune had its origins in mass-produced sliced bread. Though best known as the steward of the family’s Canadian and Irish interests, he was also the owner of Selfridges, a friend of the British Royal family – and the target, in 1983, of a botched IRA kidnap attempt.

Born in England and educated in Canada, Galen Weston first made his mark as a young retail entrepreneur in Dublin, where one of his ventures was Penneys, which in due course crossed the Irish Sea to become the highly successful Primark discount chain.

In 1971, his father Garfield Weston called him back to Canada to take charge of Loblaws, a supermarket chain of which Garfield had taken control in 1947, but which had fallen to near-bankruptcy; it was the family’s largest business asset, and Galen turned it around to become Canada’s most profitable grocer.

In 1975 he succeeded his father as chairman and managing director of George Weston Ltd, the master company for all their interests, which included department stores in several countries.

He remained chairman of George Weston until 2016, and was also president of the Weston charitable foundation in Canada, which made some $200 million of benefactions, and in the UK the Selfridges Group foundation, which supports research into neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s. The total Weston fortune was estimated in 2019 at more than £10 billion, making them, according to reports, the third richest family in Canada and 13th richest in the UK.

Willard Gordon Galen Weston was born on October 29 1940 at Marlow in Buckinghamshire. He was the ninth and youngest child of Garfield Weston and his wife Reta, née Howard, whose family originated from Coleraine in Northern Ireland.

Garfield was in turn a grandson of William Weston, a Londoner who emigrated to Toronto and whose son George started as a baker’s boy in 1875. George bought a bread delivery route from his employer and opened his own bakery in 1882, making his first fortune by mechanising the business and mass-producing loaves to meet demand from Toronto’s rapidly growing population. A tough operator, he was quoted as saying: “People will eat horseshit if it has enough icing on it.” By 1911 he had sold his first business for a million dollars and started another, making biscuits.

Garfield served in France during the First World War and afterwards toured British biscuit factories, where he conceived the idea of returning to the old country to pit his manufacturing methods against inefficient small British bakers, using exported Canadian wheat. When the crash of 1929 diminished his prospects in Canada, he set off across the Atlantic. A driven entrepreneur, he bought up bakeries and mills around the UK to create Allied Bakeries, later Associated British Foods, and in 1951 he caused a considerable stir in London by buying Fortnum & Mason, the historic Piccadilly grocers.

After the war Garfield had moved his family back to Canada, where he was pursuing Loblaws and other new retail and industrial ventures.

Galen – having worked as a supermarket “bag boy” as a teenager – completed his education by studying business administration at Huron University College, part of the University of Western Ontario.

At 21, he decided to break away from his domineering father and prove himself by starting a business of his own; Garfield refused to fund him, but his Northern Irish grandmother Eliza Whalley (whose second husband, Reta’s stepfather, had made money in Canadian sawmills) offered him $100,000 and encouraged him to try Ireland. His first venture there, Powers supermarket, grew into a small chain that was later sold to Tesco; one of its claims was to have brought the first avocados to Dublin.

In 1969 Weston bought a bankrupt Dublin department store, Todd Burns, and – with Arthur Ryan, a young store manager hired from the leading Irish retailer Dunnes, as its long-serving general manager and driving force – reinvented it as a discount fashion outlet called Penneys, which rapidly expanded and was renamed Primark when it opened its first UK store, at Derby in 1973.

In his young days in Dublin, Weston’s eye had been caught by a striking model in hot pants pictured on a billboard. She was 18-year-old Hilary Freyne; a blind date was arranged and they were married in 1966 in what was reported as a “Klondike-themed ceremony” at the Weston estate at Marlow.

They became one of Dublin’s most glamorous couples – but Galen also described Hilary as a “great seamstress”, who not only made her own clothes but took command of the cutting and machining business that stocked the first Penneys stores. As a present for Hilary he bought an interest in Brown Thomas, an upmarket Dublin store of which he took full ownership in 1984.

Not all of Galen Weston’s ventures prospered, but he stuck to a simple set of business precepts: owning real estate rather than leasing it, keeping debt to a minimum, maintaining a strong family work ethic, and retaining the loyalty of key executives such as Arthur Ryan of Primark.

Weston’s own work commitments left time for a jet-setting social and sporting life very much in contrast to that of his low-key elder brother Garry, who for many years oversaw the family’s British interests, including Associated British Foods, which became the parent of Primark and owned grocery brands such as Ovaltine, Ryvita and Kingsmill – and Fortnum & Mason, which was run by two of Garry’s daughters.

There were whispers of a fraternal “feud” – or at least an unwritten pact whereby Galen would focus on Canada and Ireland while Garry and his offspring held sway in the UK and Australia. There was certainly rivalry in earlier years, but the interests of the two branches became intermingled and Galen served as a director of both ABF and Fortnums, which were ultimately controlled by the family’s Canadian holding companies.

Territorial lines were further blurred by Galen’s £600 million purchase (after a bid battle against the property tycoon Robert Tchenguiz) of Selfridges department store in Oxford Street, London, in 2004. It was said that the British Westons had by then come to regard Galen as their benign “playboy uncle”.

But his life might have taken a very different turn in August 1983, when the Irish authorities received a tip-off that the IRA – short of funds, so on the lookout for wealthy kidnap targets – was about to launch an assault on Roundwood, Weston’s estate in Co Wicklow, 40 miles south of Dublin.

Armed police were lying in wait when seven gunmen in boiler suits and balaclavas arrived at the mansion at eight o’clock on a Sunday morning; in the 10-minute shoot-out that followed, four gang members were seriously wounded and a fifth arrested.

Fortunately Weston was not at home; indeed, he had not lived at Roundwood for a decade and had not even visited the house for several months. On the day of the attack, he was due to play polo at Windsor alongside the Prince of Wales; the match went ahead and Roundwood was later sold.

Polo was Weston’s passion. Playing at a handicap of 2, he funded his own team, the Maple Leafs – who were described by one correspondent in 1988 as “superbly mounted [with] long passing [and] powerful and accurate striking” – and created a polo stud at his grand home in Windsor Great Park: this was Fort Belvedere, once the scene of Edward VIII’s abdication drama, where the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh were guests at Hilary Weston’s 60th birthday.

In later years the Westons divided their time between Fort Belvedere, Toronto where Hilary served as lieutenant governor of Ontario, and Florida where they developed an exclusive polo-and-golf community and named it Windsor.

Galen Weston was awarded the Order of Canada in 1990 and was appointed CVO in 2018. He is survived by Hilary and by their Irish-born twins Alannah – who succeeded her father as chairman of Selfridges Group in 2019, having been the department store chain’s creative director – and Galen G Weston who is now chairman of George Weston Ltd and Loblaw in Canada.

Galen Weston, born October 29 1940, died April 13 2021