Major Tom McDowell - Chief Executive and Chairman of The Irish Times for almost 40 years

MAJOR Tom McDowell was Chief Executive and Chairman of The Irish Times for almost 40 years and oversaw the most successful expansion of the newspaper in its 150-year history as well as its transformation from a commercial company into a trust that guaranteed its independence and protected it from takeover.

He was born in Belfast in 1923 and educated in the Royal Belfast Academical Institution and Queen's University where he studied commerce and joined the Officer Training Corps. He joined the British Army in 1942, was commissioned in 1943 and became a regular officer in the Royal Ulster Rifles in 1946. After the Second World War, while still in the army, he returned to Queens and received an LLB and was called to the bar in London in 1951. After a period in the army's law department, he retired in 1955 to join an industrial company, James North Ltd., as its legal adviser in London.

Seeking experience of the company's activities, he came to Dublin temporarily to run its Irish operation but stayed on to become involved in the city's business life and was elected to the Kildare Street Club in 1955. He became chief executive of The Irish Times Ltd in 1962 and worked with four editors to oversee its growth from a struggling company into the publisher of the country's most influential, agenda-setting newspaper.

In 1973, with newspaper takeovers in the air, the company's four other ordinary shareholders who were also the directors agreed with him not to sell their shares on the open market but to sell them for less than their market value to a trust which would protect the paper's independence, prevent it from being bought out, and provide a framework for its editorial policy. He drew up the terms of the Irish Times Trust himself after seeking the advice of a wide range of similar newspapers from The Guardian to The New York Times. A £2 million loan from Bank of Ireland was used to buy out the five ordinary equal shareholders, including himself and the then editor, Douglas Gageby. The bank insisted on McDowell staying on for five or six years.

His leadership of the company was most associated with the editorship of Douglas Gageby to whom he has always attributed the editorial and circulation success of The Irish Times. He was also chief executive during the editorships of Alan Montgomery (briefly), Fergus Pyle and Conor Brady, with whom he worked successfully for 15 years. He always kept clear of involvement in the newspaper's editorial content, believing that that was the sole domain of the editor and that the management's role was to support the editor in every way possible.

During his years at the helm, the newspaper's circulation went up from under 35,000 to 105,312 and the company's financial position from a loss of £20,000 to a profit of £9.3million. He retired in 1997 as chief executive and proposed Louis O'Neill, who had successfully headed the commercial side of the paper and the company's other activities, as his successor.

He stepped down as chairman of The Irish Times in 1999 and as a director of the company in 2001, the same year as he retired from the Trust.

In recognition of his contribution to the newspaper and company, he was awarded the title honorary President for Life. The current chairman of the Irish Times Trust, Professor David McConnell, said recently that it was certain that The Irish Times would not exist at all today, or would be unrecognisable from the paper it is, were it not for Major McDowell.

Widely known as The Major, Tom McDowell has always been a private person, eschewing the social round to which his status as a media chief executive would have given him easy access. He would say that his family and The Irish Times were the loves of his life.