John Broadhead:LIFE, SAVE for a brief illness at the end, never ceased to energetically engage John Broadhead, who has died aged 92. Active and committed, he made a telling contribution to the commercial and residential real estate business in Ireland.
Born in Nottingham, he’d seen active war years by the time he arrived in Dublin in 1946, bought a small surveying practice called Harry Lisney and Son and singlehandedly grew it until, by 1958, he was employing 12 people. In 1970, with a staff of 60, the company became Lisneys and a partnership. John Broadhead became its senior partner and subsequent chairman.
In an Ireland finding its place in the 20th century he transacted the deals for such landmark buildings as Fitzwilton House, the Burlington Hotel, the Central Bank, ILAC Centre and Dún Laoghaire Shopping Centre. He was also chairman of the Irish branch of the Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors (now the SCS).
Through it all, he and Ruth, his wife of 56 years, reared a family of four in their beloved Castletimon House, in Wicklow. They worked the surrounding lands too, creating an exhibition farm on what were wild, gorse-filled acres when they bought them in 1959.
His early life was quintessentially English, after the mid-20th century fashion. Following boarding school at Leighton Park, near Reading, he studied estate management at Corpus Christi, Cambridge, a choice possibly influenced by his architect father. He graduated in 1940, spent the war years with the Royal Engineers and, while posted in Northern Ireland, met Ruth on a visit to Dublin. They married in 1943.
Fate and Dublin intervened again when, on leave and on another visit to the capital, he was struck down by diphtheria. This eliminated him from the June D-Day landing force, during which almost his entire unit died on the beaches of Normandy. The experience reinforced a sense of ethics and a hatred of the waste of warfare.
When the war ended he and Ruth moved to Dublin. Ruth’s father was the one who advised him to buy the surveying practice; Harry Lisney was dead and his son had been killed in Burma during the war. Working out of modest, hall floor offices at 23 St Stephen’s Green, with secretary Miss Jean Gowan his sole member of staff, John Broadhead began to build what would become one of the country’s leading commercial and residential estate agencies.
By the time he retired in 1984 he had seen the company expand nationwide and, in the 1970s, also seen it expand along St Stephen’s Green with the construction of the Scott Tallon Walker-designed Lisney Building.
John always found time to put passion and energy into his love of hockey; he was both captain and president of Three Rock Rovers; and into skiing. A fall, the result of failing sight, brought his skiing to an end when he was 88.
A Christian, he was dedicated to his wife and family and to working with such as the Cara Cheshire Home in the Phoenix Park.
Simon, the first of his and Ruth’s four children, was born in 1947 and followed by Charles, Sarah and Claire. When Ruth’s health began to fail in the 1980s, John involved himself in her care until her death in 1999.
He felt her loss deeply, but kept going with a wide variety of interests as well as a constant involvement with the lives and activities of his children and grandchildren.
He is survived by his four children and nine grandchildren.
John Broadhead: born April 8th, 1919; died August 30th, 2011