Philanthropic entrepreneur known for his takeover of the House of Fraser

Born: June 19, 1955;

Died: July 21, 2018

DON McCarthy, who has died of cancer aged 63, was a self-made, rags-to-riches multi-millionaire who made his fortune in footwear but became best-known in recent years for the takeover of the House of Fraser department stores. He was chairman of House of Fraser from 2007-2014, when he stepped down after presiding over many of the changes, trials and tribulations which still beset the famous stores.

In a £450 million deal, House of Fraser was taken over from Mr McCarthy's investors in 2014 by the Chinese congolomerate Sanpower but increasingly failed. It was bought last Friday for a possible bargain £90 million by Mike Ashley, owner of the Sports Direct empire and Newcastle United, after the store chain collapsed into administration.

House of Fraser was founded by Hugh Fraser and James Arthur in 1849 as a small drapery shop on the corner of Argyle Street and Buchanan Street in Glasgow. It grew into its first upmarket flagship store on Buchanan Street before expanding around the UK, into Ireland even Abu Dhabi, with sales of over £1billion a year in recent years but falling. For much of the late '60s, House of Fraser owned the famous Harrods department store in London.

Although he had already been widely known as a multi-million entrepreneur in the shoe retail industry, Mr McCarthy hit the headlines in 2007 when he led an Icelandic-backed takeover of House of Fraser, investing £25 million of his own money. He was appointed executive chairman by his fellow investors and shareholders, mainly the Icelandic investment company Baugur but including Ayrshire-born businessman Sir Tom Hunter, at the time Scotland's wealthiest man.

Mr McCarthy was known to close colleagues as "Nudger" because he had a tendency to use his elbows to make a point. But he was also widely described as "a caring mentor" or "a force of nature" by those he worked with. He proved to be something of a visionary but his vision was not enough to keep pace with the times in the retail industry. As he had predicted, though possibly too late, internet sales were making many high street stores obsolete. While chairman of House of Fraser, he became something of a spokesman for the retail industry in general, fighting landlords for better deals.

“What landlords have not realised is that in every single city, a shopping centre called the internet has opened,” he said in an interview. The sheer competitive force of the internet counts for everything. You can see it in sectors such as holidays. When was the last time you went to a travel agent? Maybe the internet will be to retailing what the Industrial Revolution was to farming." He is beginning to be proved right.

Donald McCarthy was born on June 19, 1955, in Bromley. His father Daniel, a farmer from Co Kerry, south-west Ireland, and mother Maura (née Stack) had moved to England the previous year to seek a better economic life for their children. He attended St Thomas the Apostle College in Nunhead, in the London Borough of Southwark not far from Bromley.

He was still at school, aged 14, when he got a Saturday job as a stock boy in the Stead & Simpson shoe shop in Streatham, south London, not far from his home. Aged 15, he left school - to his father's horror - to work in the shop fulltime. With boundless energy and prodigious management skills, he was manager of the store by the time he was 17 and decided to dedicate his career to the retail shoe industry. By the age of 20, he had been hired as assistant manager of the upmarket Kurt Geiger shoe and accessories store on Bond Street, in the West End of London.

The store's owner, South African David Spitz, charged him with developing a new, cheaper range of women's shoes which would become branded as Carvela, producing everything from trainers to high-heeled dress shoes. Mr McCarthy would see the brand successful, with outlets in major department stores including Harrods, Selfridges and Debenhams. He went on, in 1991, to found Studio Shoe Group (SSG) which built up 30 shops of its own and 270 concessions in department stores, later diversifying into general fashionable womenswear. That's when he made his "first fortune" - more than £150 million by some estimates. “As I’m a Catholic boy, I went down on my knees and thanked God,” he said. He was appointed CBE by the Queen in 2017 for services to business and philanthropy.

Mr McCarthy had married his teenage sweetheart Diane Agnew in 1985. When she was diagnosed with cancer in the 2000s, he gave up direct involvement in his footwear business to spend time with her. It was only after she died in 2007 that he got back into business, notably with the House of Fraser takeover. He did so, he said, because he loved it and was good at it. “Investing in retail is my sport,” he once said: “This is what I do and enjoy it. Lying on a beach is not where I want to be.”

But he had also found a new love - the fight against cancer - little knowing that he would eventually lose his battle against the same disease his wife had fought.

After Diane's death, he donated £1 million to the Royal Marsden Hospital in Chelsea, where she had been treated "brilliantly," he said. That fund set up the Diane McCarthy Medical Day Unit, which has treated and still treats cancer sufferers. He later funded a further £1.5 million for an advanced "da Vinci" laser-knife surgical robot which allows cancerous growths to be removed with minimal invasive surgery. He was also a generous donor to the Retail Trust charity.

In 2010, Mr McCarthy was awarded an honorary doctorate by Glasgow Caledonian University for his outstanding contribution to fashion retailing. He went on to become a great ambassador and generous donor to the university. In 2013, with a vital £500,000 donation, he became a founding patron of the British School of Fashion (BSoF) at GCU London, a post-graduate university based in Spitalfields with a mission "to educate, challenge and develop a new generation of fashion and luxury business leaders, innovators and entrepreneurs."

The BSoF has since graduated over 350 students, of whom many say Mr McCarthy took a personal interest in them, especially those from challenging backgrounds. GCU London recently announced an annual Dr Don McCarthry CBE scholarship for "talented students in need," something which Mr McCarthy said he was "extremely humbled by." He also became Founding Patron of the British School of Fashion in New York, an offshoot of GCU, which was opened in 2013.

Away from his work or family, rately, Mr McCarthy was a great rugby fan, supporing England except when they were playing the land of his forefathers, Ireland. His diagnosis a few years ago, indicating he was suffering from cancer, came as a shock.

After his diagnosis, Mr McCarthy married a former business colleague, Julie Robinson. She survives him along with his two children from his first marriage, John, who runs his remaining business, and Hannah, an interior designer.

PHIL DAVISON