THE co-founder with Richard Branson of Virgin Atlantic Airways in 1984, Randolph Fields was an international lawyer, gambler and airline owner, who had homes in Scotland, California and Jersey, where he died of cancer on February 24 at the age of 44.
He had a long lease on one of the private flats at Culzean Castle, which he regularly visited, and where he entertained his many friends in the West of Scotland.
Having made one fortune with Virgin, he then lost over #1m in 1987 on his ill-fated airline Highland Express, when he attempted to maintain a regular service at low rates from Prestwick to New York. Sadly, this brave enterprise, which initially provided many local jobs, only proved that you cannot run an airline with only one jumbo jet.
The inaugural flight to New York was delayed several weeks because of refurbishment problems on the aircraft then in the Far East. Further technical breakdowns meant that aircraft had to be hired on a temporary basis at prohibitive rates in the leasing market to honour obligations to passengers.
Born in California, he was brought by his mother to London at the age of nine where he left school without any O levels, but by 1980 he had qualified for the English Bar and also for the California State Bar. His gambling streak came out not only in his risky airline ventures, but in his annual visits to the Las Vegas world poker championships, where he was a player of international repute.
Perhaps his best coup was to leave Virgin with a severance settlement in the form of a ''dream ticket'' - a promise of free life-time first class travel for himself, two friends, and his mother. Fields often flew the Atlantic twice a week - to gamble, or to attend to his ''insurance archaeology'' practice, which involved digging up forgotten liabilities for industrial diseases such as asbestosis, and he claimed that his tickets were worth #300,000 a year to him.
In 1986 he married fellow barrister Fiona Harvie-Smith. His only child Randolph Jnr was born just eight weeks before his death.
NEIL GOW
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