Richard Scott, who has died aged 97, held a series of senior editorial posts on the Guardian and was pivotal to its survival through its worst crisis. As chairman of the paper's owners, the Scott Trust, he was party to all the main decisions about its commercial direction from 1956 until his retirement in 1984, the last of the family to hold senior office in the paper.
Scott was a grandson of CP Scott, whose long editorship, from 1871 to 1929, three years before his death in 1932, established the Manchester Guardian's national and international reputation. His father, Ted Scott, became editor of the family newspaper in succession. He and Richard, then aged 15, were sailing on Windermere, in the Lake District, in April of the same year when the boat capsized in a squall and Ted was drowned. The paper overcame this calamity under a new editor, WP Crozier. It was 15 years later that Richard himself joined the staff, having spent his time after Gresham's school, Norfolk, and Christ's College, Cambridge, working for the League of Nations Union, the Spectator, the British Council, and finally the news department of the Foreign Office, where his colleagues included Osbert Lancaster and Guy Burgess.
Scott became the paper's diplomatic correspondent in 1947, during the first keen frosts of the cold war. Scott hesitated to accept the job offered by the then editor, AP Wadsworth, because he was conscious that such a post "is not usually used as a training ground". Others from that time might also have found it hard to leap from being custodian of information to seeker after it, but Scott found no difficulty in demonstrating his independence.
That was especially so during the Suez adventure of 1956. His reporting for the paper, repeatedly quoted on the BBC World Service, and his own regular commentaries for the BBC so displeased Anthony Eden's government that it tried to have the broadcasts stopped. It was, of course, unsuccessful.
In that same year, Scott became chairman of the trust; in 1959 the Manchester Guardian became the Guardian; in 1961 it also began printing in London; and in 1964 the editor and its major departments followed. Scott had left the capital in 1963 for the US, succeeding Max Freedman as Washington correspondent. He was thus in charge of diplomatic, White House and Congressional reporting there, with Alistair Cooke roaming the rest of the US, from which Scott was more or less excluded.
This strange division of labour could be irksome, as both men sometimes found, but they did not let it rankle. Cooke indeed was best man at Scott's wedding to his second wife. Later, after Cooke's retirement, Scott became the head of Guardian coverage in the US, working with young talent such as Adam Raphael and discovering another star of the future, Martin Walker.
It had been characteristic of Scott's work in London that he took care never to grind an axe or promote a cause. He did not draw editorial conclusions. His predecessors before the war, Frederick Voigt and Max Wolf, had had a quite different interpretation of the role, which for them entailed exposing the inadequately known evils of Nazi Germany. Scott wrote for a readership that was already better informed, and that he judged capable of making its own assessments, once given the facts.
It was well said of him by David Ayerst, the writer of Guardian: Biography of a Newspaper (1971), that he was "a judge summing up to a jury of readers, not a judge trying a case alone and delivering judgment". Scott maintained that attitude to his work throughout his time in Washington, during the worsening years of the Vietnam war, and later in Paris, from 1971 until he retired from editorial work on reaching 60 in 1974, continuing as trust chairman for another decade.
One of the reasons for his original appointment had been AP Wadsworth's desire to have an editorial Scott on the paper. The other member of the dynasty, then in senior office, was Richard's cousin Laurence, chairman of the newspaper company and, in Mancunian eyes at least, its personification. During Richard's early tenure as chairman of the Scott Trust, he was content to defer to his cousin's managerial primacy. In the early 1960s he was either travelling frequently or living in Washington, whereas Laurence was on the spot and had a closer knowledge of the company's day-today affairs.
In 1964-65, however, Laurence began to rue his decision to take the Guardian to London and to despair, when looking at the figures, of making it a viable national newspaper. In the autumn of 1966 he led a consortium to try and outbid Lord (Roy) Thomson for control of The Times, with a view to merging the two papers and companies.
In working terms it was mainly Alastair Hetherington, the then editor, who put an end to any such proposition – implausible though it was – but it was Richard who, reconvening an emergency session of the Trust, delivered a powerful denunciation of such a deal. The new edifice being planned under Laurence's guidance, he said, was "assuming more and more the character of a mausoleum in which the relics of the Guardian might be preserved with decorum and without loss of face to nourish and sustain a more thriving Times". His intervention – it had to be from a Scott – proved decisive, and any prospect of merging the two papers was abandoned. He was cheered when he announced the decision to the staff.
Thereafter, the Scott Trust underwent a change of character. Its main purpose had been simply to exist in order to preserve continuity and keep the Inland Revenue at bay. Laurence had once observed that "the ideal trustee is one who is best pleased when the trust is not called on to do anything." In future it was to take on a more active monitoring role.
The collapse of the merger plan thrust Richard into a more demanding chairmanship, and from then on it was agreed that he and his successors should attend meetings of the newspaper company board. The following year it fell to Richard to inform Laurence of a feeling among directors that a change of top management was needed, and Laurence, while remaining chairman, stepped down as chief executive. Richard may have disliked this and several similarly irksome – and diplomatic – tasks carried out on behalf of his colleagues, but he never shirked them. Long ago, on the day of his father's death, it was he who insisted that he should break the news to his mother.
In both his capacities Scott was liked and admired on the paper. His editorial work was seen as well informed and perceptive, and as trust chairman he held the paper's reputation high. He shared the family's good looks but not its ancestral solemnity. He was keen-spirited and good company.
His marriage to his first wife, Ruth, ended in divorce, and their son, David predeceased him. Richard spent his long retirement in the Aude department of south-west France, where he at first cultivated a vineyard near Limoux. Then, after his divorce from his second wife, Anna, with whom he had a daughter, Tamara, he moved nearby to Lagrasse, Corbières, with his third wife, Christiane. He is survived by Christiane and Tamara.
Hella Pick writes: In early September 1961, Richard Scott and I met in Belgrade, at the launch of the Non-Aligned Movement. A fledgling journalist, I had a one-off commission to cover it with him: Yugoslavia's President Tito was the host to President Nasser of Egypt, India's Prime Minister Nehru, Ghana's President Nkrumah and other leaders who believed they could distance themselves from the cold war and create a force for peace and progress.
Richard was supposed to be in New York for the autumn session of the UN General Assembly, but he urged Alastair Hetherington to send me in his place. A few months later I was offered a staff job, and spent the next 35 years working for the Guardian. For a while we worked in tandem: he in Washington, I in New York. Later, I often visited him in France. He was kind and loyal, unpretentious and generous, and he changed the course of my life.
Peter Preston writes: Richard Scott was, in the keenest sense of the word, a friend of the Guardian, and I believe he was essential to its survival in 1966. Alastair Hetherington might have fought the good fight against a merger that would certainly have led to the death of the paper, but Richard was the rock – the Scott family rock – he depended on to change the course of events.
Richard was not, on his own recognition, a journalist of the modern school. The tools of his trade were judgement and assessment rather than instant coverage. But he was always wise and kind, and a rare encourager of others.
His most important role, though, was as chairman of the Scott Trust: wry and self-effacing, he helped make the trust into a living organism that truly influenced the affairs of the growing company it owned. At its inception in 1936, the trust had been an act of huge generosity – the giving away to posterity of the Manchester Guardian and Manchester Evening News by the family that owned them – but also something of a device. It did not have its full independence. Richard gave it that freedom of reality and of spirit.
He oversaw the hiring, in the late 1960s, of Peter Gibbings and Gerry Taylor, the managers from outside who began to remake the Guardian's future. He was a friend and, in a sense, company ombudsman for Guardian editors. He knew instinctively how to use his influence when there were difficulties in an expanding organisation that had no conventional hierarchy of authority. He was a friend to me when, callow in the politics of business, I succeeded Hetherington as editor in 1975, and remained a personal friend until the day he died.
Richard was not one of those journalists who sank every energy in his work. He enjoyed life and conversation and fine wine. He was always slim and handsome, with charm to spare. He took easily to his long retirement in France, slipping naturally into the role of master of a domaine and maker of Limoux's famous Blanquette until his second marriage, to Anna, daughter of the novelist Leo Walmsley, foundered and he moved out to a lonely cottage in a village 10 miles away.
But Richard was never finished with life. One day, walking by a river, he saw two French women bathing and fell into conversation with them. That was how he met his third wife, Christiane, a teacher of Spanish who refused to learn English – but with whom he spent one of his happiest, most contented periods.
He received the Guardian daily in the fastnesses of rural France and read it from cover to cover. On occasional visits to London he kept up with old colleagues, and he spoke movingly about his years alongside Alastair Hetherington at Alastair's funeral. He was delighted to see Laurence's two sons, Martin and Jonathan, follow him as members of the trust.
Richard was the quiet, calm, essentially cultivated presence at the heart of the modern Guardian's development. He was modest, claiming little credit, but he was wrong. His personality and his diplomatic skills helped make what often seemed impossible achievable. When he talked of that dreadful day on Windermere when his father, the new editor, told him to stay on the boat while he swam ashore for help and then Richard saw that Ted was lost – in a brutal tragedy which spurred the creation of the trust – he was also the embodiment of a turbulent, triumphant history.
Richard Farquhar Scott, journalist, born 16 May 1914; died 11 November 2011