Sir Ralph Halpern, flamboyant chief of the Burton Group who constructed it right into a “multi-niche” retail empire – obituary

It was expected that Halpern would be roasted at the meeting. But, flanked by his family, he faced the music, unapologetic and unperturbed, admitting the affair but dismissing it as “an innocent little nothing”, and found that the shareholders cared not one jot about his morals, only about their dividends. The executive options scheme was passed, albeit in a reduced form that would benefit Halpern by £2.5 million.

Halpern was able to carry on jogging and making money for another three years. But in 1989 Burton shares began to tumble amid a welter of speculation about the group’s liabilities, and as the new decade was rung in Halpern was drummed out.

The son of Viennese refugees, Ralph Mark Halpern was born at Belsize Park on October 24 1938. He was secretive about his background and education, and refused to supply Who’s Who with a curriculum vitae. But he did relate that his father had been a banker and retailer before fleeing to Britain, where he had started a small garment manufacturing business; his mother designed clothes.

Young Ralph was educated at St Christopher’s School, Letchworth, and entered the clothing industry as a trainee for Selfridges in Oxford Street; he went on to join Peter Robinson, a subsidiary of Burton, as a trainee in 1961, and was then sent north to Leeds to manage a Burton outpost.

Montague Burton, Tailor of Taste, was then a fading brand, with loss-making factories producing off-the-peg suits for weddings and funerals; but it boasted 600 prime sites and Halpern saw his opportunity.

He began a relentless march up the ranks, persuading the company to go into niche marketing, targeting specific age and social groups. In 1964 he was involved in creating Topshop (which began as Top Shop), launched in Peter Robinson’s Sheffield branch, aimed at fashion-conscious teenage girls. In the late 1960s, as merchandise manager of Peter Robinson, he worked with Montague’s son Raymond Burton to expand Topshop into a chain of shops within shops which soon became stand-alone stores.

Burton closed its factories in 1977, becoming a purely retailing concern; the next year it bought Dorothy Perkins. Halpern became chief executive in 1978, managing director in 1980, and within 12 months he had ousted Cyril Spencer to become chairman and chief executive.

Spencer had made the mistake of telling Halpern that he intended to discuss a buy-out of the company with the petrol station and property tycoon Gerald Ronson. When the meeting happened, Halpern was at hand with a tape-recorder. The Burton board were unimpressed and Spencer was shown the door.

Over the next decade, Halpern divided up the Burton Group into such niche retailing outlets as Principles, Topman and Topgirl, acquired new high street sites and diversified its activities. In doing so, wrote the retail guru Sir John Timpson who did business with him, Halpern “rescued Burton from almost certain closure and created a group that looked likely to dominate the high street”.

As consumer confidence grew, a credit-fuelled retail boom helped to hike Burton’s share price from 50p in 1981 to 250p in 1985, when Halpern launched his most ambitious take-over bid – for Debenhams (which also owned the upmarket Harvey Nichols store in London’s Sloane Street). This respected but ageing chain, he said, would be transformed with the help of Terence Conran into glittering “gallerias”.