Business partners and friends of property magnate “Black Jack” Jack Dellal, who died in his sleep aged 89 last week, have dubbed him a “one-of-a-kind”.
The Reuben brothers and the Tchenguiz brothers, who owned Shell Mex house on Strand, WC2, with Dellal until 2007, were among those to pay tribute.
The Reubens said Dellal was a “very dear friend, who will be greatly missed”. David called him a “legend in his time”, while Simon said he was “one of a kind”.
Robert Tchenguiz described Dellal, who earned his nickname for his love of gambling, as the “last of the traditional property legends” and a “very clever long-term investor”.
“Jack was a straightforward man of his word,” he added. “I worked with him throughout all of my 25-year career. He was a good friend, a partner and an adviser.”
Dellal was born in Manchester in 1923 to exiled Iraqi Jewish parents who worked in the city’s textiles industry. He initially made his money in merchant banking and his big break came in 1972 when he sold his bank Dalton Barton to Keyser Ullman for £58m just before the financial crisis of 1973.
In 1974, he shifted into property when he set up Allied Commercial with Stanley Van Gelder.
Van Gelder’s son Dan, a founding director of Exemplar, said: “Jack and my father worked together for 40 years and were the reason I went into this industry.
“They were the true gentlemen of property, transacting on the basis of a handshake and just had a ‘gut feeling’ on deals that always came true.”
An example of which is Dellal’s 1989 sale of Bush House, WC2, the former home of the BBC World Service, to Japanese group Kato Kagaku for £130m, having bought it just two years earlier for £55m.
And in the early 1990s Dellal teamed up with Galliard Homes chairman and chief executive Stephen Conway to buy 103 flats in Narrow Street, E14. They then sold on 90 of the flats in a single weekend.
Conway said: “Jack oozed charm and personality. He was a very tough negotiator, but once he had given his word it was a done deal.”
Dellal was ranked at number 40 in the 2011 Estates Gazette Rich List with an estimated fortune of £445m.
He had nine children from two marriages, the last of which he fathered in his late 70s.
