Charles Jacob
Stockbroker and Methodist preacher
who founded the UK’s ethical investment sector
The Times,
20 August, 2017

Charles Jacob thought his days in the frenzied heart of the City were behind him when as a high-flying stockbroker he suffered a nervous breakdown in 1969. It proved to be a “road to Damascus” experience and he re-emerged after three years as a “virtual vegetable on heavy medication” to pioneer ethical investment in the UK.

Jacob was a founder member of the Stewardship Fund’s Committee of Reference. It scrutinised companies’ products and services, customer relations, community involvement, and commitment to conserving energy or natural resources. It recommended against investing in companies that harmed the environment, were cruel to animals, traded with oppressive regimes or produced pornography, weapons or tobacco.

At around the same time, the London-based Ethical Investment Research and Information Service (EIRIS) was set up to provide intelligence about companies. In its early days it approved only 200 out of 500 companies it investigated.

Despite the restrictions, the Stewardship Fund beat 68 per cent of all UK equity growth unit trusts during its first 11 years. The Financial Times declared in 1990: “The days when financial decisions could be made in a complete moral and social vacuum are numbered.”

Charles William Jacob was born in Hornsey, north London, in 1921. His father, a Jewish confectionery salesman who had married out of his faith, died when Charles was five years old; his widowed mother struggled to bring up her children — she also had a daughter — in cramped accommodation. Charles occasionally had to sleep in a chipped bath. He joined a youth club and Sunday school at the local Methodist church in Forest Hill “because it was the nearest”. This was the source of a religious faith that he would never lose. It was while attending Sunday school that he met Margaret Jenkins, who lived in the same street as him. They later married and had three daughters. All survive him.

Jacob left school at 14 to work as an office boy in the City with a firm of stockbrokers, Nathan & Rosselli, and worked his way up, eventually becoming a partner.

Jacob had faith in the good character of most professionals who worked on the Stock Exchange. “There are men that I know through whom the light shines, even if they are not depicted in any stained-glass window.”

As a north Londoner, Jacob was a lifelong Arsenal supporter who would take his daughters to cup final matches, but since Arsenal was far from the Kentish suburbs where they lived he would sometimes take them to Millwall games instead.

Jacob was active as a Methodist lay preacher. One of his daughters, Jacky, would occasionally accompany him to church. She recalled that he was a wonderful storyteller who was fond of visual aids and carried a model of Cleopatra’s needle around with him.

At the end of his life he looked back with some satisfaction on the fact that good had come from the breakdown that caused him so much pain. “I am absolutely convinced that God uses our suffering for his own purposes, if we allow him.”

Charles Jacob, CBE, ethical investor, was born on January 24, 1921. He died on June 1, 2015, aged 94