My father, Denis Gildea, who has died aged 94, played a key role in negotiating Britain’s trade treaties after the second world war.
As a senior civil servant in the Board of Trade he took part in negotiations to integrate Europe into the Marshall Plan through the Organisation for European Economic Cooperation. He also helped to develop the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade and to construct the Efta free trade area, and worked with Edward Heath and George Brown in the 1960s to bring Britain into the European Economic Community. Later, under Margaret Thatcher’s second government, he was tasked with privatising British Airways.
In his 2002 memoirs, he wrote that when he retired from the civil service in 1983: “I thought our generation ... had done better than our fathers in creating a better world after the war. Indeed we should look back on the 30 or so years after the war as a sort of golden age.”
Denis was born in Worthing, West Sussex, the only son of Rudolf, a rubber planter, and his wife, Rosalind (nee Jepson). With his father working in the far east, his parents lived mostly apart, and in 1934 his mother took him to Barcelona, where he was educated in a Salesian school. Returning to the UK in 1935, he attended St Paul’s school in west London.
He went straight from school to join the Royal Navy in the second world war, escorting convoys across the Atlantic as a sub-lieutenant. His mother died of cancer during the war and his father, captured by the Japanese, died in Changi internment camp in Singapore in 1945.
Demobbed, he took a degree in philosophy, politics and economics at Worcester College, Oxford, staying in the holidays with a Belgian family to learn French. He did well in the civil service examination in 1948 and might have had a career in the Foreign Office. But, having married Hazel Walsh, a physiotherapist, in 1950, he did not want his children to go to boarding school and so joined the Board of Trade instead.
A semi-detached member of the Church of England, Denis believed that churches should be ecumenically linked and socially engaged. He sat on the board of Christian Aid (1972-84) and helped send funds to Chile after the 1973 coup. He was also involved in the creation of Centre 70, an outreach centre in West Norwood, south London.
He believed fervently that his children should learn a foreign language and be as much European as British. We were twinned with a French family and sent on exchanges from 1966. In his later years he suffered from Alzheimer’s but was not beyond calling Brexit “a rather silly idea”.
Hazel died in 2012. He is survived by their five children, Laura, Edward, Paul, Mary and me, 17 grandchildren and three great-grandchildren.
