Duncan Naughten (OB 1955-1959)

An accountant by accident, a traveller by design and a chum for life

A chartered accountant and Rotarian with a penchant for travelling and working in less settled parts of the world, Duncan Grant Naughten died on December 8th 2024, aged 81. The funeral took place at Harpenden Methodist Church on January 6th.

Born on October 7th 1943, he was brought up in post-war Essex and gained a scholarship to Brentwood School. His son Austen told mourners that at school “new and wonderfully pleasing things opened up to him".

At a CCF field day, Duncan was charged with aiming a decommissioned artillery piece at St Botolph’s Church, Colchester. At the end of the exercise, he and fellow student soldiers found themselves in a pub. Sipping his pint, he decided this was definitely the way to spend an idle hour. So began a lifelong enthusiasm for grape and grain and the warm embrace of the public bar.

Facing the end of his time at Brentwood, Duncan had no idea what to do with his seven O levels. When the careers master asked the class if anyone was interested in chartered accountancy, Duncan put up his hand. He explained in later life: “I wasn’t really sure what an accountant was but I didn’t have any better ideas.” His course was set. Wife-to-be Elaine cajoled him through his exams. He qualified in 1967 and later became a Fellow.

In 1972, he became chief accountant and company secretary of a hi-fi and audio equipment manufacturer. From 1974 to 1981, he was group financial controller of Tricentrol plc, an oil company with trading subsidiaries. The high technology company, Comtech, then required his presence in Switzerland, the Netherlands and Bermuda. He dealt with budgets, venture capital and equity funding, contracts, treasury matters, tax planning and statutory reporting.

He joined Trimoco plc, holders of major vehicle franchises in the UK, and was concerned with acquisitions and disposal of dealerships and property development. In the early 1990s, he spent two years as finance manager of a document courier company. After assignments in 1993-94 at bar-coding systems and health service management companies, he attempted to retire but “failed.”

He found himself consulting for UK businesses, for the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development in eastern and central Europe, Asia and Egypt and for a business development programme focused on Africa.

The travel bug had been awakened by school trips to Paris. He and Elaine journeyed extensively in Europe in their intermittently trustworthy Mini. A brave trip to Prague in 1969 saw Soviet tanks still in the streets. His career allowed him to travel to India and Malaysia in the 1970s; America, Panama and Bermuda in the 1980s; and, following five years in Switzerland, to Lithuania, Mongolia, Dagestan, Kyrgyzstan, Romania, Siberia, Egypt and Ghana in the 1990s. Austen explained: “He would zoom off, armed only with a credit card
and phrase book to places most would prefer to see only on the news.”

Family holidays had to involve travel. Pins highlighting desired but rarely realised overnight rests would be stuck in Michelin maps. As night fell, the Naughtens would drive into the nearest town and take pot luck with the first hotel. Duncan once convinced a police car to escort them to an art noveau pile in Turin. The hotels were often shockers---in the middle of a pig farm in Germany and a noisy establishment on the French/Spanish border with Elaine wondering if it was a brothel.

Duncan loved speaking to people in their own tongue. French, Italian and Spanish were his strongest; he had good deal of Russian and even a little Romanian. Few waitresses were immune and off-menu food and drinks would miraculously result.

He made friendships at school which lasted a lifetime and spent a lifetime making and nurturing many more. His address book was full of people he’d met from every part of his life: through work, travel, as neighbours, at Rotary---he was President of Harpenden Rotary Club--- and in pubs. With Duncan, you were a chum for life.

“It is absolutely impossible that Dad’s love of fine food was nurtured by the mystery meat dinners at Brentwood School,” continued Austen. Despite this grounding, he became a gourmand and a fine cook. Travelling involved sampling the local cuisine, even if it made the palette squirm. He arranged the menus for board meetings at Comtech, casually letting it slip that lunchers were enjoying unusual parts of the animals listed. On Sundays, equipped with Len Deighton’s Action Cook Book, a glass of red wine and comedy recordings, he would roast something delicious for lunch.

His enthusiasms included the company of good chums, Essex County cricket, steam trains, an enormous collection of German stamps, the Guardian cryptic crossword, Tottenham Hotspur, photography and old films. The house was full of books: Dickens, Shakespeare, Conrad, Elliot, Thackeray, Sterne, modern fiction, works of history and the great comic writers. Duncan would quote from them copiously. He considered a good lunch the highest achievement of Western culture----an vehicle for family and chums to exchange stories and share jokes and news.

The displeasures of life were to be avoided or at least endured with Stoic fortitude. He did not care for bananas, yoghurt, films featuring John Mills, gravy on a roast dinner or Conservative canvassers.

He couldn’t abide fuss or sentimentality. His unflappability was legendary. When the blade of a rotary lawn mower flew into his face, he appeared in the house and asked “would someone mind calling an ambulance.” He once drilled a hole through his thumb, stuffed it with sawdust, wrapped it with a hanky and kept on working.

Duncan Grant Naughten was a kind, jovial, funny, reliable, erudite man and the calm solid centre of his family. He had a profound sense of duty and of what was right and never showed anger. Spending time with his children, children-in-law and grandchildren was always top of his agenda. Elaine died in March 2023. He is survived by sons Austen and Clement, by daughters Florence and Victoria and by seven grandchildren. In his last year, he met ill health and frequent hospital stays with affable stoicism. He made the best of the food, made friends with the staff, did not complain and practiced his languages. On the last day of his life, spotting a Polish name on a nurse’s name tag, he apologised – in Polish – for not speaking much Polish!

Do read below an edited piece about Naughten's adventures in former Soviet dominated countries as a business consultant - with the original appearing at greater length in the OB Chronicle of 2017.

Arrest in Siberia, armed escorts in North Ossetia and sheep slaughtering in a Baku cafe

As a business consultant over 18 years in east European and former Soviet Union countries, Duncan Naughten (1955-59) found his mettle well and truly tested by heat, cold, unusual food and hotels, being arrested, the prospect of violence and businesses which were not quite what they claimed to be. Duncan, who died in December 2024, was an ambitious linguist, who sometimes found his communication skills stretched in India, Malaysia, Egypt, Azerbaijan, Kyrgyrzstan, Turkmenistan, Mongolia, Russia, Lithuania, Moldova, Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo. It all added up to 1250 missions, 80 airports, over 1,000 flights and nearly 2,000 days in the field. Quite a few adventures came his way, as recorded in the Old Brentwoods Chronicle in 2017.

“You quickly learned that the norm was that there wasn’t a norm in dealing with social customs, and the legacy of state-dominated commerce.”

He braved over 45 degrees celsius in Ashgabat and minus 43 degrees in Kimry, north of Moscow. “Arriving at Tomsk airport in Siberia, I was met by a statuesque young woman with a huge fur hat and a fur coat down to the ankles. As she approached, the coat flew open to reveal hot pants.”

He witnessed a man on a step ladder wiping the ice off a wing’s leading edge with a bare hand; and watched air crew getting stuck into the vodka in an airport bar. Both observations related to flights he was about to take.

Hotels varied. At the top end, there were the Karolina in Vilnius, the Kempinsky in Ulaanbaatar and the Ak-Kerne in Bishak with its glorious view of the Tien Shan mountains. There were cockroaches in Vishny Volochok. Food was broadly fair in Bosnia, Moldova and Mongolia, fair to reasonable in Egypt, Kosovo, Lithuania and North Ossetia; and reasonable to plain disgusting in Russia, Azerbaijan, Kyrgyrzstan and Turkmenistan. To drink: vodka, vodka and more vodka.

“You had to be very careful about taking photographs. If a military vehicle or even an individual wandered into the frame, you could be banged up for spying. I was briefly arrested for taking a photograph of a preserved steam locomotive at Ulan Ude railway station in eastern Siberia. Apparently this was classed as a strategic asset of the state. Our group was escorted to a police post where the man in charge decided we were not a major espionage threat. We were released but not before an outside view of the cells had made me nervous.”

In October 1997, Duncan visited a rare earths manufacturing complex in Tokmok---at least that is what it claimed to be. The company did not freature on any maps or in the telephone directory and was sealed off by fences and security gates. All communication between the workers and the outside world had to be by letter, sent to a post box in Moscow. Five factories were spread around the 25-square kilometre site. “At no point, did I see a single grain of any rare earth.

“In May 1998, en route from Baku to Salyan, we stopped for coffee at a roadside café of appalling squalor. A shepherd suddenly appeared, leading a sheep. Before our eyes, the man produced a colossal knife and cut the sheep’s throat. He helped it to bleed to death in front of us.”

North Ossetia in the Caucasus included the town of Besian where 334 peole had been killed in the notorious school siege in 2004. The work in Besian was at a sweet corn processor, once the second largest in the world but reduced to operating at a fraction of its potential. *Only four cities were open to us in North Ossetia. Travel was only permitted in daylight hours. UN armed escorts and drivers were obligatory. After dark, we were accompanied by armed escorts who would conduct us to approved restaurants.

“In Kosovo, we drove through village after village where both the mosque and the Orthodox church had been dynamited or shot to pieces.” An armour-plated UN Land Cruiser was the prescribed mode of travel, given that a businessman driving through had recently been killed by a sniper.

Near Pristina, Duncan’s party encountered a US army patrol---"colossal Hummers and colossal soldiers, shaven heads and Raybans, laden with enough weaponry to start their own war. They said nothing; I said nothing but we drove away very slowly
and very smoothly.”

In Turkmenistan, attempts to advise a food company owned by two brothers met with difficulties. One brother was apparently roaming around Europe, opening offshore accounts. The other was under house arrest on suspicion of tax evasion and murdering his secretary. “We did not do any business but the country gave me the worst ever attack of food poisoning in all my peripatetic endeavours.”