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Charles Gordon, a friend of Princess Margaret and founder of Spey Investments, was a London venture capitalist who backed businesses such as National Car Parks, Carmen Curlers and the Wimpy hamburger chain.

Gordon was born to a Jewish family on May 19 1927, in Vilna, Lithuania. His parents Tania and Sholom Gordon first emigrated to South Africa and from there to London.

He studied English and law and At Cambridge, travelled and worked for his father’s engineering company until 1955 when he married Nadia Nerina, a celebrated ballerina who danced principal roles at Covent Garden and died at age of 80 in 2008.

Gordon wrote on property finance for the Investors Chronicle, now part of the Financial Times Group, where he met leading real estate entrepreneurs such as Charles Clore who were making fortunes in the 1950s. Gordon became financial consultant Jack Cotton, running City Centre Properties, the biggest UK developer of the time, which was documented in his book, The Two Tycoons.

While working for Hambros, then the biggest of the accepting houses, the merchant banking elite of the pre-Big Bang City, he arranged a deal with Hamros to set up Bishopsgate Property and General Investments, a property financing company in which he had a personal equity stake. During this time he secured financing for Cedar Holdings, whose 1974 bailout was the subject for his book, The Cedar Story.

In the 60s pension fund managers had a lowly status in the company for whose employees’ retirement they were charged with providing.

Gordon set up Spey Investments based on the insight that the growth of collective investment vehicles such as pension funds was transforming the financial system. He recognised the funds were ill-equipped to finance small and developing businesses and became and according to a friend from the era, became the “first person in the City to treat pension fund managers as human beings”. With a combination of flattery and entertaining he raised money from the funds.

Gordon won support for Spey from the pension funds of Unilever, ICI, Barclays and the electricity supply industry, together with Royal Insurance, but Spey was unsuccessful and had to be dismantled.

After Gordon left Spey he engaged into further property dealing, but went bankrupt. Together with Depfa, the German bank, he persuaded the Kuwait Investment Office to sell a 13-acre brownfield development site by Tower Bridge in London to a consortium in which he participated and which earned him millions. Gordon’s involvement was not made public and doday the site is of the Greater London Authority. Gordon lost most of earnings on plans to finance solar energy panels on the roofs of airport car parks and along motorways. After attending the opening of an exhibition in the honour of his wife Nadia at the Royal Opera House in 2013, Gordon was struck by dementia. In 2014 he died in the south of France, where he had lived since the late 1970s. Gordon was survived by three siblings,