Derek Rayner, Baron Rayner
English businessman and life peer (1926-1998)
Derek George Rayner, Baron Rayner (30 March 1926 – 26 June 1998) was an English businessman, who was chairman and chief executive of Marks & Spencer, and revived and rapidly expanded the company in the 1980s. He began working for M&S in 1953 as a management trainee and became the first chief executive outside the founding families of the company.
Personal life
Rayner was born in 1926, the son of George and Hilda Rayner. He was educated at City College, Norwich and Selwyn College, Cambridge, where he read theology. From 1946 to 1948 he completed his National Service duty in the Royal Air Force. He remained a bachelor throughout his life, with no known dependents.
Career
Marks & Spencer
Rayner began working for M&S as a management trainee in 1953 at the company's store in Oxford when the company's then chairman, Lord Marcus Sieff, asked his advice about a problem. He rose rapidly in the company's management and became a director in 1967.
By the 1980s the company's trademark, "St. Michael", was outdated and the company sales of clothing and household goods went into decline.
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This entry incorporates text from “Derek Rayner, Baron Rayner” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.