Interview: Dame Amelia Fawcett - Lady in lavender

Odd things happen when people leave behind their full-time, full-on City careers.

Some sail around the world, others decamp to the country. Dame Amelia Fawcett, a veteran of Morgan Stanley, has managed both, while juggling high-powered, low-profile roles that mean she works closely with both the Prince of Wales and George Osborne.

Her latest venture is her least predictable. The Welsh farmhouse that Fawcett bought 20 years ago after being drawn to the area for its fly fishing has become an unlikely business hub. Not so long ago she started growing lavender on her 40 acres. Instead of simply selling it she has produced a range of scented cushions and blankets under the brand of Chilcott, her late mother’s maiden name. No jokes please about another wealthy City type enjoying the sweet smell of success.

“Don’t laugh,” the American says, over coffee, with a healthy twang that betrays her Boston roots. “Initially I thought about growing grapes and making wine but we had the soil tested and they told us it was perfect for lavender.”

Fawcett found it “grows like billy-o” so that: “When I send Instagram pictures to people they write back, ‘I didn’t realise you had moved to the South of France’.” A plan to produce just lavender oil was swiftly ditched. Now Chilcott — run with three other women — is testing candles to sell alongside its pièce de résistance, blankets made from 100 per cent British lambswool. Such sourcing means the range is not cheap but it has won famous fans, including Prince Charles, whose charitable foundation Fawcett chairs.

“I was in a meeting with him the other day and as I was leaving he took me by the arm and said, ‘Where is my blanket?’ I felt like saying, ‘It’s on your bed, sir’, but I didn’t.”

A glance at her CV confirms that Fawcett, brisk and ballsy in fitted brown jacket with gold brooch glinting, does not throw herself into things half-heartedly. She is single with dual UK-US citizenship and shares her home with two black labradors, Charlotte and Tori, who appear in the product photography on the website. Still, the big question about this new lavender obsession is: why on earth bother?

“After 30 years in banking and the law, to be able to do something sustaining and sustainable, to use your hands for something different, that is fun,” she says.

Put it like that and Chilcott sounds like a perfect retirement project. Except that Fawcett, 58, is far from retreating to till the land. Her main job these days is chairing the Hedge Fund Standards Board, a global body dedicated to increasing transparency between hedge funds, their investors, regulators and governments. The so-called “shadow banking” world has grown at the expense of the banks since the financial crisis but, as Fawcett points out, “to date in 40 years, hedge funds have not taken a penny of public money” after getting into trouble.

That contrasts sharply with the bailed-out high-street banks. Her friendship with Sir David Walker, another Morgan Stanley alumnus soon to step down as the chairman of Barclays, plus the fact she is a non-executive director at the Treasury, overseer of Lloyds and Royal Bank of Scotland, means she has been sounded out about joining certain boards or even chairing them.

“They have tried and I’ve said no, repeatedly,” she says, before quickly adding something about the “long selection process”. Fawcett adds: “I am the one who gets up in front of MBA students and says the City lost its way. It lost its moral compass, it needed to be brought back into line. Absolutely, it needed to find true north, still does, but parts of it have gone way over. I just don’t think it’s fun to be a banker any more.”

There was a time when it was. Fawcett came to Europe to work in Paris for an American law firm but was lured to London in 1987 when Morgan Stanley was trying to establish itself in the wake of the Big Bang. Because it was akin to a start-up, reporting back to New York, Fawcett suffered little of the sexism rife in the City in those days, instead vaulting up from the legal team and through the bank as it grew.