Tony Marchington, who has died aged 55, was a leading biotech entrepreneur – co-founder of Oxford Molecular, once valued at £450 million – who was forced into bankruptcy by his ownership of the steam locomotive Flying Scotsman, which cost him millions.
Marchington combined a shrewd scientific brain with a passion for steam. He once owned 25 traction engines, including the star of the 1962 film The Iron Maiden, which sought to create the aura around them that Genevieve had done for vintage cars.
He bought his first steamroller at 22, building with his father a collection that included a working Victorian funfair; a road locomotive built in 1900 which he claimed was the world’s first armour-plated vehicle; a Wall of Death from the 1930s; and a seagoing steam tug. He once had the 160-ton Flying Scotsman driven on a low loader along twisting Peak District roads to the family’s traction engine rally. As it pulled into the field, he told the crowd: “I’m saying to myself 'Marcho, you’ve arrived!’”
Many railway enthusiasts believed that, but for him, Flying Scotsman might never have returned to the main line. In 1996 he had stepped in to purchase, for £1.5 million, the ageing A3-class Pacific from Sir Bill McAlpine and Pete Waterman, whose own restoration plans had run into difficulties.
He then spent £1 million over three years restoring Flying Scotsman at the Southall Railway Centre – a task originally priced at £200,000. It emerged in 1999 in pristine condition to haul a £350-a-head special train from King’s Cross to York.
Yet within seven years he would be the latest victim of what has been described as the “curse of the Flying Scotsman”. Taking the historic locomotive to America had ruined Alan Pegler, its first private owner, and Waterman lamented that the Scotsman had cost him even more than his divorce.
For Marchington things had started well. In 2002, for example, he secured a contract for Flying Scotsman to haul Orient Express Pullman train excursions, floating Flying Scotsman plc on the Ofex market and hiring the former Conservative MP Peter Butler to run the company. But then Edinburgh City Council rejected Marchington’s proposal for a “Flying Scotsman Village” to capitalise on the brand. In late 2003 he was declared bankrupt, and his collection of traction engines sold.
With Flying Scotsman plc £474,000 in the red (on top of debts owed to banks totalling £1.5 million), the locomotive itself was put up for sale, with the National Railway Museum purchasing it for £2.5 million in response to a campaign by enthusiasts. It is currently undergoing a further lengthy and costly restoration.
Anthony Frank Marchington was born at Buxton on December 2 1955, and raised on the family farm in the Peak District. Showing a boyhood flair for science, he gained a BA in Chemistry and a PhD in Bioinformatics at Brasenose College, Oxford.
There he lodged with the American Walter Hooper, the last personal secretary of the theologian and children’s author CS Lewis. Marchington lectured with Hooper in the United States, and co-wrote Through Joy and Beyond, a 1977 life of Lewis.
Marchington joined ICI Agrochemicals in 1983 as a project manager, becoming marketing manager for South Ameria in 1986. At ICI he found a way of using a computer to help a molecule dock with the active part of an enzyme, a breakthrough that enhanced the fortunes of Zeneca when it was launched as a separate company.
In 1988, with his tutor Prof Graham Richards, he co-founded Oxford Molecular, a drug design software house. The company thrived, being floated in 1994 and earning £10 million for the city’s university as it acquired the pioneering French company Biostructure and built partnerships with companies such as Glaxo Wellcome.
Worth £450 million at the height of the biotech boom of the late 1990s, Oxford Molecular was sold for £70 million in 2000 to Pharmacopeia Inc – and is now part of Accelerys, whose European headquarters is in Cambridge.
Marchington bounced back from bankruptcy as an after-dinner speaker. He went on to run Marchington Consulting and Savyon Diagnostics and co-founded Venture Hothouse Ltd. For the last year of his life he was chief executive at Oxford Medical Diagnostics, developing advanced methods of gas analysis, in particular breath analysis for the screening of diabetes.
He was a Fellow of St Edmund Hall, Oxford, and a former member of the Department of Trade & Industry’s Competitiveness Advisory group. He joined the Freemasons in 1991, becoming a Provincial Grand Steward and Assistant Provincial Grand Master for Oxfordshire. He was made a Freeman of the City of London in 1997.
Tony Marchington was twice married. He is survived by his second wife Caroline, whom he met when he gave her a lift to the local pub on his steam engine, and two children from each marriage.
Tony Marchington, born December 2 1955, died October 16 2011
With Flying Scotsman plc £474,000 in the red (on top of debts owed to banks totalling £1.5 million), the locomotive itself was put up for sale, with the National Railway Museum purchasing it for £2.5 million in response to a campaign by enthusiasts. It is currently undergoing a further lengthy and costly restoration.
Anthony Frank Marchington was born at Buxton on December 2 1955, and raised on the family farm in the Peak District. Showing a boyhood flair for science, he gained a BA in Chemistry and a PhD in Bioinformatics at Brasenose College, Oxford.
There he lodged with the American Walter Hooper, the last personal secretary of the theologian and children’s author CS Lewis. Marchington lectured with Hooper in the United States, and co-wrote Through Joy and Beyond, a 1977 life of Lewis.
Marchington joined ICI Agrochemicals in 1983 as a project manager, becoming marketing manager for South Ameria in 1986. At ICI he found a way of using a computer to help a molecule dock with the active part of an enzyme, a breakthrough that enhanced the fortunes of Zeneca when it was launched as a separate company.
In 1988, with his tutor Prof Graham Richards, he co-founded Oxford Molecular, a drug design software house. The company thrived, being floated in 1994 and earning £10 million for the city’s university as it acquired the pioneering French company Biostructure and built partnerships with companies such as Glaxo Wellcome.
Worth £450 million at the height of the biotech boom of the late 1990s, Oxford Molecular was sold for £70 million in 2000 to Pharmacopeia Inc – and is now part of Accelerys, whose European headquarters is in Cambridge.
Marchington bounced back from bankruptcy as an after-dinner speaker. He went on to run Marchington Consulting and Savyon Diagnostics and co-founded Venture Hothouse Ltd. For the last year of his life he was chief executive at Oxford Medical Diagnostics, developing advanced methods of gas analysis, in particular breath analysis for the screening of diabetes.
He was a Fellow of St Edmund Hall, Oxford, and a former member of the Department of Trade & Industry’s Competitiveness Advisory group. He joined the Freemasons in 1991, becoming a Provincial Grand Steward and Assistant Provincial Grand Master for Oxfordshire. He was made a Freeman of the City of London in 1997.
Tony Marchington was twice married. He is survived by his second wife Caroline, whom he met when he gave her a lift to the local pub on his steam engine, and two children from each marriage.
Tony Marchington, born December 2 1955, died October 16 2011
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