Born: 29 November, 1912, in Winchester, Tennessee.
Died: 8 July, 2008, in Nassau, Bahamas, aged 95.
THE only thing Sir John Templeton enjoyed more than making money was giving it away. He was possibly the world
's most successful investor of the second half of the 20th century, but spent the latter decades of his life as a spiritual philanthropist, donating his wealth towards a greater understanding of the meaning of life and how better to live it.
His last 20 years, including his dozen books and around $70 million a year in donations to university research towards spiritual progress, focused on seeking answers to what he called "the big questions": What is the best way to live? How large is God? How are finite beings related to the infinite? What was God's purpose in creating the universe? How can we be helpful?
His annual Templeton Prize for Progress towards Research or Discoveries about Spiritual Realities, initially known as the Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion, is the richest individual prize in the world, currently standing at £820,000 but set to reach £1 million next year. It honours "entrepreneurs of the spirit, outstanding living persons who have made an exceptional contribution to affirming life's spiritual dimension". These have included followers of Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, even agnostics, the list including Mother Teresa (the first winner, in 1973, when it was worth £70,000), evangelist Billy Graham and Soviet dissident writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn.
In 1978, the prize went to Edinburgh-educated theologian Tom Torrance, who died last December and shared Templeton's own view that religion and science were compatible, reconcilable and mutually necessary. The Rev Lord MacLeod of Fuinary, who died in Edinburgh in 1991, received the prize in 1989 for "adapting the monastic ideal and spirit to modern life and religious activity" through his prayer-centred ecumenical community on the island of Iona.
Through the Templeton Foundation, launched in 1987, Sir John also gave numerous financial awards to students and researchers around the world, including the John Templeton Award for Theological Promise which recognises the 12 best young post-doctoral scholars worldwide on the basis of their dissertations related to "God and spirituality". Two graduates of St Andrew's University's School of Divinity (St Mary's College), Drs Julie Canlis and Nathan MacDonald, were among last year's winners.
Sir John was American by birth but an Oxford-educated anglophile who became a naturalised British citizen in 1963 after moving from New York to the Bahamas. He was a Presbyterian throughout his life but an exceptionally open-minded one, said to lean towards the theories of the Unity School of Christianity, that the Bible, the traditional concept of God, or of Heaven and Hell should not be taken literally. "I am still an enthusiastic Christian," he once said. "But why shouldn't I try to learn more? Why shouldn't I go to Hindu services? Why shouldn't I go to Muslim services? If you are not egotistical, you will welcome the opportunity to learn more." He always opened his business meeting with a prayer, but insisted he was not asking for more profit, but merely tranquility to allow him and his staff to think straight.
His aim, and that of his foundation, was to see spirituality progress as much as science. "If you have a spiritual problem," he once said, "a priest will give you advice out of the Bible, which is 2,000 years old. If you have a medical problem, you don't go to a doctor and expect him to find a cure in Hippocrates."
Sir John made his estimated $500 million personal fortune by going against the flow, buying stocks, as he put it, "at the point of maximum pessimism" – when everyone else was selling. His first great success came after Hitler invaded Poland when he realised war was inevitable and that surplus goods would become scarce and therefore more valuable. With $10,400 of borrowed money, he invested $100 in the stock of every company trading on Wall Street at less than $1 a share – throwbacks to the crash a decade earlier. Of the 104 companies, he made a sharp profit on all but four.
In the 1950s, he began investing in mutual funds, setting up his Templeton Growth Fund in 1954, based in Canada to avoid capital gains tax, and was one of the first US investors to buy into Japanese companies, still struggling after the war, and later Chinese. By the time he sold the Growth Fund to the California-based Franklin Resources group in 1992, it was one of the most successful investment companies in US history, worth $440 million. Its funds had grown by close to 14 per cent a year, almost three points above average market performance.
Until that year, 1992, when he opted to concentrate on his spiritual quest, Sir John was president of many of the fund's offshoots, including Templeton Investment Counsel Ltd of Edinburgh, which, after the sale to Franklin, became known as Franklin Templeton Investment Management Ltd.
One colleague recalled his words during the 1987 stock market crash when everyone around him was in shock or panicking. "The bad news is we're in a bear market. The good news is it's almost over. Let's find stocks to buy."
John Marks Templeton was born in a small town in Tennessee to a Presbyterian family of cotton traders who were badly hit by the Wall Street crash of 1929. Financing himself through odd jobs, he won a scholarship to Yale University, graduating in economics, then to Oxford where he studied law at Balliol College until 1937. Little did he know then that, half a century later, a new Oxford College would be named after him, Templeton, for his endowment to what was previously called the Oxford Centre for Management Studies. It was one of his proudest honours.
Sir John Templeton, who died of pneumonia, was knighted in 1987 for his services to charity. His first wife died in 1950, his second in 1993. A daughter from his first marriage predeceased him. He is survived by two sons from the first marriage.
PHIL DAVISON
The full article contains 1028 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
