Sir Ernest Hall, property developer and composer

Sir Ernest Hall liked to call himself “a successful failure”, taking the theme as the title for his autobiography How to be a Failure and Succeed, which detailed how he gave up music as a young man and became a successful entrepreneur, first in textiles and then in property development. His most fulfilling venture was Dean Clough, a pioneering initiative in a half-mile-long complex of Victorian mills in Halifax, West Yorkshire, in which Hall realised his “practical Utopia” by fusing enterprise and the arts.
Hall acquired the 20-acre site — once the home of one of the world’s largest carpet factories — in 1983, when he was 53, and poured some £20 million into its development. Today more than 140 companies, including the fashion retailer Jack Wills and the RSA Insurance Group (formerly Royal and Sun Alliance), rub shoulders with arts organisations such as the theatre companies Northern Broadsides (which is based in the Viaduct Theatre at Dean Clough) and IOU, and the arts charities Northern Orchestral Enterprises and Yorkshire Youth & Music. Other organisations on site include an NHS commissioning group, a Travelodge, and Phoenix FM radio station.
About 4,000 people work at Dean Clough, which provides rent-free accommodation for numerous arts groups and studio space for up to 20 artists. In addition it supports regional and national theatre initiatives and mounts regular musical events, including acclaimed jazz seasons. It has a rolling programme of gallery exhibitions, with a focus on contemporary art, and has continued to add to its collection. It has amassed more than 300 works.
Past artistic highlights at Dean Clough have included the premiere of Ted Hughes’s last play, Alcestis, by Northern Broadsides in 2000; and the first presentation of 60 Minutes Silence, one of the videos by Gillian Wearing that won her the Turner prize in 1997. Dean Clough also houses a permanent exhibition of large paintings by the avant-garde film-maker Derek Jarman.
Despite his passion for the arts, Hall never expressed any interest in turning Dean Clough into a charitable trust — “I want a business which is philanthropic as well as being commercial” — and it remains privately owned.
Ernest Hall was born into a working-class family in Bolton in 1930. His parents, Ernest and Mary Elizabeth Hall, struggled to make ends meet and were “half-timers” in a mill, and later ran a pie shop. Ernest attended St George’s Primary School in Bolton, where he discovered a love of the piano at the age of nine. That was when he heard Sibelius’s Valse Trieste on a wind-up gramophone that a visitor brought into the classroom. He persuaded his parents to buy him a second-hand piano, and from Bolton Grammar School at 16 won a scholarship to the Royal Manchester College of Music. Envisaging a career as a concert pianist, he became an associate of the Royal Manchester College of Music and won the Royal Patron’s Fund prize for composition in 1951.
Professional engagements proved thin on the ground, however, and after John Ogden, one of the most gifted British pianists of the 20th century, arrived on the scene, Hall realised that there was “a difference between being good and nearly good”, and decided “to abandon music before it abandoned me”.
During National Service, Hall had found that he had an aptitude for office work, so he took an office job in a small textile mill and, by dint of enterprise (he learnt to bookkeep, weave and type), eventually became the mill’s owner, making his first fortune in the process. British fashion was booming in the 1960s and Hall’s woollen clothes became part of the Carnaby Street success story. From 1971 Hall expanded his interests into property development, becoming chairman of the Mountleigh group and a self-made millionaire.
Property in itself was not enough to satisfy such a restless spirit, and in 1983 he sold his business interests to embark, with his son Jeremy, upon Dean Clough. “Together we turned an abandoned, semi-derelict, 19th-century manufacturing colossus into a thriving, dynamic, practical Utopia,” he recalled. Hall threw all his energy into making the venture a success, retiring as chairman only in 2007.
Despite his entrepreneurial activities, Hall never gave up on music. Once Dean Clough was afloat he began to play concertos with local orchestras, but soon realised that his playing would have to improve dramatically if he was to keep up with the likes of the Bulgarian violinist Vanya Milanova, with whom he had been invited to perform in Amadeus. Hence, after his office day, he would practise for four hours on the Steinway at home; he also continued to compose.
True to his belief that you are never too old to learn something new, Hall set out in his seventies to complete his recording of the complete piano works of Chopin (14 CDs in all) in time for the bicentenary in 2010 of the composer’s birth.
How to Be a Failure and Succeed (2008) is an expression of Hall’s mantra that conviction and self-belief can overcome even the bleakest of setbacks, summed up in his phrase: “The only failure is to stop trying.” In 1998 he appeared on BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs, talked about his rags-to-riches life and revealed that his favourite piece of music was Schubert’s Piano Trio No 1 in B flat major — though he was also fond of Steely Dan and Bobby Wellins.
He was appointed OBE in 1986, made deputy lieutenant of West Yorkshire in 1991 and knighted in 1993. Among other posts, Hall was chancellor of the University of Huddersfield, chairman of Yorkshire and Humberside Arts Board and vice-president of the Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts.
He married June Annable, whom he met at the Royal Manchester College of Music, in 1951 and they had two daughters, Virginia, a former high sheriff, and Vivian, and two sons, Jeremy, who took over as chairman of Dean Clough, and Tom. They separated and Hall got married for a second time in 1975 to Sarah Wellby, with whom he had a fifth child, Leopold.
In 2007 Hall retired from Dean Clough and moved to Lanzarote, where he built a concert venue next to his home and hit the headlines when it was revealed that he was in a romantic relationship with his long-time friend, the cookery writer and Great British Bake Off star, Prue Leith. After four years they separated and Leith remarried. He returned to the UK in 2021 to live with his youngest son, Leopold, and his wife, Sarah, in Sussex.
Although he had a habit of registering his disappointment in a way that some of his staff felt was overly robust, Hall was generally known for being relentlessly positive, with one contemporary composer saying that, “Just talking to him is like drinking champagne, without the hangover.”
Sir Ernest Hall OBE, DL, property developer, pianist and composer, was born on March 19, 1930. He died on August 3, 2024, aged 94