The following obituary appeared in The Telegraph

Sir David Kirch, reclusive collector of rare banknotes who gave £100 million to the elderly of Jersey. He discovered the joy of giving money away on his 70th birthday, when he sent £100 Co-op vouchers to everyone on Jersey aged 70 and over.

David Kirch, photographed by Allan Warren: the London property tycoon also amassed 15 tons of airship memorabilia, including a singed bottle of beer salvaged from the Hindenburg Credit: Allan Warren

Sir David Kirch, who has died 89, was a London property speculator who assembled what was thought to be Britain’s largest collection of provincial banknotes and the world’s most extensive personal collection of airship memorabilia; but he sold it all in the process of becoming one of the nation’s most generous philanthropists.

In the 1960s the reclusive Kirch had amassed a property empire that at one point included swathes of Kensington and Earl’s Court, as well as the Shaftesbury Theatre in the West End – which he threatened to demolish. Elegant, blond and blue-eyed, he was viewed as an enigma. “Often at weekends, he takes his mother down to his cottage at Shoreham-on-Sea, otherwise he sits alone in his 15-room mansion in Hyde Park Gate and watches colour TV after eating his solitary dinner served by his Spanish butler,” reported the Evening Standard. In 1973 he settled as a tax exile in Jersey.

On reaching “three score and ten” in 2006, he decided to mark the milestone by distributing £100 Co-op vouchers at Christmas to every islander aged 70 and over – a commitment he honoured even on discovering there would be 9,000 recipients. “I am fond of old people because I’m old myself,” he explained. He was delighted to learn that one pensioner had been able to buy a microwave oven, and called it “Mr Kirch”, so that “every time it pinged they thought of me”.

Sir David Kirch on his investiture as KBE at Windsor Castle  Credit: Alamy

He repeated the scheme in subsequent years – later upping the voucher to £110 – and established a charitable trust to provide homes for pensioners on Jersey. In 2012, on being diagnosed with cancer, he announced he would leave £100 million, the bulk of his fortune, to the elderly of Jersey.

Observing that his two happiest encounters with money were, first, in the making of it, and second, in the giving away, he proceeded to liquidate his assets to fund his trust. He sold his Rolls-Royce in favour of a Mini, and auctioned his collection of nearly 4,000 English provincial banknotes issued by defunct 19th-century institutions such as Scarborough Old Bank, Glastonbury & Shepton Mallet Bank and many others, their £5 and £10 denominations often fetching four-figure prices. He also sold a more unusual collection of “skit notes” – historic joke banknotes with political or satirical themes, issued by entities such as “the Bank of Love”.

His 15-ton collection of airship relics, sold in 2012, included medals awarded to the crew of the R101 which crashed in France in 1930 and a singed beer bottle salvaged from the wreckage of the Hindenburg in 1937.

David Kirch Credit: Allan Warren

David Roderick Kirch was born in Wimbledon on July 23 1936, the son of Leonard Kirch and his wife Margaret. His father had done well as a wholesale meat trader, but chose to keep travelling by train at six o’clock to Smithfield because, if the other traders saw his chauffeured Rolls-Royce, “he’d never get the price he wanted”.

At Tonbridge School, David demonstrated a flair for selling stamps. His commanding officer on National Service agreed that he would make a better businessman than a soldier, and since “I wasn’t clever enough to go to university,” as Kirch recalled, he found a job in the Lloyd’s insurance market.

On the untimely death of his father, aged 59, he inherited £5,000 and launched himself in the meat trade. When his firm was taken over by a Dutch company, who wanted his Kingston cold store, rather than his business, Kirch realised that property was a better bet than meat, and bought a stake in a Hampshire estate agency.

Joining forces with his brother Peter in 1962, they borrowed heavily to buy up chunks of west London over the 1960s, specialising in properties with sitting tenants that could be converted to more lucrative short-term lets. One flat in Courtfield Road was rented to the Rolling Stones; the police stripped off the oak panelling in the drawing room during a drugs bust.

Their first big gamble, as Kirch told an interviewer, was to buy 23 houses in Earls Court for more than £250,000 – 90 per cent of it borrowed – though they were producing rental income of only £1,000 a year. “Once you had dealt with sums of a quarter of a million,” he observed, “things do become much easier.”

In the early 1970s the Kirch brothers bought into a quoted company, Peureula (Sumatra) Rubber Estates, which they renamed Peureula Investments and through which they amassed unpayable debts of some £35 million – chiefly to Keyser Ullman, one of the fringe banks heaviest hit by the property crash of 1973. “They can only ever hope to get their money back,” Kirch said in 1976, “which they won’t.”

His enthusiasms as a collector ranged from glass eyebaths to memorabilia from Crystal Palace Credit: Allan Warren

Having lost nearly everything, David Kirch later rebuilt his portfolio to a value at one point estimated at £250 million.

His enthusiasms as a collector ranged from glass eyebaths to memorabilia from Crystal Palace (which he dreamed of rebuilding) and a bench once belonging to Lord Lucan. One particular indulgence was cars; another was gambling. At the Casino de la Fôret at Le Touquet, Ian Fleming challenged him to a race back to their hotel in their sports cars.

Being a covert homosexual, Kirch recalled, was another form of gambling: “Sex was that much more exciting when it was illegal.” He regretted never having children, and observed that his life had spanned an era when his friend, Lord Montagu, could be imprisoned for homosexuality, to the legalisation of gay marriage and adoption by same-sex couples.

His long-term partner Serge Cuhat died in 2009 in an Alpine ballooning accident.

In 2013 David Kirch was appointed KBE.

Sir David Kirch, born July 23 1936, died February 28 2026.

(PS 50-53)