whole matter in detail with me and his lawyer (Mr. Ian MacCallum) in Hong Kong in January 1979. This important meeting of the three of us (Croucher, MacCallum, Todd) took place in the Hong Kong Club on January 23rd, 1979. There Mr. Croucher set out his ideas and we also considered a detailed draft deed which he had received from Mr. de Rothschild for his approval. It was at once clear that Mr. Croucher was not in favour of the Rothschild proposal; in particular, he would not accept the suggestion that Rothschild Trust Company (CI) Ltd. should be sole Trustee and that they would appoint several advisers to help them in academic matters. Noel held that a firm of bankers like Rothschild could be appointed by his Trustees as an adviser but should not be itself a trustee. He also objected to the headquarters of his foundation being in Guernsey, and it quickly became clear that for these and other, at the time unrevealed, reasons, Noel had decided to break off any further discussion of the matter with Rothschild. This was, of course, a matter upon which I neither could nor would comment, since it was clearly for Noel and his lawyer to decide on any action. I have no knowledge of any subsequent dealings he or they may have had with Rothschild; I did however receive from Noel a copy of a letter he had sent to Edmund de Rothschild on 30 August 1979, telling him he had dropped the proposal of a trust and did not wish to discuss it further.
Following our January meeting in Hong Kong, I had a stream of letters from Noel, some well prepared and typewritten, and others scribbled by hand. Arising from his requests as conveyed in them, I sent him a copy of the Trust Deed of the Nuffield Foundation and an abbreviated version of it which I prepared and from which I had removed all irrelevancies and left only those details which would apply if Noel wished to create a Trust on analogous lines. He was very pleased about this, and my draft formed at least part of the basis on which the final Trust Deed of the Croucher Foundation was drawn up by him and Mr. MacCallum in the autumn of 1979. Noel was concerned that in setting up a Foundation we should' appoint a merchant bank as investment advisers; he indicated that he did not wish to have Rothschilds involved and preferred Schröder Wagg (who incidentally advise Nuffield) whom he knew and respected through Schröder-Chartered in Hong Kong. Early in 1979 it appears to have first struck Noel that he was getting rather advanced in years and that it might be desirable to take some precautions in case he died suddenly. This led him to write to me on 22nd March 1979 informing me that he was going to approach Schröder and that he was having the necessary documents prepared to appoint me forthwith as his sole trustee so that in the event of anything happening to him I could go ahead with Schröder and with the Foundation. Fortunately for me he did not in fact do so. He was at this time rather given to talking about doing all sorts of things without ever getting around to putting them into practice; indeed there were times when both Ian MacCallum and I doubted whether he would ever get around to signing any Trust deed which might eventually be prepared!
By the time of my next visit to Hong Kong in October 1979 matters had largely been clarified. Noel had agreed to a draft trust deed which had been drawn up by Ian MacCallum as his lawyer and which was based substantially on the Nuffield deed modified, of course, to suit our circumstances. Noel wished MacCallum and myself to be his trustees and after some discussion he agreed to act as Chairman of the Foundation set up on the basis of the deed, provided that I would act as vice-chairman and promise to take over the chairmanship if anything happened to him. MacCallum and I persuaded him that we really ought to have more than two trustees in addition to himself, especially if we were to be dealing with
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