OBITUARY:Sidney Golt

Sidney Golt was one of the unsung heroes of the present international trading system. In the mid-1960s he was one of the small group of civil servants from leading industrialised countries who had the vision, the compassion and the economic common sense to ensure that products from the less developed world would have relatively free access to markets in richer countries.

And in the 25 years after his retirement from the Board of Trade in 1970 he embarked on an equally satisfying career as an adviser and writer on the problems of international trade.

But he was no bloodless bureaucrat. "He always got the best out of people, especially his younger colleagues," a distinguished contemporary, once said, "because he believed in them''.

Sidney Golt was born into a family of Polish-Jewish refugees in West Hartlepool.He owed his first education to a scholarship from a Rabbinical Foundation to Portsmouth Grammar School, and from there he went on a scholarship to Christ Church, Oxford, where he read PPE.

He then studied at Jews College, but in 1936 he had an introduction into what was to become his life's work when he took a job as a statistician with the International Tin Producers' Association, which was trying to introduce some stability into the depressed world of international community pricing.

In 1941 he was drafted in to work on the Price Regulation Committee and developed into one of the outstanding figures from the band of civil servants who began their careers as temporary wartime recruits.

After the war he was transferred on to the Board of Trade to work in a variety of jobs including supervising the post-war utility furniture scheme and devising ways of helping the British Film Industry compete with Hollywood.

But by the mid-1950s he had found his permanent niche dealing with international trade. He was deeply involved with the negotiations which culminated in the foundation of the European Free Trade Area.

But his biggest contribution was made in the international trade sector in the mid-1960s. In 1964 he was the Deputy Head of the British delegation to the first United Nations Conference on Trade and Development, and it was at this conference that the resentment of the undeveloped world and the barriers erected against them by leading industrialised countries were first exposed.

Over the new few years he was chairman of a working party of senior civil servants from France, Britain, the United States and Germany who were trying to satisfy the demands of the Third World. His tact, his personal warmth and his genuine feeling for the less privileged led to the formation of policies and the success of the "Unctad 2" conference in 1968, at which it was admitted for the first time that under- developed countries should be given full and, if possible, privileged access to the world's important markets.

His reward was being appointed CB in 1964 and in 1970 retirement with, he was fond of remarking, a pension of a mere pounds 2,000 a year.

For the next 25 years he was as busy and as influential as he had been in his last decade at the Board of Trade. For nearly 20 years he was an adviser to the International Chamber of Commerce and his pamphlets on the subject of international trade were compulsory reading for everyone concerned with the subject. When well into his seventies, he worked for nearly a decade as an international trade consultant and despite his colleagues' entreaties he thought nothing of commuting regularly to North America.

Away from work he was a connoisseur of claret and an excellent, if not especially tolerant, bridge player. His genuine warmth and gregarious nature sometimes made one forget the sharpness of his brain. He often completed the Times crossword in a few minutes without apparent effort and certainly without showing off .

Nicholas Faith

Sidney Golt, civil servant, writer: born West Hartlepool 31 March 1910; Assistant Secretary, Board of Trade 1945-60, Under Secretary 1960-68, Deputy Secretary 1968-70; CB 1964; publications include Towards an Open World Economy 1972, Western Economies in Transition 1980; married 1947 Jean Oliver (two daughters); died 4 June 1995.