Entrepreneur David Gilmour created many businesses over his career and turned the tragic murder of his daughter, Erin, into a commitment to educational charities, funding numerous preschools for at-risk children.Deborah Baic/The Globe and Mail
Entrepreneur David Gilmour, co-founder of global miner Barrick Gold Corp., a real-estate and resort empire, an iconic bottled water brand and the manufacturer of Frank Sinatra’s stereo, died this month at the age of 91.
After meeting as students at a downtown diner in 1952, Mr. Gilmour struck up a partnership with fellow University of Toronto graduate Peter Munk that gave birth to an array of businesses, and friendships with the rich and famous. He turned a wrenching personal tragedy – the murder of his daughter, Erin, at age 22 – into a commitment to educational charities, funding numerous preschools for at-risk children.
David Harrison Gilmour was born in Winnipeg on Nov. 5, 1931, and moved to Toronto with his family when he was three years old. His father, Adam, a First World War army officer, joined investment dealer Nesbitt Thomson (now part of Bank of Montreal). His mother, Doris Godson Gilmour, was an acclaimed opera singer who performed in London and across Canada.
An upper-class upbringing sparked Mr. Gilmour’s life-long love of travel. When he graduated from Trinity College School in Port Hope, Ont., at age 17, his father offered to fund either a fledgling business or a trip to Europe. Mr. Gilmour opted for his own version of a grand tour across Spain and France in a Volkswagen convertible. His father’s one condition for backing the trip: His son must travel alone.
Mr. Gilmour said the solitary journey provided an education in consumer behaviour that shaped his career. “I could observe what cars people drove, how they dressed and behaved,” Mr. Gilmour told Forbes magazine. “Suddenly you just catch the mood of what people may want that they don’t yet know they want.”
After several months in Europe, Mr. Gilmour ran out of cash and fired a telegram to his father saying “Four tires worn out – very dangerous to drive. Please send $300.” His father replied: “Park car beside road and abandon. Return home immediately.”
The founders of Clairtone, David Gilmour, (left) Executive Chairman of Zinio and Peter Munk, Founder & Chairman of Barrick Gold Corporation, laugh as they chat together in Munk's office at Barrick Gold in Toronto, on May 8, 2008.Deborah Baic/The Globe and Mail
Mr. Gilmour did come back, following his father into the post-Second World War army as an officer in the tank division of the Governor-General’s Horse Guards, an experience he later credited for developing his leadership skills. He then studied management at the University of Toronto and forged a friendship with Mr. Munk, an engineering student, after they met at Diana Sweets, a restaurant near the campus.
On graduating, Mr. Gilmour turned down an opportunity to join his father in the investment business, instead moving to Montreal, where he sold pots and pans door-to-door. After a moderately successful year, one of his three older sisters, Shelagh Vansittart, lured her bother back to Toronto by offering up her social circle, including Mr. Munk, and the opportunity to co-found a Scandinavian furniture importer, which the siblings called Dansk Design.
In 1957, Mr. Munk launched a business building high-end stereos. He reached out to Mr. Gilmour for sleek wooden cabinets to hold the hi-fi components. The pair decided to start a company, Clairtone, that sold sets for $700, or roughly $7,000 in today’s dollars.
“One of the key elements to our relationship is the extraordinary degree to which the two of us can enter a room with diametrically opposed views and not leave that room until we’re both looking in the same direction,” Mr. Gilmour told writer Donald Rumball for a biography of Mr. Munk. Mr. Rumball said the two entrepreneurs had complementary skills: “David can smell a product and Peter can make it commercially viable.”
Clairtone sales soared in the early 1960s, as the pair hired advertising guru Dalton Camp to run a campaign that featured Mr. Sinatra lounging next to a stereo, cigarette between his fingers, with the tag line: “Listen to Sinatra on Clairtone stereo. Sinatra does.”
To expand into building televisions and pay for a new factory, Mr. Gilmour and Mr. Munk secured funding from the Nova Scotia government. Political backing proved a poisoned chalice. Clairtone’s losses mounted as it competed against far larger consumer electronics companies. In 1967, provincial mandarins pushed the two founders out of the company.
Unemployed, Mr. Gilmour and Mr. Munk turned their attention to a Fiji hotel they had bought on a whim in 1963, when they were flush with Clairtone cash. Neither had ever been to the South Pacific nation or seen the property they acquired for $250,000. The first time Mr. Gilmour visited, he stepped out of a car and found himself up to his ankles in mud. Only then did the Canadian realize there was a rainy side on Fiji’s main island, and that was where he owned a resort.
Built to house the crew filming a Burt Lancaster movie, Fiji’s Beachcomber Hotel was the first property in what became a major chain, the Southern Pacific Hotel Corp. As part of the company’s expansion, Mr. Gilmour spent years working on an Egyptian resort at the base of the pyramids, backed by Saudi financier Adnan Khashoggi. Egyptian President Anwar Sadat ultimately cancelled the project.
In 1980, Mr. Munk and Mr. Gilmour sold the hotel chain, which by then included 54 properties, and pocketed approximately US$130-million. They began investing in Canada, launching TrizecHahn, which grew to be one of North America’s largest real-estate companies, and Barrick Gold, one of the world’s largest miners. Mr. Munk died in 2018 at age 90.
In 1983, Mr. Gilmour’s only child, Erin, was stabbed to death in her Yorkville apartment. In describing his grief, Mr. Gilmour wrote that after this terrible event, there was a period when he was indifferent to whether he lived or died. It would take almost four decades for Toronto police to solve the murder, using genetic genealogy. Last November, they arrested a 61-year-old man from Moosonee, Ont., and charged him with the murders of Erin and another woman.
“David looked at Erin’s picture every single day, recalling a very special relationship where each put the other on a pedestal,” said Jillian Gilmour, his wife of nearly 42 years. She and her husband were having lunch at a golf club in Florida last fall when a detective phoned to share news of the arrest. Ms. Gilmour said after years of being disappointed by leads that didn’t pan out, the call subsequently “did give him a sense of closure.”
After selling his hotel business, Mr. Gilmour bought an island in Fiji, where he and his wife opened a resort in 1990, The Wakaya Club & Spa. Over the years, guests have included Nicole Kidman, Bill Gates, Tom Cruise, Rupert Murdoch and Steve Jobs.
The tropical resort inspired two late-life start ups. In 1996, Mr. Gilmour launched Fiji Water, a brand distinguished by its square bottles (in four sizes). The bottled water built a following in part due to product placements on television shows such as Ally McBeal and The Sopranos. Mr. Gilmour sold Fiji Water in 2004. Ms. Gilmour said: “David loved creating businesses; he didn’t always love running them.”
In 2011, Mr. Gilmour and entrepreneur David Roth founded Wakaya Perfection, a line of organic products – including ginger, turmeric and kava – grown organically in virgin volcanic soil in Fiji, Tonga and Nicaragua.
To honour his daughter, Mr. Gilmour built preschools in Fiji and across the United States, including a project in Las Vegas with tennis star Andre Agassi as a partner, and a facility in Florida that is named for Erin Gilmour. In 2004, U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell presented Mr. Gilmour with the Award for Corporate Excellence. He was also an officer of the Order of Fiji.
Mr. Gilmour died of a heart attack on June 11. In addition to his wife, Ms. Gilmour, he leaves his nieces, Shelia Stene, Kristin Basso, Dianna Sutton and Vanessa and Katharine Vansittart. His former wife, Anna McCowan-Johnson, Erin’s mother, died in 2020. Mr. Gilmour was also predeceased by his sisters.