Alan Crompton-Batt

Daily Telegraph
(Filed: 23/09/2004)

Alan Crompton-Batt, who has died aged 50, was the public relations
consultant credited with creating the notion of the celebrity chef.

Before Crompton-Batt set about marketing restaurants in the mid-1980s,
the chef may have been quietly lauded as an artist in his field, but
he remained unseen, the fellow in the kitchen wearing checked trousers
and a comical hat. By the time Crompton-Batt had finished, the chef
had emerged from behind the stove to appear as a personality in the
glossy magazines and the gossip columns, as famous in his own right as
the celebrities who paid to eat his food.

Crompton-Batt's two most famous clients were Nico Ladenis and Marco
Pierre White, both of whom became firm friends. The publicist
appreciated that these men were not only great chefs, but also
supremely marketable as personalities. Ladenis - who was once said to
have flambeed the money of a customer who had earned his disapproval -
became the most famous restaurateur in the country and was
Crompton-Batt's first client. Marco Pierre White contributed a
hitherto unknown glamour to the business, becoming the "rock star" of
the cooking fraternity.

It was perhaps not surprising that this quality in White was apparent
to Crompton-Batt, for he had enjoyed a spell managing a post-punk rock
band, the Psychedelic Furs, before becoming involved in the restaurant
world. When he did make the transition, Crompton-Batt brought a fine
palate and an instinctive understanding of the value of gastronomy
which earned him the respect of those he represented.

His technique as a publicist was idiosyncratic. If a journalist asked
him to confirm a story about a client, Crompton-Batt might reply:
"Yes, totally true. And this is what he's going to say." He would then
launch into a faultless impersonation of the client, giving a line
with all the appropriate phraseology and histrionic effects; he fondly
believed that the client would not remember whether or not he had
spoken to the press.

Alan Richard Crompton-Batt was born on March 23 1954 in Salisbury,
Wiltshire. His father was a pilot serving with the RAF, and was posted
to Singapore when Alan was 11. He was educated at boarding school in
Penang, and, although he won a place at Oxford, he decided not to take
it up, instead looking after the Psychedelic Furs.

He soon concluded that the music business was not for him, and became
a food inspector for Egon Ronay. It was in this role that he first met
Ladenis, when he went to report on Chez Nico in 1981 for the Egon
Ronay guide.

Crompton-Batt then went to work for the Kennedy Brooks restaurant
group, for which he became marketing director. When the company bought
the Ivy from Lord Grade, Crompton-Batt met the impresario's niece
Elizabeth, whom he was to marry in 1987. In 1985 he decided to set up
on his own as a restaurant PR; this was a novel idea at the time, and
for the rest of the decade he virtually had the field to himself.

Nico Ladenis, meanwhile, had embarked on a rural experiment, taking
Chez Nico to Shinfield, near Reading in Berkshire. It had not been a
success, and when Crompton-Batt telephoned to say that he was now in
the public relations business, Ladenis, reflecting that his friend had
come along at exactly the right moment, asked him to represent him.
Their professional association continued until Ladenis sold his London
business in 2000, and Crompton-Batt contributed the preface to the
chef's first book, My Gastronomy (1987).

Crompton-Batt had excellent contacts in London, particularly among
food writers, and he soon built up an impressive list of clients.
These came to include the independent hotel group Relais & Chateaux
(Le Manoir aux Quat' Saisons, Sharrow Bay Country House and Le
Gavroche are part of the stable); the Hard Rock Cafe; and Planet
Hollywood. He also represented Taittinger Champagne, and he launched
Haagen-Dazs ice-cream in Britain.

Marco Pierre White was still a teenager working at Le Gavroche when he
first encountered Crompton-Batt. "He believed in me when I was 19 and
fresh out of Yorkshire," White said. "He told me I would be the first
British chef to get three stars." Later, when White opened Harvey's on
Wandsworth Common in January 1987, Crompton-Batt began to represent
him. White came to view him as his best friend, describing him as "a
rocker, a hard-core boy", adding that he knew "how to lunch, how to
dine".

This was true. Crompton-Batt, who sometimes sported electric blue
suits and gold jewellery, was an inveterate party animal who was not
known for his temperance. He once took exception to a review by the
Observer's food critic Jay Rayner, and confided at an awards ceremony:
"The last time I saw Jay Rayner I hit him. He deserved it, and I am
going to hit him again."

He was a devoted fan of Manchester United.

Recently Alan Crompton-Batt had tired of the London scene, and
resolved to make a new life in South Africa, where he was planning to
write his memoirs. He died there, of pneumonia, on Monday.

He and Elizabeth divorced in 1995, but remained good friends. Even
though she set up her own PR agency, they did not compete against one
another.


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