ADEANE, Philip John 1933-2025
Richard R
From the Times of 20 Nov 2025: ADEANE Philip John died peacefully on 5th November 2025. Formerly managing director of Antofagasta plc. Beloved husband of Angela and father of David and stepfather of Lucy and Jasper. Funeral for family and close friends at St Peter’s Church, Babraham, at 1pm on 3rd December and memorial in London in the new year.
He was s of Col Sir Robert Philip Wyndham ADEANE OBE 1905-79 sometime head of that gentry family of Brabraham and his 1st Joyce Violet 1904-73 d of Rev Cyril Frederick PARRY-BURNETT 1872-1947 sometime head of that Welsh gentry family of Perfeddgoed and Violet Mary c1876-1954 d of Rev Sir James Erasmus PHILIPPS 12th Bt 1824-1912 (f of 1st Viscount ST DAVIDS 1860-1938, 1st & only Baron KYSLANT 1863-1937 and 1st Baron MILFORD 1874-1961) and Hon Mary Margaret BEST 1836-1912 (gd of 1st Baron WYNFORD 1767-1845). He m [as her 2nd h] Angela and had a son as above.Richard R
This makes clear his son David is from a first m to Catherine de Clippel.
Obit in the Times of 7 Feb 2026:
E X T R A C T
Philip Adeane obituary: longstanding director of miner Antofagasta
Executive with a 30-year career at the top of one of the oldest and most remarkable companies listed on the London Stock Exchange, dies aged 92
After a conventional landed-gentry upbringing in Cambridgeshire, Philip Adeane’s subsequent career path to becoming managing director of a FTSE 100 company was rather less orthodox. The death of his elder brother Charles in the Innsbruck air disaster in 1964 brought an abrupt and tragic end to their burgeoning partnership dealing in silver and antiques, after which their father, Sir Robert Adeane (a prominent businessman and patron of the arts), began to fear that his surviving son was spending too much time gambling at John Aspinall’s Clermont Club.
Sir Robert’s solution was to pack Philip off to Canada, where he began working as a delivery driver for The Daily Gleaner newspaper in New Brunswick, before eventually becoming a journalist on the paper. He subsequently moved to Central America to work for the Costa Rica Railway Company, of which his father was chairman but where Philip nevertheless started on the bottom rung, labouring and laying railway sleepers, before eventually rising to management level.
Returning to London, he stayed with the Costa Rica Railway Company until 1980, when he was appointed managing director of the Antofagasta (Chile) and Bolivia Railway Company, a sister company in which the Chilean entrepreneur Andrónico Luksic had recently acquired a controlling interest from Jacob Rothschild…
… Philip John Adeane was born in 1933 and spent his early childhood at Babraham Hall, a neo-Jacobean house designed by Philip Hardwick for his great-grandfather Henry Adeane, MP for Cambridgeshire.
Philip’s cousin Humphrey Lyttelton (son of his father’s sister Pamela) recalled the “formidable” lunches at Babraham as a child, “with an army of footmen and maids, under the generalship of the head butler, padding round with an endless succession of courses. The children used to sit through the meal in apprehensive silence, to the eventual fury of my grandfather [Charles Adeane, ‘an odd mixture of martinet and rebel’], who would explode from time to time with an impatient: ‘Why don’t you say something?’.”
Philip’s father Sir Robert — a kinsman of the courtiers Michael and Edward Adeane, who respectively served as private secretary to Queen Elizabeth and private secretary to Charles when he was the Prince of Wales — was a notable art collector. He was also a generous patron of the Tate Gallery (he founded the Friends of the Tate) and Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge, where a gallery is named after him.
After his parents’ high-profile divorce in the 1940s, Philip’s mother Joyce (née Parry Burnett) took her two sons and daughter Christine to north Wales where she had grown up…
...He is survived by his second wife Angela (née Forster), by his son David from his first marriage to Catherine de Clippel, and by his stepchildren Lucy and Jasper…
Philip Adeane, businessman, was born on January 11, 1933. He died on November 5, 2025, aged 92