Francis Sitwell

Scion of the literary Sitwells who went into City PR

Francis Trajan Sacheverell Sitwell, publicist and businessman: born London 17 September 1935; married 1966 Susanna Cross (two sons, one daughter); died London 14 January 2004.

As Dame Edith Sitwell's literary executor and nephew, Francis Sitwell spent much of his adult life promoting and defending her work and that of her siblings, Osbert and Sacheverell. But, as a financial PR and public-affairs consultant for 20 years, he also became one of the best-known faces in the City of London. His network of friends and colleagues embraced the worlds of art, politics and journalism; his eclectic collection of friends included Barry Humphries, Ken Livingstone and Michael Heseltine.

In the latter part of his life, he was more often to be found at his Northamptonshire home, Weston Hall. There, he guided visitors around the 18th-century house with its collection of Sitwelliana and pretty gardens in somewhat eccentric fashion. He would wave his arms in the air as if he were trying to order the bill in a packed restaurant and then pat his head as though trying to squash an insect.

He collected mini Fidel Castros, hoarded those 50-pence pieces with hands on and, aside from backgammon, was unable to play any board game except for one called Seven League Boots, recommended - it said on the box - for those aged five and upwards. He had a passion for bureaucracy and filing, and never lost his navy vernacular, insisting his children refer to a rubber dinghy hired in Greece as "she". He would have me dragged out of meetings with urgent messages to call him. "Yes Daddy, what is it?" "Oh - I've just seen the most frightfully funny sign on a van for a marquee firm offering 'immediate erections around the county'. "

But any eccentricities, when set against those of his forebears, pale in comparison. His grandfather was Sir George Sitwell, who built a platform in his garden at Renishaw Hall in Derbyshire where he would sit, under a large grey hat, peering through a telescope and contemplating his vistas and statues. When indoors he would shut himself in his study to smoke Egyptian cigarettes and pen such works as "Modern Modifications on the Theory of Survival", "The Origins of Part-singing", "Rotherham in the Dark Ages", "The Introduction of the Peacock into Western Gardens" and, his favoured subject, "A History of the Fork".

Meanwhile Francis Sitwell's aunt Edith looked, someone once observed, "like an altar on the move". She wore long gowns, enormous hats and vast rings on her elongated fingers. Her most famous poems, performed as Façade and read to music composed by William Walton, were early rap - the lyrics pulsated with rhythm, the sounds of the words uttered more important than their actual meaning.

Edith's brother and fellow writer Osbert was in turn poetic, extravagant, generous, belligerent, rude and oversensitive. His younger brother, Sacheverell, my father's father, was tall, thin, fascinated by the minutiae of life, author of over 130 books of poems, travel writing, architecture and music and possessed of a brilliant imaginative mind and almost no financial sense whatsoever.

It was into this family that Francis Trajan Sacheverell Sitwell was born in September 1935, the second name alighted on by Sacheverell when researching a book on Romania. The younger brother to Reresby, Francis was packed off to a maiden aunt in Canada during the Second World War for five years, for safekeeping, although he did once say to me, "I wondered once if they had actually forgotten about me."

On his return he was sent to boarding school and then Eton, where a contemporary remembers him as "always jolly, always amusing and always optimistic". After National Service in the Navy, Sitwell spent 10 years with Shell, including a two-year stint in Kericho, Kenya, where his houseboy called him Father Tum-Tum, before entering the world of public relations in London. "In a 20-year career," recalls a client, "he achieved the amazing feat of not making a single enemy."

His clients included Christie's, the Royal London Society for the Blind and the outdoor advertising company More O'Ferrall. In 1985 he founded his own firm, sharing an office with some former colleagues from his days in Red Lion Court, off Fleet Street, the PR heartland known then as Bullshit Boulevard. When not acting for his clients, Sitwell amused himself by organising small practical jokes. He once hid a pair of ladies' underwear in his colleague Simon Preston's breast pocket, which Preston then produced during a business meeting thinking it was a handkerchief.

Sitwell inherited his father's fascination for life and also an intense love of music and the arts. He was on the councils of the London Philharmonic Orchestra and the Byam Shaw School of Art. He started the Sunday Ballet Club in the late Sixties to provide a platform for new dancers and choreographers; he was Chairman of the Park Lane Group which raised funds for young musicians; and in 1995 Princess Margaret unveiled the statue of Mozart he had commissioned in Orange Square in Pimlico.

On Edith's death, he inherited her literary works, which he promoted assiduously, allowing publication of her letters, and lecturing on her in Britain and across the world. He permitted Alannah Currie, of the 1980s pop group the Thompson Twins, to record Façade to modern club music.

When his father died in 1988, Sitwell took over Weston Hall, where he had spent his childhood, and was a much-loved member of the village. He was often to be found gossiping with the locals in the Crown Inn; they asked him to be president of the local horticultural society.

He held their annual show in his garden, persuading friends, including Barry Humphries one year, to open the event. Few will forget Dame Edna Everage emerging from the front of Weston Hall, climbing into a brougham and being drawn around the garden. She alighted at the top of some steps and was kissed warmly on both cheeks by Francis. In a poem specially written for the occasion, Dame Edna said, "As for me, I'm no ordinary mother and wife, I was Dame Edith Sitwell in a previous life."

William Sitwell