Professor Tim Traverse-Healy OBE Hon.FCIPR
Tim Traverse-Healy OBE, one of the pioneers of post-war public relations in Britain and founding member of the Institute of Public Relations, has died at the age of 102.
Born in Grantham March 25th, 1923, Thomas Hector (Tim) Traverse-Healy’s first involvement with PR was when he was recruited into Aims of Industry, an industrialist-funded, anti-nationalisation organisation. While there, through his contact in 1948 with a group of practitioners who were to found the Institute of Public Relations (now the Chartered Institute of Public Relations), Traverse-Healy became a founding member as its recruitment secretary and later President (1967-68) and an Honorary Fellow.
By 1954, he had joined the advertising agency Pritchard Wood & Partners (PWP) as its PR head under the chairmanship of the renowned Fleetwood Pritchard. In the early 1960s, PWP was bought out by the US advertising group Interpublic, with Traverse-Healy moving to head up the European business of its PR consultancy, Infoplan. A few years later, he left to form his own PR consultancy in partnership with the like-minded Denis Lyons (later Lord Lyons of Brighton).
The eponymous Traverse-Healy & Lyons later sold the consultancy to advertising group Young & Rubicam (Y&R), where it was merged into Y&R’s existing PR business. Lyons’s early death led him to leave and go solo. A few years later, he merged his business with the fast-growing PR consultancy set up by one of his sons, Kevin, and crisis communication specialist, Michael Regester. In Traverse-Healy & Regester he found the opportunity to both continue his boardroom-level consultancy while pursuing his interest in promoting PR as a profession, particularly its ethics. Traverse-Healy & Regester was sold in 1987 to the listed Charles Barker group of PR, advertising and recruitment agencies – a business that went back to 1813.
He was invited by Stirling University, where he was a visiting lecturer, to take up a one-year full-time post of Professor in its business school. He was proud of this academic recognition, having long been a proponent of the academic status of Public Relations and a visiting lecturer at many universities, including Bournemouth, Cardiff, Westminster, and Baylor and Ball State in the USA.
In addition to numerous UK awards, Tim Traverse-Healy received international recognition for his contributions to the development of the practice and profession of Public Relations. He was a founding council member and then the president of the International Public Relations Association (1968-1973); vice-president of the European PR federation (CERP) from 1965 to 1969; and elected to the USA’s Arthur Page Society’s Hall of Fame in 1990. He remained close to his earlier years at Stonyhurst College and the Royal Marines through their associations and was even back in uniform in the 1990s as the Honorary Colonel of the Army Cadet Force Public Relations Unit.
He published numerous papers, lectures and articles – particularly on the ethics and codes of conduct for public relations. His final contribution to the profession, his personal ‘Credo for PR’ (2014), repeated his career-long commitment to the belief that PR should serve the public interest as well as its clients:
“In the overall scheme of things the objective of our contribution to society at large is the achievement of a balance between the intentions of the institutions we represent and the legitimate concerns of their community and constituency.”
Tim Traverse-Healy married his wartime Wren (WRNS) sweetheart, Joan Doreen Thompson in 1947. They are survived by their five children and numerous grandchildren and great-grandchildren.