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Sir John Templeton, who has died aged 95, was a legend in the world of fund management and invested much of his multi-million pound fortune in promoting spiritual and religious progress.

Templeton boasted one of the longest and most successful track records on Wall Street. From its foundation in 1954, his Templeton Growth Fund grew at an astonishing rate of nearly 16 per cent a year until Templeton’s retirement in 1992, making it the top performing growth fund in the second half of the 20th century.

A $100,000 stake invested in 1954 would, with distributions reinvested, would have grown to $55 million in 1999.

The Templeton formula was simple in theory, though not easily achieved in practice.

He looked for bargains — shares selling well below their asset values due to temporary circumstances — and would usually hold on to them for five years or more until they reached what he considered to be their true worth.

It was an approach that required rigorous research and determination not to be swayed by the fashions of the moment.

While other American tycoons made their fortunes buying American stocks, Templeton looked at the opportunities offered by emerging markets around the world.

He was one of the first to invest in post-war Japan, and one of the first to sell Japanese stocks in the mid-1980s before the bear market set in.

Templeton once described his speculative activities as a “ministry”, and saw the workings of the money market as part of God’s plan for His creation.

His Bible-belt religiosity appealed to small investors in middle America, and they entrusted him with their savings.

He also developed a cult following among other fund managers; even after his retirement, his off-the-cuff observations about stockmarket trends could move the market.

Templeton went on to found other successful investment funds such as Templeton World Fund. But in 1992 he sold the Templeton Funds to the Franklin Group for $440 million, a move which freed him to devote his time to the work he considered really important — the promotion of religion and spirituality.

Templeton believed in the possibility of religious as well as scientific advance, and argued that theologians should match the achievements of science with spiritual research, harnessing the tools of science to make “progress”.

From the 1970s onwards he devoted increasing amounts of his time and money to improving the world’s “spiritual wealth”.

In 1973 he inaugurated the Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion, an annual award to remedy the Nobel Foundation’s omission of religion from its prizes.

A brilliant publicist, Templeton guaranteed that his prize would always be worth more than the Nobel, and arranged for the Duke of Edinburgh to present the award at Buckingham Palace, thus ensuring full press coverage.

From 1973, when it stood at £70,000, the prize money has risen to £820,000, making the Templeton Prize one of the world’s largest annual monetary awards.

Winners over the years have included Mother Teresa of Calcutta, Alexander Solzhenitzyn, the Reverend Dr Billy Graham, and Charles Colson, the Watergate-burglar-turned-minister. Buddhists, Muslims, Hindus and Jews also qualified to win the prize.

But this was only a drop in the ocean of Templeton’s philanthropy. He endowed university courses in spirituality and science, funded medical schools to run classes on healing and spirituality, and rewarded universities and individuals that upheld “traditional educational values”, schools that promoted “character development” and colleges that taught market economics.

There were also Templeton Prizes for “Inspiring Movies and TV” and for “Exemplary Papers in Humility Theology”.

Templeton also funded one-off projects looking into such questions as the relationship between prayer and longevity and how meditation alters brain activity.

An Anglophile from his student days at Oxford, Templeton later took British citizenship, and during the 1980s, appalled at the drop in the level of churchgoing, he established four annual prizes in religion specifically for the British people.

On a more secular level, in 1985 he gave more than £4 million to the Oxford Centre for Management Studies to help raise professional standards in British management.

It was one of the biggest endowments ever made to a British educational establishment at that time, and the centre was subsequently incorporated into the university as Templeton College.

The John Templeton Foundation, established in 1987, currently has an endowment of some $1.5 billion and disburses some $70 million in grants annually, largesse which illustrated the lessons of Templeton’s favourite parable — that of the Talents: “The more we give away, the more we have left” was his paraphrase.

John Marks Templeton was born on November 29 1912 at Winchester, Tennessee, the son of a small town lawyer and cotton merchant. Brought up strictly as a Presbyterian, aged 15 he became superintendent of his local Sunday school.

A bright boy, Templeton won a place at Yale to read Economics; but during his second year his father lost most of his money and could no longer afford to pay the fees.

Determined to continue his studies somehow, John Templeton raised money by winning prizes and scholarships, and by founding a student newspaper in which he sold advertising space.

By the end of his course he was the top scholar at Yale and had won a Rhodes Scholarship to study Law at Balliol College, Oxford.

The Depression was still casting its pall when Templeton graduated from Oxford in 1937 and returned to America.

He got a job on Wall Street with a company that would become part of Merrill Lynch, but before long he was spotted by a Texas oil magnate who appointed him his finance director.

At the same time Templeton began dabbling on the stock market on his own account. In 1939, calculating that war would kick America out of depression, he ordered his stockbroker to buy $100 worth of all the stocks selling at under $1 a share, including the bankrupt ones. Within four years his $10,000 investment had become $40,000.

In 1940 he took over a company managing $2 million a year. By the time he sold it in 1967 it was managing $400 million.

During the 1950s and 1960s, working 80 hours a week, he built up a number of successful investment funds. In 1963 he moved from New York to Nassau, in the Bahamas, where he took British citizenship and continued to work 60-hour weeks until he was well into his eighties.

Templeton’s habit was to start his mutual fund’s annual meetings with a prayer. He believed that if a business was not ethical “it will fail, perhaps not right away, but eventually”.

He wrote or edited some 10 books about religion and spirituality.In Worldwide Laws of Life (1998) he set out 200 spiritual and ethical principles for leading a “sublime life”. Drawing on sources ranging from Thomist canon law to modern “how to be successful” manuals, he included such aphorisms as “Every ending is a new beginning” and “What the mind can conceive, it may achieve”.

Readers who could suggest a new law for subsequent editions were offered $1,000; those willing to teach a course about Worldwide Laws would qualify for $10,000.

A lean spare figure, always immaculately dressed and with perfect southern manners, Templeton radiated urbane unflappability and it sometimes seemed that nothing could dent his irrepressible optimism. Yet he had known tragedy.

In 1950 his first wife, Judith, whom he had married in 1937, died in a cycling accident, leaving him to bring up their three young children. He remained a widower for eight years.

Then, one day, one of his sons was invited to tea with a playmate whose mother, Irene Butler, had recently been widowed. Two years later, in 1958, they married. Irene died in 1993.

John Templeton was knighted in 1987 for services to charity.

He is survived by two sons of his first marriage; his daughter predeceased him.

Source - telegraph