James B Sherwood

Over his long, colorful life, the peripatetic James Sherwood seeded many businesses — container leasing, a London guidebook, ferries and riverboats, hotels and restaurants (like the “21” Club in New York and Harry’s Bar in London), an ice cream company, a magazine, fruit farms and a vineyard. Mr. Sherwood, who was based in London but born in America, had been a multimillionaire since he was 36, when the container leasing business that he and a college buddy started in 1965 with $100,000 (his investment was $25,000 for a half interest) went public. James Blair Sherwood was born on Aug. 8, 1933, in Newcastle, Pa., the only child of Florence (Balph) Sherwood, a pianist, and William Sherwood, a patent lawyer. He grew up in Lexington, Ky., where his father’s family was from, as well as in Berkeley, Calif., and Bronxville, N.Y., when his father began working for the Atomic Energy Commission. He studied economics at Yale, where he was in his own estimation an indifferent student but an enthusiastic bridge player. In the 1960s, Mr. Sherwood met Shirley Cross, an Oxford-educated botanist. A widow with two young sons, Charles and Simon, she was working for Smith, Kline & French, the pharmaceutical company (now GlaxoSmithKline), on the development of Tagament, the wildly successful beta blocker that soothes stomach ulcers. They married on New Year’s Eve 1977. Charles gave his mother away, and Simon was best man. Afterward, the boys changed their last name by deed poll to Sherwood, as a gift to their parents. But they weren’t formally adopted until two years ago — at ages 58 and 57 — when Mr. Sherwood discovered that the adoption of adults was legal under Kentucky law. Although he was a devoted Anglophile, Mr. Sherwood never became a British citizen.