Sir Russell Kettle;

              SIR RUSSELL KETTLE
Sir Russell Kettle was the senior part-ner of Deloittes when Arthur B. Foye went to England in 1952 to open dis-cussions that drew DPG&Co. and II&S ever more closely together throughout the world. Sir Russell greeted Mr. Foye, then H&S Managing Partner, with the briefest bit of casual conversation and then moved right to the point, saying to his American visitor: "Well, Mr. Foye, the ball is in your court."
On just such a note was begun the far-reaching merger. On that easy note, too, was the close friendship sustained between Sir Russell and Mr, Foye until death took Sir Russell at 81 as he walked along a street in Woking, Sur-rey, on June 20.
"Russell was a gracious and courte-ous man, a gentleman by instinct and breeding," said Mr, Foye. "After my first real touch with him that January day in London, there were many meet-ings and much correspondence be-tween us. lie came to H&S partners' meetings in the United States after the merger until ill health in late i960 pre-vented his traveling."
Mr. Foye recalled that Lady Kettle had accompanied Sir Russell to the partners' meeting in 1957 at The Greenbrier in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia. It must have been a happy occasion because he called his last house at Woking, in Surrey, Green-briar after the West Virginia resort, but he characteristically used the English spelling,
"Greenbriar, a small house with lovely gardens, was built on a corner of ground Russell had reserved from the large house he formerly owned," Mr. Foye explained. "Gardening was one of Russell's hobbies. I especially remember the roses,
"The house itself reflected Lady Ket-tle's grace and charm. It was always immaculate and most attractively fur-nished. Russell had a fine collection of etchings and old silver,"
He was not an etcher himself but served for many years as treasurer of the Royal Society of Painter-Etchers and Engravers, On his retirement, ten of the members each gave Sir Russell one of their art works.
In 1950, when he completed his term as president of the Institute of Chartered Accountants in England and Wales, his senior partners had presented him with an inkstand to add to his small but choice silver collection "as a token of their esteem and to mark his year in office."
Those colleagues could also have fun about Sir Russell's penchant for writing letters to The Times of London. Many of his letters were published, and his partners jestingly accused him of writing them for revenue^, Mr. Foye
said. The Times paid £ 1 for each letter published.
His other writing included a literate history, Deloitte £r Co. 1845-1956, which sets the firm within the contem-porary political, cultural and economic scene.
"Russell could write that fine history because he was so well-read himself," Mr. Foye said. "lie had quite a good library at home, especially biographies of English people—he was most in-terested in people—and books about finance,
"He kept well-informed on national and world affairs," Mr. Foye contin-ued, "and discussed them with great tolerance and breath of view. He was very conservative in politics."
Sir Russell was known as an out-standing professional accountant. When he retired from active practice in 1955, he had been with Deloittes for more than 50 years, ten early ones as secretary to Lord Plender, who pre-ceded him as senior partner from 1905 to 1946. He was selected to serve on the British Transport Arbitration Tri-bunal when the Labour government nationalized transportation after World War II. "He had, like so many of the English," Mr, Foye pointed out, "a love of country that stands above party affiliations when there is a service to be performed,"
That was the obverse of the man who often took Mr. Foye to lunch at the Gresham Club in London, and then to the billiard room to sip coffee and watch snooker pool; the man whom Mr. Foye remembers as the collector of humorous stories and unusual events, which he put into scrapbooks and into his conversation.
He was one of those men who will live long in the minds and hearts of all who knew him, •
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