Sir Peter Parker, who has died aged 77, was chairman of British Rail for nearly eight years and was overall an accomplished and versatile industrialist with razor-sharp business acumen.

He wanted to introduce managerial skills into the Labour Party and no doubt would have done so if he had not been unsuccessful as parliamentary candidate for his home town of Bedford in 1951.

In later life he switched his allegiance to the Liberals, complaining at Labour's failure to talk about the role of management in society.

But it was as the boss of British Rail that he is best known. He was first offered the chairmanship by Barbara Castle in 1967, but even Harold Wilson's persuasion could not tempt him to take the job.

This was largely because he was to be refused permission to increase executive pay. However, when the job was offered again in 1976, he accepted it.

The first part of his tenure of office went well. He restored some confidence in the railways, sorted out how they should be financed, and reached an agreement with the Labour government and the Tory opposition that there should be a ''contract'': the railways would improve their efficiency and in return would receive a government subsidy for social costs and investment.

Later, however, Parker ran into trouble with the unions. After a series of disputes over flexible rostering, the unions failed to deliver on productivity.

The train drivers' union, Aslef, quarrelled with the larger National Union of Railwaymen, and both bodies also had internal divisions. Aslef eventually capitulated but British Rail had lost much of its reputation. He was later to describe the disputes

as ''a necessary journey

through hell''.

Another of his problems as BR chairman was having to work with six different ministers during his years of office. He remained sceptical about privatisation, although it was not an issue which seriously arose during his chairmanship.

Once he said: ''I argued in my time the railways should be brought as close as possible to the customer. But there is a real integrity to the railway network that must not be under-rated and it should not be broken up in some amateurish way.''

Peter Parker was born in Dunkirk on August 30, 1924, moved with his family to China and learned to speak Japanese. When the family returned to England, Parker, who had received early schooling in Shanghai, attended Bedford School. In 1943, aged 17, he joined the Army and was promptly shipped out to India. His two brothers, who had both joined the RAF, were killed separately in the war before either of them reached the age of 20.

In 1944, he was ordered to go from northern Burma to return to Delhi for overseas posting to the United States where he received a crash course in American management styles.

That set him on the road to his subsequent career. He went to Oxford and started knocking on the doors of colleges, finally getting into Lincoln College.

But he was also attracted by acting, and that was a career he might well have adopted.

He played Hamlet under Kenneth Tynan's direction in a university production and took part in a doctored Restoration version of King Lear in London's West End, a production which toured America. But management was his first love and he was among the pioneers who sought to

attach it to the concept of

social responsibility.

He was taken on by Philips Electrical valve factory in Mitcham as a personnel officer and later by Booker Brothers food group.

He eventually became chairman of the Rockware Group, the biggest maker of glass containers in the country.

After his spell at British Rail, which ended in 1983, Parker returned to the business world and played figurehead role in a number of companies, ranging from the British arm of Mitsubishi to the Evered Bardon gravel group.

He was appointed to head a buy-out bid for Mirror Group Newspapers.

But he had distinctive ideas about the philosophy of business. Once he said: ''Industrial policy really matters. We need the market desperately, but we do not want to be slaves to it. I have always felt that business and politics are close. I have never felt that business is just about business.''

But he always felt that the important thing for industrial policy was ''to get the politicians out of the habit of jerking between extremes''.

Outside his business interests, Parker chaired the London School of Economics, and the trustees of the Liberal Democrats, Friends of the Earth, and the Constitutional Reform Society.

He was also a director of the National Theatre and was responsible for bringing Sumo wrestlers to Britain as chairman of the Japan Festival.