Tom Farmer

Sir Thomas Farmer (10 July 1940 – 9 May 2025) was a Scottish businessman who founded the Kwik Fit chain of garages and owned the Scottish football club Hibernian. Sir Tom was Chancellor of Queen Margaret University, Edinburgh from 2007 until 2015.

Farmer was born on 10 July 1940 in Leith, Edinburgh. One of seven siblings in a devoutly Catholic family, in 1964, Farmer founded his own tyre retailing business which he sold in 1969 for £450,000. Farmer retired to the United States, but became unsatisfied and decided to find a new venture, founding Kwik Fit in 1971.

According to the Sunday Times Rich List in 2020, Farmer was worth an estimated £126 million.

Farmer founded the Kwik Fit chain of garages in 1971. The firm grew quickly, mainly through acquisition, including opening in the Netherlands in 1975. Farmer was named Scottish Businessman of the Year in 1989. After building the chain to become the world's largest independent tyre and automotive repair specialists with over 2,000 centres operating in 18 different countries, Farmer sold the firm to Ford in 1999 for more than £1 billion. He was the first Scot to be awarded the Andrew Carnegie Medal for philanthropy.

Farmer owned 90% of Hibernian, a professional football club based in Edinburgh, between the early 1990s and 2019. He invested nearly £3 million to rescue the club from receivership and he continued to fund developments of Easter Road and financial losses made by the club. Before his intervention, the club had been threatened during 1990 by an attempted takeover by Wallace Mercer, the owner of their Edinburgh derby rivals Hearts. Farmer admitted in 2006 that he had no great love of football, and he rarely attended matches. He said that "[he] felt it was important to the local community that Hibs should continue to exist, as [he] was informed by campaigners that [his] grandfather had saved the club from bankruptcy approximately 100 years earlier." Farmer delegated control of Hibs to other figures, such as Rod Petrie. He sold the majority ownership of the club to American businessman Ron Gordon in July 2019.

Four years after the sale of Kwik Fit, in 2003 Farmer went on to found another car tyre business in direct competition with his previous company. Using £80 million of the proceeds from the sale to Ford, he named the new venture "Tyres 'n' Wheels Autocare" with an initial three branches located in his native Edinburgh. The company was later renamed "Farmer Autocare" and grew into 21 centres located across central Scotland.

In 2006, Farmer donated £100,000 to the Scottish National Party to help fund their campaign for the 2007 Scottish Parliament general election. Farmer commented at the time that it "was not an indication of [his] political allegiance but that [he] wanted the SNP to be able to compete financially with their better-funded political opponents". Farmer repeated his endorsement for the SNP in the 2011 election.

Farmer was married to Anne (née Scott) and lived in Edinburgh. They had two children and four grandchildren. Lady Farmer died in 2023.