When a mutual friend suggested that Gillian Romaine Tett meet Henrik Jones in November 2021 to discuss environmental and social investing and get his advice on a family health issue she was dealing with, Ms. Tett agreed on one condition.
“I said I’ll meet him as long as he knows it’s not a date,” she said. At the time, Ms. Tett was “resolutely single,” so she thought of the “most undate-y” meet-up possible. “I told him to come over on Sunday at 9 a.m. for a walk,” she said.
She brought her golden retriever, Charlie, and planned to go on one of the shorter of her preferred routes around Randall’s Island Park, which was near her Manhattan apartment. “Halfway through, I diverted to turn it into a long walk,” she said. “I’d realized he was amazing.”
Mr. Jones was also charmed. “The first walk, I was in a complete daze,” he said. “It ended up being a couple of hours.”
Ms. Tett, 57, is the provost of King’s College, Cambridge, in England. She is also a columnist and member of the editorial board of the Financial Times, which she joined in 1993 as a foreign correspondent for the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.
During more than three decades at the Financial Times, Ms. Tett held several other positions at the newspaper, including Tokyo bureau chief, U.S. managing editor, and most recently, chair of the U.S. editorial board. She has written four books on business, economics and anthropology, and this June, she received an Order of the British Empire, a major honor, for contributions to economic journalism. She has a bachelor’s degree in archaeology and anthropology and a doctorate in cultural anthropology from Clare College, Cambridge.
Mr. Jones, 63, is the founder and managing partner of Buckhill Capital, a venture capital firm based in San Francisco. He has a bachelor’s degree from Brown in comparative literature and semiotics and an M.B.A. from Harvard. He was a founder and chief executive of Answers.com, a reference website.
During their first walk, the two spoke at length about environmental and social investing. Ms. Tett founded the Moral Money column at the Financial Times, which covers news about companies working toward “cleaner, fairer capitalism,” and Mr. Jones’s firm is focused on sustainability.
Inspired by the conversation, Ms. Tett invited Mr. Jones to join one of her salons that evening at her home. She hosted these events regularly for 14 years, inviting people from different professions for food, debate and conversation. One of her early guests was Paul Volcker, the former chairman of the Federal Reserve, who spilled a bottle of red wine on the tablecloth that Ms. Tett still uses in tribute to him.
Mr. Jones showed up with an array of wine and cheese, impressing Ms. Tett. Afterward, the two began spending time together regularly, going on more walks and bike rides. A couple of weeks later, they were officially dating.
“When I began to spend time with him, I realized that he’s so smart and so funny and witty and always makes me laugh and has amazingly good values and is really kind,” Ms. Tett said.
Soon after, the two discovered another shared passion. For New Year’s Eve 2021, Mr. Jones invited Ms. Tett on a short skiing trip in Vail, Colo. Mr. Jones grew up between Minneapolis, where he was born, and Stevns, Denmark, where his mother’s side of the family is from and where the family has a 14th-century castle. In high school and college, Mr. Jones was captain of the ski teams. He named Buckhill Capital after a hill in Minnesota where the world-renowned alpine ski racer Lindsey Vonn learned to ski.
“On the chairlift up, she said, ‘Don’t wait for me, I know how fast you are,’” Mr. Jones said. “I thought we’d start with the bunny hill.”
But when they reached the top, Ms. Tett picked a run that went through the trees and disappeared into the distance. When Mr. Jones caught up with her at the bottom, she apologized and told him she’d gotten excited and couldn’t stop. Ms. Tett, it turned out, was an ardent skier with a particular love of backcountry skiing and skinning, or climbing up a mountain in skis to then soar down.
“From my late teenage years, I’ve skied madly all over the world, in Europe, Japan, America,” she said. “I often had problems dating people in the past since I would take them skiing and then push them too hard on the slopes until they got cross or embarrassed.” Luckily, she said, Mr. Jones is “a brilliant skier.”
In December 2023, Mr. Jones picked out an engagement ring with three diamonds that traveled around the world in his pocket for 17 days — from New York to Cambridge, then to Verbier, Switzerland. He finally proposed to Ms. Tett on Marshall’s Beach in San Francisco on Jan. 5, 2024. (The couple split their time between San Francisco, Cambridge and New York City.) Afterward, they kept the news to themselves for about a week to digest it and to find the opportunity to tell their children simultaneously — Mr. Jones, whose first marriage ended in divorce, has one child, and Ms. Tett has two.
They were wed July 8 at the Chapel at King’s College, Cambridge, by the Rev. Dr. Stephen Cherry, the dean of King’s College and the director of studies in theology, religion and the philosophy of religion.
The couple estimated that 300 to 350 guests attended. Ms. Tett was the first provost at King’s College to marry in the 500-year-old English Gothic chapel, considered one of the landmark houses of worship in England.
The Choir of King’s College, Cambridge, one of the world’s most famous choirs, performed during the service. Guests from media, finance and academia included Darren Walker, the head of the Ford Foundation; Perri Peltz, a filmmaker and journalist; and Mohamed Abdullah El-Erian, the former chief executive of the investment firm Pimco.
“You don’t really see people our age have a big white wedding that’s almost like a royal wedding,” said Vicky Ward, 55, an author and investigative journalist who first introduced the pair. “It made it very, very special. At our age, you know that these two people have really thought hard about this, and I think there’s a lightness that comes with that.”
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The bride wore a glamorous, strapless white dress with a train by Ines Di Santo, a decision that took some prodding. “If it hadn’t been for Henrik, I think Gillian would have gotten married in her jeans,” Ms. Ward said. She joined forces with Ms. Tett’s friends Christy Ferrer and Rana Foroohar to persuade Ms. Tett to buy a dress about three months before the wedding.
“At one point, she picked a black dress, and we had to say, ‘No, that’s not happening,’” Ms. Ward said.
After the ceremony, there was a reception on the Back Lawn, half of which has been turned into a wildflower meadow as part of Cambridge’s conservation efforts, followed by dinner and dancing in the Great Hall.
One surprise arrived when a special system that protects the stained glass windows in the Great Hall abruptly cut off all of the electricity because the noise level was too high from cheering and shouting.
“Suddenly, all the music was gone,” Ms. Tett said.
Mr. Jones grabbed Freddy Clarke, a longtime friend who always brings a guitar with him, and convinced him to play “La Bamba” while Mr. Jones sang along.
“People went wild,” Mr. Jones said. Another guest, Claudia Romo Edelman, joined in and soon they were singing other hits like “Twist and Shout” and “Sympathy for the Devil” by the Rolling Stones.
Then, Mr. Jones’s and Ms. Tett’s children found a speaker and began DJing.
“It went on like this until midnight,” Ms. Tett said.
On This Day
When July 8, 2024
Where The Chapel at King’s College, Cambridge, United Kingdom
Anything Goes On the evening before the wedding, guests were invited to a costume party at the provost’s Lodge garden where the dress code spanned such references as Harry Potter, King Henry VIII and Burning Man. “There’s all this Tudor history, but the whole place looks like Hogwarts, so we wanted to do a Harry Potter theme for the costume party, and we threw in Burning Man because Henrik comes from San Francisco,” Ms. Tett said.
Skal! In a nod to his Danish roots, Mr. Jones found wedding bands from the Viking era for him and Ms. Tett to exchange. Hers was made of two gold wires twisted into a band, and his was a solid band with a pattern of stamped circles and triangles along the circumference.
Plenty of History During the wedding weekend, the couple organized six tours around the University of Cambridge, including of the Fitzwilliam Museum, the rooms of the economist John Maynard Keynes and the mathematician Alan Turing, and the Whittle Laboratory, where green aviation is studied.
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