Edward McMillan, banker and teacher, 1919-2015

Half a century ago, Merrill Lynch secured its place as the leading stockbroker for individual Americans when its client numbers passed 1m. Yet it was still catering little to pension funds and the like.

While serving on a New York Stock Exchange committee in 1965, Edward McMillan, a Merrill executive just below main board level, detected early the shift in institutional buying from bonds and mortgages into common stocks that was about to gather pace.

McMillan, who has died aged 95, won directors' blessing to take the business beyond its private client roots. The airman and tenacious survivor of 27 months as a prisoner of war in Stalag Luft III was made a full board member and placed at the head of a new division for "institutional sales and equities".

Coming up to his 20th year on its staff at the time, McMillan was ultimately regarded as the last surviving partner to have been hired by founder Charles Merrill.

"I once asked him what were the pivotal points in his business career," says Ted Agne, a Boston communications consultant and friend. "Ed's answer was: 'Going to work for Charlie Merrill and hiring David Ogilvy to do the advertising'." Ogilvy, the British guru behind Ogilvy & Mather, one of the first multinational ad agencies, went on to develop Merrill's "bullish on America" slogan launched in 1971, the year of its initial public offering.

Yet within a year McMillan's fledgling unit had stumbled, in an affair that culminated in reprimands from the Securities and Exchange Commission and a trading suspension.

In arranging a 1966 debenture issue for Douglas Aircraft, some in his team came to learn that profits at the plane maker were rapidly weakening. The problem arose when at least one of them shared the news with big investors in its common stock.

Retail shareholders heard only days later, in the release of the manufacturer's poor six-month earnings and near zero forecast for the full year. By that time the shares had slid by more than 12 per cent, in big volumes.

The SEC investigated and found this a sufficient breach that in 1968 it censured the group, along with five traders and four executives including McMillan. His unit was shut for three weeks as a penalty.

The case was a big early blow to the partners who only six years earlier had led the firm's switch to corporate status - and were eyeing an IPO.

Merrill accepted the ruling without admitting liability - and covered the costs of the nine staff as civil suits landed from disgruntled small investors. The SEC tightened its strictures on insider trading and Chinese walls.

Born in Philadelphia on October 11 1919, the Dartmouth graduate had long made Boston his home town. McMillan thus returned to run the Merrill office where he had earlier worked. But he was gone by 1970 - a year before the brokerage house regained sufficient poise to adopt the branding on which Ogilvy had been working since 1968 and launch its own shares on the market.

In retiring at 50 he said he was fulfilling a 1943 "pledge to the Lord" that if he were spared, he would later try "being of help to other people". The prayer had come in the skies over Tunisia as he bailed out by parachute from a B-17 bomber caught by Luftwaffe fire.

In recognition of a safe landing albeit behind enemy lines, he taught business to disadvantaged youths at an inner city community college, served in his parish church and founded a careers programme at his alma mater.

He and his wife Betty, who died in January (they leave four children), were wartime fiances. As a Women's Army Corps lieutenant based at the New York Port Authority, she heard McMillan had been liberated - and was to be on the first US troop ship home.

With her superiors she arranged for him also to be the first combatant to disembark. Their dockside kiss made front pages; they married nine days later.

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