George Pinto
City banker who was also an intensely focused bridge player and a figure of legend on the golf course
GEORGE PINTO, who has died aged 89, was a City professional whose private life was devoted to bridge, golf and the support of Zionist causes. Pinto was a long-serving director in the corporate finance department of the merchant bank, Kleinwort Benson, where he maintained a reputation as the most precise and punctilious proofreader of any document issued by the firm. Prospectuses for Eurobond issues, which had to be telexed around the world as well as committed to print at speed, were a particular speciality. Regulatory compliance, grammar and punctuation were all grist to his mill; no errant space or comma escaped his indefatigable eye.
Pinto’s daily routine was to arrive at Kleinworts’ Fenchurch Street headquarters towards midday and work late into the evening behind a desk piled with draft prospectuses before leaving to play bridge until the early hours, usually at the exclusive Portland Club. His office – shared for some years with James Cecil (later Lord Rockley), also a man of measured words – was not a place of levity or banter. Younger colleagues, even so, found Pinto courteous and wise.
At the bridge table, likewise, Pinto maintained an intensity of focus which could be disconcerting to partners as well as opponents. “Clubbable” was not a description that fitted, but his dry wit and evident fascination with the nuances of the game gradually endeared him to Portland players.
By tradition, members take turns to host dinner for the whole club, often forming pairs or groups to share the cost. Pinto was always a solo host and his chosen menu was always the same, with quail as its main course.
As for golf, Pinto was once described as the sort of player whom PG Wodehouse might have enjoyed observing. Having first held a club when he was eight or nine, Pinto recalled playing as a young teenager at the end of the war at Deal, where the penalty for slicing was to hack out of a minefield through barbed-wire beach defences. Nevertheless he favoured links courses rather than “mud heaps inland”, and in 1947 he became a member of Royal St George’s at
Sandwich, where he was latterly the senior member and a figure of legend.
Tall and fit, Pinto played at his peak off a handicap of two. “Mind you,” he said in an interview with Kleinworts’ staff magazine, “they kept fiddling with the handicap system … and every time they did, I came down again.” He played regularly for Eton in the Halford Hewitt tournament for public school old boys, in the Kent Amateur and Open and the English Amateur, and later in Seniors tournaments.
“Some like golf mostly for the companionship,” he observed. “I don’t.” Foursomes were particularly irksome to him: “A foursome is only half a round. You get your walk, but only half the shots.”
His real preference was to play alone but with two balls, A and B, practising a different swing for each: as it might be, low with a
draw for A and high with a slight fade for B. In defiance of the convention that a single golfer “has no standing on the course”, he would play through groups ahead of him with an imperious “Excuse me”. On damp days he could be spotted playing in Wellington boots, and when offered a drink at the bar he might ask for a pint of milk.
George Richard Pinto was born on April 11 1929 to Major Richard Pinto and his wife Gladys (née Hirsch). George’s older sister Ann – to whom, with her son and two daughters, he was devoted – was the first of five wives of the 2nd Lord Marks of Broughton, heir to one of the founders of Marks & Spencer.
The Pintos were a Sephardic family who had large landholdings in Egypt before migrating in the latter part of the 19th century, first to Paris and then to London,
where George’s grandfather Eugene became a stockbroker and early cinema proprietor and married a daughter of Levi Cohen, a founder of London’s Liberal Synagogue.
Eugene’s only son, Richard, was a Coldstream Guards officer who won an MC in the First World War; his only daughter, Dorothy (Dolly), married James de Rothschild of the French branch of the banking family, to whom the Pintos were related. Dolly became chatelaine of the great Rothschild mansion of Waddesdon Manor in Buckinghamshire and a leader of British Zionism as a philanthropist, political activist and associate of Israel’s founding president, Chaim Weizmann.
George was educated at Eton, where he boxed for the school. After two years’ National Service with the Coldstream, he went on to study at Trinity College, Cambridge, and to take accountancy articles with the City firm of Cooper Brothers. In 1958 he joined the merchant banking house of Robert Benson Lonsdale, which merged in 1961 with Kleinwort, Sons & Co to form Kleinwort Benson.
It was from his aunt Dolly that Pinto inherited his dedication to Zionist causes, which he supported extensively through his private charitable trusts. Among other involvements he was a vice president of the Anglo-israel Association, treasurer of the Israel-diaspora Trust and co-chair of governors of the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies.
George Pinto – who died of injuries sustained in a road accident – was a man of fixed and fastidious habit in every aspect of life. Having inherited from his father a love of paintings, he was a patron of the National Gallery and owned a notable small collection, including work by the 18th century Swiss artist Jean-étienne Liotard.
His homes in Knightsbridge and Kent were otherwise austere: he never failed to turn out the lights before leaving a room, and if he invited fellow clubmen to supper the fare was plain and the wine, though excellent, served in small measure. On one occasion a whole chicken casserole was spilt on the carpet; unperturbed he scraped it up, served it and apologised for the lack of gravy. He never married.
George Pinto, born April 11 1929, died September 10 2018