Robin Herbert
City financier and landowner who reinvigorated the Royal Horticultural Society as its president
ROBIN HERBERT, who has died aged 89, was a dendrologist and City financier who helped to transform the fortunes of the Royal Horticultural Society and who left a splendid natural legacy in his own Welsh woodlands and gardens.
Tall, courtly and quietly spoken but driven by purpose and passion, Herbert was a fixture of public bodies concerned with nature – from the Royal Parks, to which he was an adviser, to the National Botanic Garden of Wales at Llanarthne in Carmarthenshire, where he was a trustee, and the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew, where he was chairman from 1991 to 1997.
But it was at the RHS – where he first became a council member in 1971, was elected president and chairman from 1984 to 1994, and was thereafter president emeritus – that he made his greatest impact.
Taking command when the morale and finances of the 180-year-old society were in low water, he led a transformation which saw a doubling of RHS membership, the acquisition of gardens at Rosemoor in Devon and Hyde Hall in Essex and new horticultural shows around the country. RHS publications, award schemes and outreach programmes were all revamped.
Herbert modestly insisted that these advances were team efforts, giving credit in particular to the RHS treasurer, Lawrence Banks. But Fred Whitsey, the Telegraph gardening correspondent, wrote of Herbert: “You have no doubt about where the vision lay… You are in the presence of a powerful intellect and a questing mind… someone who has thought very deeply indeed about every fragment of the society’s activities and cares passionately about its fortunes.”
Robin Arthur Eidyr Herbert was born in London on March 5 1934, the son of Sir John Herbert, Conservative MP for Monmouth, and Lady Mary, a daughter of the 6th Earl of Ilchester and later a lady-in-waiting to Princess Elizabeth. From 1939 until his death in 1943, Sir John was Governor of Bengal, where Robin explored the corridors of Government House in Calcutta on his tricycle and recalled playing marbles with General Wavell’s glass eye when the Commander-in-chief, India, came to tea.
When Lady Mary died in 1948, the 13-year-old Robin inherited 3,500 acres at Llanover, near Abergavenny in Monmouthshire. A maternal uncle became his guardian while his godfather Bobby Jenkinson, a noted plantsman, encouraged his love of gardens.
He was educated at Eton, did National Service in his father’s regiment, the Royal Horse Guards, read philosophy, politics and economics at Christ Church, Oxford, and – prompted by his formidable American Herbert grandmother – went on to study at Harvard Business School.
He set up home at Llanover in 1960 with his American bride Margaret, and in 1969 he inherited another estate close by at Llanarth from a widowed cousin, having seen off a rival claimant.
Some years later, Herbert sued for libel – and won – after finding himself portrayed as “an inhumane, greedy landlord” in a television documentary, Who Is Buying Up Britain?, made by the athlete-turnedbroadcaster Chris Brasher. The allegation was clearly unfair: as his daughter, the writer Susannah Herbert, put it: “While others sold off cottages, he restored them; he invested in farms, in rivers, woods, landscape – and in people, definitely people.” The record libel pay-out was donated to the National Trust.
Meanwhile, Herbert had also embarked on a financial career. In 1963 he joined forces with a group of Oxford contemporaries led by Prince Rupert Loewenstein to buy a small merchant bank, Leopold Joseph, creating a niche corporate finance and private wealth management business to which Loewenstein, to the discomfort of his partners, recruited the Rolling Stones as major clients.
“I always had a desk there but wasn’t in any way executive,” Herbert said of his early role in the venture. As others departed, however, he came to the fore and helped steer the business through turbulent times.
Having floated on the Stock Exchange in 1971, the bank shunned unwelcome takeover approaches during the propertylending boom of that era and survived the subsequent crash relatively unscathed.
Herbert was a safe-hands chairman of Leopold Joseph from 1978 to 2004, when he secured its sale to the Bermuda-based Butterfield Bank. One portfolio he looked after personally for more than 40 years held the UK investments of the Vatican.
His upright City reputation brought him directorships of Natwest, Marks & Spencer and Consolidated Gold Fields, as well as the chairmanship from 1990 to 1996 of Union Discount Co. He was also at various times a member of the National Rivers Authority and National Water Council; a trustee of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew and the National Botanic Garden of Wales; deputy chairman of the Countryside Commission; chairman of the National Trust’s committee for Wales; and president of the Welsh Historic Gardens Trust.
Herbert regretted having no botanical qualifications but was at heart a hands-on gardener as well as a plant-hunter as far afield as the Amazon and Siberia – and, above all a lover and grower of trees. For the late Queen’s Silver Jubilee in 1977, he planted a mulberry or walnut tree in every garden on his estates.
He took special pride at Llanover in a twoacre plantation of redwood Sequoia sempervirens – brought from California as seed cones in his suitcase in 1957 and now standing 150 feet tall.
Robin Herbert was a deputy lieutenant and former high sheriff of Monmouthshire, and a long-serving local magistrate. He was appointed CBE in 1994.
He married first, in Paris in 1960, Margaret Lewis, the daughter of an American diplomat. The marriage was dissolved in 1988, and he married secondly, in that year, Philippa King, who survives him with two sons and two daughters from the first marriage.
Robin Herbert, born March 5 1934, died January 12 2024