U.K. banker backed wide range of causes
TRIBBLE’S CASE ... HELPED TRIGGER A FEDERAL REVIEW THAT IN 2015 DISCLOSED FBI EXAMINERS SYSTEMATICALLY OVERSTATED TESTIMONY IN ALMOST ALL TRIALS IN WHICH THEY OFFERED HAIR EVIDENCE AGAINST CRIMINAL DEFENDANTS FOR TWO DECADES BEFORE 2000.
Francis Carnwath, who has died aged 80, was for 27 years a banker with Barings: his most impressive achievements, however, came after he retired from the firm in 1989.
As deputy director of the Tate Gallery from 1990 to 1994, Carnwath played a leading role in the choice of a disused power station, across the Thames from St. Paul’s Cathedral, as the home of the new Tate Modern gallery.
This vast building had only been completed in 1960, yet by the 1990s seemed destined for demolition.
In February 1993, Carnwath visited the empty shell on Bankside and immediately grasped not merely the obvious difficulties of any development, but, more pertinently, its immense potential for a new gallery.
When Tate director Nicholas Serota visited Bankside, he too was captivated. The great and the good rallied round; the area’s council proved both co-operative and generous.
And so in the spring of 1994, the Tate paid £500,000 for an option to buy the former power station. Soon after, Carnwath left the Tate; in the space of little more than three years, as well as supporting the organization in its new ventures in Liverpool and Cornwall, he had made a crucial contribution to securing an exciting future for the new gallery.
From 1997 to 2002, he was director of the Greenwich Foundation for the Royal Naval College, established in 1995 in horrified reaction to the Conservative government’s plan to sell Greenwich Palace after the departure of the Royal Navy.
When Carnwath joined the foundation, there was no constitution, no money, no trustees and no staff.
Very soon, however, the new director had negotiated £17 million from the Ministry of Defence toward renovations, as well as £ 2 million per annum from the Department of Digital, Culture, Media and Sport.
Carnwath completed negotiations that installed Greenwich University in the main buildings. A music-lover and a pianist, he was delighted when Trinity College of Music also set up headquarters in Greenwich Palace.
The eldest in a family of five brothers and a sister, Francis Anthony Armstrong Carnwath was born south of London on May 26, 1940. His father, Sir Andrew Carnwath, was senior partner of Barings from 1955 to 1974.
Francis was educated at Eton, where he was known to his friends as Freddy. After school he worked his passage on a boat to Argentina, contracting appendicitis en route. Confined to hospital on arrival, he endeared himself to all and sundry by creative use of the word “delicioso,” the only Spanish he knew. Subsequently he worked for a bank in Mendoza.
Back in England, he studied Economics at Cambridge. Notwithstanding a taxing social life, he stuck to his resolution of learning a poem every day; still more impressively, he could remember them 40 years later.
He joined Barings in 1962, making steady progress, with spells in South Africa, the U.S. and France. He would look back on his time in Malaysia as especially memorable.
The fondest of fathers — and later of grandfathers — he loved to take his children on idyllic walks through the jungle.
Carnwath left Barings in 1989. While still at the bank he had taken on responsibilities outside the firm: trustee, later deputy chairman, of Shelter; treasurer at Voluntary Service Overseas; chairman of Spitalfields Historic Buildings Trust. At English Heritage he served as a member of the London Advisory Committee, including a spell as acting director of the Heritage Lottery Fund.
For seven years he chaired the panel responsible for London’s Blue Plaques, relishing the installation of a plaque for the guitarist Jimi Hendrix at 23 Brook Street, next door to George Frideric Handel’s house.
Other institutions included the Musgrave Kinley Outsider Art Trust; Thames21, which improves rivers and canals; the Spitalfields Festival; the Old Etonian Trust; the Charles Darwin Trust; the Royal Armouries; and the Yorkshire Sculpture Park.
Ever modest and self-deprecating, Carnwath would say achievement was just a matter of “getting started and keeping going.” In fact the extraordinary range of his work could only have been mastered by someone with a combination of brains, energy, optimism and discipline, all sweetened by perfect manners.
A keen Scottish dancer and an enthusiastic rock’n’roller, Carnwath, who was appointed CBE in 1997, always found time for music, not least the works of Bach.
At the end of 2014 he fell and hit his head, subsequently developing hydrocephalus. Thenceforward he was confined to a wheelchair and dependent on others.
He married, in 1975 ( separated in 1995), Penelope Rose, with whom he had two daughters and a son. The great tragedy of their lives, in 1985, was the death, at age six, of their daughter Catriona from pneumonia.
Carnwath’s partner from 1999 was Caroline Wiseman, a private art dealer. They moved to Suffolk, where they bought the Arthouse, from which Caroline — enthusiastically backed by Francis — organized events.