Lord Ashburton
Steered his family’s banking house of Baring through the Big Bang era and set up Grange opera
THE 7TH LORD ASHBURTON, who has died aged 91, was a patriarch of the Baring banking dynasty and the founder, on his Hampshire estate, of the Grange Park opera festival. John Baring, as he was known during his banking career, was one of the last princes of the old City of London, as leader of the seventh generation of Baring Brothers &
Co, the business founded in 1762 by Francis Baring, son of a German-born wool trader.
Specialised in raising loans for foreign governments, the 19th-century banking house of Baring was described (supposedly by the Duc de Richelieu) as Europe’s “sixth great power” after Britain, France, Austria, Prussia and Russia. The family partners acquired huge wealth and estates – and a clutch of peerages, of which the barony of Ashburton (in which John succeeded his father in 1991) was created for Francis Baring’s second son Alexander.
John Baring was chairman of Baring Bros from 1974 until 1989, an era first of economic stress at home and abroad and later of revolutionary change in the City. He invariably took the long view, deploying a gravitas that was enhanced by great height, owl-like eyes and famously long silences that disguised a wry sense of humour: an example of this was when in his seventies he arrived at a dinner in his velvet dinner jacket, pointing out that it used to be double-breasted but was now serving very nicely as a singlebreasted one.
He knew how to control a meeting: the opposition would be given the conversational rope in which to hang themselves, while he kept his silence until finally asked to give his opinion, which invariably was short, sharp and to the point, and which inevitably ended up being accepted as the chairman’s summary.
His achievement, wrote one historian, was to have “secured Barings’ reputation for discretion, loyalty and conservatism”. But he also laid the foundation of a more adventurous securities trading operation which, under his successors, would bring down the entire firm.
In the different sphere of heritage conservation, John Baring acquired the reputation of an iconoclast – and the nickname “Basher Baring”.
In 1963 he demolished the neoclassical mansion of Stratton Park in Hampshire (built for Francis Baring), keeping only its magnificent portico and replacing the house itself with a modernist house designed by Stephen Gardiner and Christopher Knight.
He went on to buy back the nearby 600-acre Grange Park estate, which had passed out of Baring hands before the war. His interest was in the farmland, the palatial house in Greek Doric style having fallen into dilapidation after military occupation. A 19th-century wing was removed and permission secured to demolish the rest.
But the plan was halted by a public campaign – “People wrote extremely rude letters to The Times about me” – and in 1973 the remaining temple-like structure, with its huge iron-framed 1820s orangery, was placed in the guardianship of what is now Historic England, while remaining Baring property.
The main Grange Park house remained an uninhabitable shell (the Baring family home was elsewhere in the park), but found new life in 1998 as the venue for a summer opera festival created with John and Sally Ashburton’s enthusiastic support by the conductor-impresario Wasfi Kani, who had previously worked at Garsington. A much-relished feature of an evening at the Grange was when Ashburton would wander on to the stage with his black labrador Bessie to address the audience before a performance.
An award-winning 500-seat theatre was created in the orangery, and the collaboration flourished through some 60 productions until 2015, when a falling-out over lease-renewal terms provoked Wasfi Kani and her team to look elsewhere. Ashburton and his son Mark announced a new Grange Festival in situ under the artistic directorship of the counter-tenor Michael Chance.
John Francis Harcourt Baring was born on November 2 1928, the elder son of Alec Baring, 6th Lord Ashburton, and his wife Doris, daughter of the 1st Viscount Harcourt.
John was educated at Eton – where as coach of the shooting eight he competed for the interschools Ashburton Shield – and Trinity College, Oxford. He entered Baring Bros in 1950 despite some discouragement from his father, a long-serving but (by his son’s account) “not tremendously keen” managing director there: “I don’t know why you would want to go into the City now,” he told his son. “I think it’s all over.”
The bank’s rule was that a family member could have a job but must start at the bottom – as a clerk on a high stool, sorting post, writing ledgers in longhand – and would be swiftly expelled if incompetent. “Pretty dull work,” John recalled, “but if a man can’t get through dullness he won’t get places.”
Having passed that test he was ushered into the partners’ room in 1955 and was one of the architects in the late 1960s of a restructuring designed to preserve independence and keep death duties at bay, by converting the firm from a partnership to a company owned largely by a charitable trust, the Baring Foundation.
After a discreet power struggle, John Baring succeeded his kinsman Lord Cromer (the former Bank of England governor, who had been appointed Ambassador in Washington) as chairman of the firm’s executive committee in 1971. Under his cautious helmsmanship over the decade that followed, wrote another commentator, “Barings enjoyed a certain amount of growth, mainly abroad, but without any expectation (or perhaps wish) of returning to the great days.”
When the opportunities of the City’s Big Bang reforms presented themselves in the mid-1980s, his board’s chief concern was to keep control of their business and its good name, rather than follow other historic firms that had chosen to join larger combinations.
But what had been a proudly oldfashioned merchant bank of just 300 staff when John Baring took charge was rapidly evolving: the Victorian office in Bishopsgate where he had started work, with its antique system of pulleys and baskets for moving paperwork between floors, had been replaced by a glass tower; numbers had grown so much by 1986 that he was no longer able to address every employee by name when he made a Christmas tour; and younger executives in the firm were hungry to reap the rich rewards of the new era.
It was on Ashburton’s watch in 1984 that the bank recruited a team of Japanese specialists from the stockbrokers Henderson Crosthwaite under the leadership of Christopher Heath, who became the City’s highestpaid executive by the end of the decade as the Baring Securities operation grew to 1,000 staff around the world. It was a divergence from Barings’ traditional milieu that would come spectacularly to grief in 1995 owing to fraudulent and ill-controlled trading in Singapore by Nick Leeson.
That calamity struck some months after Ashburton had finally retired from the boards of the bank and its holding company. But he was still chairman of the trustees of the Baring Foundation – by then the group’s sole ordinary shareholder and one of the UK’S largest grant-giving charities, but which suffered a catastrophic wipeout of capital from the collapse.
In the early 1980s John Baring had been a candidate to succeed Gordon Richardson as governor of the Bank of England. It was whispered that he had turned down other appointments to keep himself available, and one Bank official wrote in a memoir that the Treasury mandarin Sir Douglas Wass, when asked who the successor would be, said simply: “John Baring”.
To the City’s surprise, however, Margaret Thatcher preferred an appointee who was better known as a grandee of Kent – the Natwest chairman Robin Leigh-pemberton, who happened to be John Baring’s Eton and Trinity contemporary. Baring nevertheless served loyally for eight years on the Bank of England’s court of directors and gave LeighPemberton his full support when senior officials initially tried to sideline the inexperienced new governor.
From 1982 Baring also sat on the board of BP, and in 1992 he was asked to step up as non-executive chairman, following the sudden departure of the rambunctious
Bob Horton as chairman and chief executive. At a difficult moment for the company, this was the first time the two senior roles had been separated – bringing it into line with the new norms of the Cadbury governance code.
Baring worked closely with David Simon as chief executive to create a new management template, attending executive meetings by invitation, bringing calm and wisdom to the table; though he spoke little, he was totally trusted by colleagues.
Having presided over an orderly transition to a new era of leadership, he retired from BP in 1995.
He was deputy chairman of Royal Insurance, chairman of the Accepting Houses Committee, vice-president of the British Bankers Association, and a director of Dunlop and Jaguar. Among many public roles he was receiver general of the Duchy of Cornwall and Lord Warden of the Stannaries, treasurer of the Police Foundation, a trustee of the National Gallery, chairman of the Rhodes Trust, High Steward of Winchester Cathedral and a deputy lieutenant of Hampshire.
He was appointed CVO in 1980, knighted in 1983, raised to KCVO in 1990 and created a Knight of the Garter in 1994. He was quietly proud of his role in the annual Garter ceremony, was a faithful member of the Church of England, and loved the countryside, taking a knowledgeable interest in trees, birds and rivers.
John Baring married first, in 1955, Susan, daughter of the 1st Lord Renwick, with whom he had two sons and two daughters. The marriage was dissolved in 1984, and in 1987 he married Sally Crewe, daughter of the artist John Spencer Churchill (nephew of Sir Winston), who survives him with the children of his first marriage.
The Ashburton title passes to his son Mark, born in 1958.
Lord Ashburton, born November 2 1928, died October 6 2020