The Earl of Home
Prime minister’s son who at Coutts became the Queen’s banker and was a pageboy at the Coronation
THE 15TH EARL OF HOME, who has died aged 78, was the Queen’s banker as chairman of Coutts & Co, having first built an international financial career with Morgan Grenfell; he inherited the earldom disclaimed by his father on becoming prime minister as Sir Alec Douglas-home in 1963.
In his professional life, David Home embodied the traditional banking values, as one colleague put it, “of discretion, infinite care and utter integrity”. His ancient and distinguished lineage also made him ideal for Coutts, the private bank in the Strand, founded in 1692, which had for many years provided banking services to the royal family. He was its chairman from 1999 to 2013, continuing as chairman of the Swiss-based international arm until 2017.
In an era of rising competition in financial services for the wealthy – and of turbulence for Coutts’s parent, Royal Bank of Scotland – Home’s role as chairman was in large part to do with the maintenance of the highest standards and of an image which, despite modernisation, remained instantly recognisable.
Modest and considered in style, but firm when necessary, he was completely trusted by clients, royal and otherwise, and liked by staff at all levels. He shunned modern technology but maintained an address book second to none, doing business always on the basis of real personal relationships.
David Alexander Cospatrick Douglashome, was born on November 20 1943, the only son of Alec Douglas-home (then Lord Dunglass by courtesy) and his wife Elizabeth, daughter of the Very Reverend Cyril Alington, who was headmaster of Eton and later Dean of Durham.
The Homes descend from William de Home, who acquired lands in Berwickshire in the 13th Century. The earldom was granted in 1605 to Alexander, 6th Lord Home, who had been in the retinue of King James VI of Scotland when he took up the throne of England. The Hirsel estate near Coldstream, which became the family’s principal seat, was acquired in 1611.
At the Coronation in June 1953, Lord Home, who had succeeded his father as 14th Earl in 1951, was to be the bearer of the Sword of Spiritual Justice, one of three unsheathed swords carried point upwards in the procession – and was in need of a page to support him.
Although the official minimum age for participation in the lengthy ceremony was 12, the Duke of Norfolk as Earl Marshal gave permission for nine-year-old David, now Lord Dunglass, to take part; he and other pages discovered in rehearsals that the baubles on peers’ coronets were detachable and – to the horror of courtiers – could be played with as marbles.
David was educated at Eton and Christ Church, Oxford – where he was an undergraduate in October 1963 when his father, who had been Harold Macmillan’s foreign secretary but initially ruled himself out as a candidate for prime minister, emerged from a conclave of Conservative grandees to become Macmillan’s successor, preferred over Quintin Hogg, Rab Butler and Reginald Maudling.
It was also agreed that he should re-enter the House of Commons at the forthcoming Kinross by-election. In order to do so, he made use of legislation recently pushed forward by the Labour MP Tony Benn (in order to shed his own inconvenient inheritance as Viscount Stansgate) which allowed Home to renounce for life his four hereditary peerages and revert, as a Knight of the Thistle, to “Sir Alec”.
The Dunglass courtesy title also went into abeyance, and a porter promptly repainted the name on the door of David’s college rooms.
Graduating in 1966, Douglas-home joined Morgan Grenfell, one of the City’s oldest and grandest merchant banking houses, where he was a director from 1974 to 1999. Specialising in Middle Eastern and Asian business, he was a director of the Arabbritish Chamber of Commerce and chairman of the British Overseas Trade Board’s Middle East trade committee. In the latter capacity, he led a delegation in March 1991 to assess how British firms could contribute to the reconstruction of Kuwait after the looting and vandalism of the previous year’s Iraqi invasion.
After the takeover of Morgan Grenfell by Deutsche Bank, Lord Home was a director, and briefly chairman, of Deutsche Morgan Grenfell plc before departing for Coutts. He was also a long-serving director of Grosvenor, the Duke of Westminster’s property empire, where he succeeded the 6th Duke as chairman from 2007 to 2010, as well as Chairman of the MAN investment group and a director of the Dubai Financial Services Authority.
In 1995 he inherited the earldom – and the baronies of Home, Dunglass and Douglas – on the death of his father, who had accepted a life peerage as Lord Home of the Hirsel in 1974 after a second stint as foreign secretary under Edward Heath.
In the House of Lords the 15th Earl played an active role on the Conservative benches – and sat from 1999 as one of 92 elected hereditary peers. He was appointed CBE in 1991, CVO in 1997 and a Knight of the Thistle in 2014.
Commitments in London and abroad inevitably limited Lord Home’s presence in his Scottish fiefdoms, but he strengthened the finances of his estates (at Douglas in Lanarkshire as well as the Hirsel), enjoyed the sport they provided, and was an admired and respected participant in Borders society. To the wider Douglas-home family (his father having had six siblings) he was a fount of generosity and quiet wisdom.
He married, in 1972, Jane Williams-wynne, who survives him with their two daughters and a son. The wedding took place at St Margaret’s Westminster and the reception, by special permission of the Queen, at the Banqueting House in Whitehall.
Their son Michael, Lord Dunglass, born in 1987, succeeds to the titles.
The Earl of Home, born November 20 1943, died August 22 2022