Lord Camoys
City banker who became the first Roman Catholic Lord Chamberlain since the Reformation
THE 7th LORD CAMOYS, who has died aged 82, was a City banker who became Lord Chamberlain at an acutely sensitive time in the modern evolution of the monarchy.
Camoys succeeded the 13th Earl of Airlie as head of the Royal Household in January 1998, when the Queen and her entourage were struggling to come to terms with a new public mood in the aftermath of the death of Diana, Princess of Wales. There were media demands for a more approachable royal style and pressures from the new Labour government both for a more modern image and for evidence of cost-savings in the running of the Household.
Whereas Airlie was an emollient figure, Camoys came to the job with the reputation of a tough decisionmaker, who had survived a bruising career in the City as the founding chief executive of Barclays de Zoete Wedd (BZW), the ill-fated investment banking arm of Barclays Bank.
In his first year at Buckingham Palace Camoys maintained a low public profile – with only one slip-up, when at an investiture ceremony he announced the newly knighted rock star Elton John as Sir John Elton. But as chairman of monthly meetings of the Queen’s most senior advisers he was known to be an advocate of change.
Ralph Thomas Campion George Sherman Stonor was born on April 16 1940. His third name commemorated Edmund Campion, one of the recusant Catholic priests who took refuge at Stonor Park during the Elizabethan persecutions; Sherman was the surname of his American grandmother.
The barony descends from Sir Thomas de Camoys, KG, who commanded the left wing of the English army at Agincourt. The title went into abeyance in 1426, but was revived in 1839 in favour of the descendants of one of Sir Thomas’s grand-daughters.
Young Tom’s father, the 6th baron, Major Sherman Stonor, was a rumbunctious, hard-drinking character who staved off bankruptcy by progressively selling the contents of Stonor Park, the part-medieval, part-tudor, part-18th-century house near Henley which has been in continuous occupation by the Stonors since before the Norman conquest – making it the oldest family home in England.
Tom was educated at Eton and Balliol. Between the two he was despatched by the Foreign Office to Nepal as tutor to Crown Prince (later King) Birendra and, were it not for the family’s shortage of cash, he would have been a natural for a career in diplomacy. Having taken a Third in History, he was recruited instead into Rothschilds by David Colville (brother of Jock), the bank’s first non-family partner.
Rothschilds quickly spotted his leadership qualities. At 26, Tom Stonor, as he then was, was put in charge of a joint venture with National & Provincial, a predecessor of Natwest. This became, as Rothschild Intercontinental Bank, a player in the eurodollar loan market of the 1970s. In due course – with Camoys as its chairman – the business was sold to American Express.
By 1976, meanwhile, Stonor family relations had deteriorated badly. Having auctioned off the last sticks of furniture at Stonor Park, the 6th baron put the house itself on the market, while refusing an offer for it from Tom. The dispute was only resolved by Sherman’s death, after which Tom (by now the 7th Baron Camoys) was able to buy the house from the trustees, re-furnish it and open it to the public.
Relations between Tom and his mother, who lived in a dower house at Stonor with her exotic younger son Bobby, remained strained for many years, though they were reconciled before her death.
Lord Camoys was appointed managing director of Barclays Merchant Bank in 1978, and recruited a group of ex-rothschild colleagues to join him. With Camoys’s drive and the power of Barclays behind it, the bank was capable of innovative deal-making but was never able to compete with the grander independent merchant banks on their traditional territory. A thick-set chain-smoker, Camoys managed his business in a brusque, nononsense style, and did not hesitate to make enemies in Barclays’ complex internal politics.
From 1983 onwards, he devoted all his energies to the opportunity presented by the approach of Big Bang, the City reform which would allow banks to own securities houses from October 1986. With granite determination he assembled BZW, the merger of Barclays Merchant Bank with the stockbrokers de Zoete & Bevan and stockjobbers Wedd Durlacher.
To do so he fought every inch of the way, against colleagues who distrusted the new entity and against brokers and traders who – though they had sold their firms to Barclays for spectacular prices – were reluctant to conform to the managerial processes involved.
“It was bloody hard and very, very successful,” Camoys himself said; it drove him, at 46, to a stroke – from which he recovered fully, though he moved to a less taxing role, as a deputy chairman touring the world to drum up new business.
He was particularly effective as an ambassador to the finance ministries and central banks of the Far East: senior Asians related to the fact that he was a man of strong presence but few words, though they were bemused by the nicotine chewing gum which he left in their ashtrays after he gave up smoking.
In 1993 he moved to become deputy chairman of Sotheby’s – at the instigation of his old Balliol room-mate Lord Gowrie, who was chairman of Sotheby’s Europe.
There he combined his ability to open doors at the highest level with his love of, and eye for, objets d’art. But he remained a non-executive director of BZW, and was known to have been infuriated by Barclays’ decision, in 1997, to break up the investment bank and abolish its name.
Camoys was also chairman of Jacksons of Piccadilly, a family grocery and tea merchants business which closed in 1985. He was director of Barclays Bank, National Provident Institution and 3i.
In the House of Lords he was a member of the EEC select committee from 1979 to 1981. He was also a member of the Historic Buildings and Monuments Commission for England and the Royal Commission on Historical Manuscripts, a steward of the Leander Club at Henley and Prime Warden of the Fishmongers Company.
Camoys’s connections with the Royal family began through friendship with the Duke of Gloucester’s family, and later with the Duke and Duchess of Kent, whose country home at Nettlebed was close to Stonor.
The Duchess of Kent made public her conversion to Roman Catholicism by hearing Mass in Camoys’s private chapel. His own appointment in 1992 as a Lord-in-waiting to the Queen was confirmation that his position as a leading Roman Catholic layman was no obstacle to Royal service. He served as Lord Chamberlain of the United Kingdom until 2000, when he retired due to ill health.
He was appointed GCVO in 1998, and a Privy Counsellor in the same year. He was a “consultor” to the Patrimony of the Holy See from 1991 to 2006 when he was made Knight Grand Cross of the Papal Order of St Gregory the Great by Pope Benedict XVI.
He was also a deputy lieutenant of Oxfordshire, and he remained a close friend and adviser to King Birendra of Nepal, who awarded him the Order of Gorkha Dakshina Bahu in 1981, until the king’s assassination in 2001.
In his spare time Camoys enjoyed shooting, and collecting artefacts of all kinds for Stonor Park. A warmhearted, humorous man off duty, he once expressed surprise at reading a description of himself as “flinty”. “My family think I’m a pudding,” he declared.
He married, in 1966, Elizabeth (Beth), daughter of Sir William Hyde-parker, 11th Bt, of Long Melford in Suffolk. They had a son, Ralph William Robert-thompson Stonor, who was born in 1974 and inherits the barony, and three daughters.