Lord Kindersley
The 3rd Lord Kindersley, who has died aged 84, was a merchant banker at Lazards as his father and grandfather had been before him, and chairman of the Commonwealth Development Corporation. He was also briefly — and uncomfortably — chairman of the troubled Brent Walker leisure group built up by the former boxer George Walker.
The Kindersleys were a grand dynasty of the 20th century City. The barony was created in 1941 for Robert Kindersley, “a man with whom it would be safe to go tiger hunting”, according to a contemporary; he was a stockbroker who had been recruited in 1905 by the Lazard banking partnership in Paris to turn its modest London agency into a stand-alone business — which he did with aplomb, as well as founding the National Savings movement.
His son, the second baron, chaired Rolls-Royce and Guardian Royal Exchange as well as Lazard Brothers — and both father and son were members of the court of the Bank of England. If the 3rd Lord Kindersley did not seek to match his predecessors’ eminence, he built a wide portfolio of City interests and a reputation for quiet determination behind the scenes.
Hugo Kindersley (who succeeded to the title in 1976) was a director of Lazards from 1960 to 1990 and a vice-chairman from 1980 to 1985, with particular expertise in export finance. It was through that connection that he was asked in 1980 to take the chair of the Commonwealth Development Corporation, the government’s agency for the financing of agricultural and other ventures in poorer parts of the world.
Soon after taking up the role, he had to plead against Treasury cuts in CDC’s funding. But during his decade in post the institution expanded geographically — into non-Commonwealth nations in Asia and Latin America — and in its range of equity investment and private sector partnerships as well as traditional loan finance. Kindersley thoroughly enjoyed visiting CDC projects in Africa and elsewhere — sometimes accompanying the Prince of Wales, who was a CDC director — and became a committed advocate on behalf of its clients.
In September 1990 Kindersley was approached to join the board of Brent Walker, the conglomerate assembled by George Walker in the easy-money 1980s boom: its assets included breweries, marinas and the William Hill chain of bookmakers, and its debts amounted to £1.4 billion. Some 60 banks were on the hook, and when they insisted that Walker could no longer be both chairman and chief executive of the company (he was also its major shareholder), Kindersley was the compromise candidate to take over the chair.
He warmed to Walker personally but realised that he was a rogue operator with whom the banks on whom survival depended were no longer prepared to deal. So he instigated Walker’s sacking as chief executive in a ferociously confrontational board meeting on the night of May 29 1991; having narrowly lost the vote, Walker was escorted from the building at four in the morning.
Soon afterwards Kindersley called in the Serious Fraud Office to trawl for malfeasance, and in due course Walker was arrested, with others, on charges of theft and false accounting. He was eventually cleared, though he was forced into bankruptcy with massive personal debts and Kindersley — who retained some sympathy for Walker despite their falling out — later spoke of “a certain amount of vindictiveness” in the way the banks had pursued him.
Brent Walker itself survived until the last of its assets were sold off some years later. But it had not been a battle to which the softly-spoken Kindersley was temperamentally suited; those close to him felt it aged him, and he was clearly relieved to step down as chairman in July 1992.
Robert Hugh Molesworth Kindersley, always known as Hugo, was born at his parents’ home in Eaton Square on August 18 1929 and educated at Eton. An outstanding games player and a very handsome young man, he enjoyed a gilded youth — though he saw action as a Scots Guards lieutenant in Malaya before going up to Trinity College, Oxford, where he gained a half blue for real tennis. After a year at Harvard Business School and a carefree tour of the States in an open car, he entered Lazards and was rapidly promoted.
Before he was 30, Kindersley already held directorships of London Assurance, Witan Investments and the Steel Company of Wales; he later joined the boards of, among others, Sun Alliance, GEC, Swedish Match and the shipping company Maersk. He served on numerous overseas trade bodies and was deputy chairman of the Export Credit Guarantee Department.
In the House of Lords he took the Conservative Whip and interested himself in health matters. From 1990 to 1997 he was a conscientious chairman of Henry Smith’s Charity, which distributed more than £10 million a year garnered from its extensive property interests in Kensington; in 1992 he organised opposition in the House of Lords to the Leasehold Reform Act, which he argued would allow speculative leaseholders to pick up windfalls at the expense of charitable freeholders.
He was also treasurer of the YMCA, prime warden of the Fishmongers’ Company and a Deputy Lieutenant in Kent. An excellent tennis player, he was a member of the management committee of the All England Club . In later life he remained a fine skier, as well as a keen gardener and watercolour artist.
Hugo Kindersley married first, in 1954 (dissolved 1989), Venice Marigold (“Rosie”) Hill, sister of the 8th Marquess of Downshire; they had three sons, one of whom predeceased him, and a daughter. He married secondly and very happily, in 1989, Patricia (“Tita”) Crichton-Stuart (née Norman), acquiring four stepchildren. The heir to the barony is his son Rupert, born in 1955.
The 3rd Lord Kindersley, born August 18 1929, died October 9 2013