[A-List] City of London modernisation

["Michael Keaney" <michael.keaney@xxxxxx>]

Obituary
Lord Hambro

City banker who got the Tories out of debt

Roger Cowe
Wednesday November 13, 2002
The Guardian

Lord Hambro, who has died aged 72, was the last family chairman of the
merchant bank which bore his name. He also applied his financial acumen and
connections in the cause of the Conservative party, as its treasurer in the
difficult years between 1993 and 1997.

As one of the last old-style merchant bankers, Hambro was a natural Tory,
which made him a rather uneasy bedfellow of many of those who took over the
party in the aftermath of Margaret Thatcher's demise. But his role was
financial, not political; he was charged with rescuing the party from the
£19m overdraft run up in John Major's desperate, but successful, bid to fend
off the Labour party in 1992, for a fourth successive Tory election win. His
efforts were rewarded with a life peerage.

The task meshed perfectly with Hambro's City job, where he had long been
generous with the money of the companies on whose boards he sat. Even in
those days, when big business contributions to the party were commonplace,
he was a long-serving member of some of the most free-spending boards. He
was, for example, a director of both the Guardian Royal Exchange insurance
company and the builder Taylor Woodrow for more than 30 years. From 1987, he
also served for 12 years on the board of the shipping and distribution group
P&O, led by his friend and business associate Lord Sterling, who had been a
confidant of Mrs Thatcher.

Charles Hambro was a great-great-grandson of the man who had moved from
Copenhagen to found the London branch of the family bank in 1839. The
Scandinavian connection was lucrative for many years, although by the time
he joined the bank, in 1952, it had become a pillar of the City
establishment, with a similar range of interests and influence as the great
names of Rothschild and Baring.

Before he was two years old, Charles's mother died after catching pneumonia
while out riding, and his father remarried. His stepmother's connection to
the Wallenberg family enabled him to be evacuated to Sweden during the
second world war. He spent the middle war years in the United States,
staying with the great Morgan banking family, before returning to England in
1943 to complete his education - and consolidate an invaluable banker's
network - at Eton. This classic City training continued with two years'
national service in the Coldstream Guards.

After only five years at the bank, Hambro was appointed as a managing
director, and became deputy chairman in 1965, at the age of 35. Seven years
later, he took over the chair, relinquishing it only in 1997 as the bank's
independence began to evaporate.

He was in charge through interesting but turbulent times, beginning with the
stock market and property crash of 1973-74. Hambros was one of the leading
banks called in by the Bank of England to launch the financial lifeboat
which dealt with the collapse of the Slater Walker empire and saved the
financial system from collapse.

As part of its modernisation during the 1980s, Hambros moved from its
historic location in the heart of the City to modern premises near the Tower
of London. It was symbolic of the changing times, but the changes were often
not to the chairman's liking. "Sometimes I wonder whether we have been so
clever at all," he once mused.

During the 1980s and 1990s the bank profited from the Conservatives'
privatisation programme, advising on the flotation of Railtrack, among
others. But Mrs Thatcher's government also ended the cosy City cartels,
opening up the market to international investment banks which were fuelling
and feeding off globalisation.

In common with most of the other great names of British merchant banking,
Hambros was unable to deal with the onward march of its big American and
continental rivals. By the mid-1990s, its most successful operations were
the estate agency Hambro Countrywide and the insurance company Hambro Life -
and they were sold off as part of the bank's dismemberment in 1998. While
the name lives on as SG Hambros, it is now part of the French group Société
Générale.

In keeping with his background and traditions, Hambro himself was a
gentleman banker who maintained other interests and a relaxed outlook. He
did not spread himself thinly, preferring to maintain a few lengthy
commitments. He was a trustee of the Royal National Pension Fund for Nurses
from 1968, and a trustee of the British Museum from 1984 to 1994.

His style was low-key and affable and, while he inevitably regretted the
passing of the family bank and the old City, he continued to enjoy life,
particuarly on his Gloucestershire estate, which was renowned for pheasant
shooting. He listed his interests as shooting, farming and forestry.

Hambro married his first wife, Rose, in 1954, and they had two sons and a
daughter. They were divorced in 1976, after which he married his second
wife, Cherry.

· Charles Eric Alexander Hambro, Lord Hambro of Dixton and Dumbleton,
merchant banker, born July 24 1930; died November 7 2002