LORD HAMBRO: 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, acting 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 £19 million 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. 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, 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 en- abled him to be evacuated to Sweden during the second World War.
He spent the middle war years in the US, staying with the great Morgan banking family, before returning to England in 1943 to complete his education 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 managing director, and he 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.
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, Hambro 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.
Hambro's style was low-key and affable and in his latter years he continued to enjoy life, particularly on his Gloucestershire estate, which was renowned for pheasant-shooting. He listed his interests as shooting, farming and forestry. He 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: born July 24th 1930; died November 7th 2002.