Lord Camoys — April 16, 1940-January 4, 2023

THE 7th Lord Camoys, of Stonor Park, has died, aged 82.

He was a City banker who succeeded the 13th Earl of Airlie as head of the Royal Household in January 1998 and in doing so became the first Roman Catholic since the Reformation to hold the position.

When he became Lord Chamberlain, it was a sensitive time for the monarchy following the death of Princess Diana in August the previous year.

At the time, there were demands for the royal family to be more approachable and to be seen to reduce the running costs of their household.

Camoys took the job with the reputation of making tough decisions, having been the founding chief executive of Barclays de Zoete Wedd, which lay the foundations for Barclays Capital.

In his first year at Buckingham Palace he maintained a low public profile. He used to chair monthly meetings of the Queen’s most senior advisers.

He was known to be an advocate of change and by the time he had retired due to ill health he had implemented a policy of more openness and supported the policy of financial transparency.

Ralph Thomas Campion George Sherman Stonor, known as Thomas, 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 granddaughters.

Thomas’s father, the 6th baron, Major Sherman Stonor, staved off bankruptcy by progressively selling the contents of Stonor Park, the part-medieval, part-Tudor, part-18th-century estate, which has been home to the Stonors since before the Norman conquest. It is the oldest family home in England.

He was educated at Rupert House School in Henley, Eton and Balliol and was despatched by the Foreign Office to Nepal as tutor to Crown Prince Birendra, who later became King, which started a close and special 60-year connection with the country.

He would have been a natural for a career in diplomacy but instead joined Rothschilds after being recruited by David Colville, the bank’s first non-family partner.

At 26, Thomas Stonor was put in charge of a joint venture with National & Provincial, a predecessor of NatWest. This became Rothschild Intercontinental Bank, a player in the eurodollar loan market of the Seventies. The business, with Camoys as chairman, was sold to American Express.

By 1976 Stonor family relations had deteriorated. Having auctioned off the last of its furniture, the 6th baron put Stonor Park on the market, while refusing an offer for it from Thomas. The dispute was only resolved by Sherman’s death. In 1978, Thomas, who was by then the 7th Baron Camoys, was able to buy the house from the trustees.

He drew up an action programme to refurnish, repair and repaint large parts of the house and it re-opened to the public in April 1979.

Saving Stonor and managing its care and restoration with his wife Elisabeth became his life’s main focus.

In 2010 Camoys had told a meeting of Henley’s Rotary Clubs that the previous 32 years had felt like a long rush and he had been kept continually busy with the many problems involved in managing the small estate as well as with commitments locally.

Relations between Thomas and his mother, who lived in a dower house at Stonor with her younger son Bobby, remained strained for many years, though they were reconciled before her death.

Camoys was appointed managing director of Barclays Merchant Bank in 1978 and recruited a group of ex-Rothschild colleagues to join him.

With his 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.

He assembled BZW, the merger of Barclays Merchant Bank with stockbrokers de Zoete & Bevan and stockjobbers Wedd Durlacher, in the wake of strong opposition from colleagues, brokers and traders who were reluctant to conform to the managerial processes involved.

It drove him, at 46, to a stroke from which he recovered fully but 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 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 became deputy chairman of Sotheby’s, thanks to his old Balliol room-mate Lord Gowrie, who was chairman of Sotheby’s Europe. 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 and Prime Warden of the Fishmongers Company.

For 30 years he was a trustee of the Chequers Trust, the country residence of the British Prime Minister.

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 was at Nettlebed.

The Duchess of Kent made public her conversion to Roman Catholicism by hearing Mass in the private chapel at Stonor.

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.

On one occasion he had been assigned by the Queen to assist with the welcome for President Nelson Mandela on a state visit.

He had asked him about his greatest worry for South Africa to which President Mandela replied that there was an almost complete lack of civic society, mainly caused by the apartheid regime.

He served as Lord Chamberlain 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 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.

Having been born on the Stonor estate during the Second World War, he had a firm dedication and love for Henley and the Chilterns.

He started school at Rupert House and learned to swim as a boy in the Thames at the former Henley Municipal Swimming Baths on Wargrave Road.

He collected paintings by local artist John Piper, whose family he had grown up with, and was a regular visitor to the former Bohun Gallery in Henley.

Like many ancestors before him, including the 3rd Lord Camoys who founded the Henley Royal Regatta, he became a long-running steward of the regatta in 1978 as well as a member of Leander Club, assisting both organisations on their finance committees.

He was part of the founding team of the Henley River & Rowing Museum of which he became president, was president of the Henley Society and regularly chaired its annual general meetings, was a director of the Henley Business School and a long-running director of Perpetual plc, which later become Invesco Perpetual.

Shortly after returning to Stonor, he organised the inner avenues of lime trees along Fair Mile following his father who had organised the outer avenue of turkey oaks.

Standing on the steps of Henley town hall at the annual remembrance service each year was of great importance to him.

He supported the Oxfordshire Army Cadet Force as well as Twyford scouts and Loddon explorer couts by allowing them to hold exercises and camps in the grounds of Stonor Park.

He also supported the Henley Youth Festival’s annual cross-country runs in the park as well as the Red Cross Youth Festival’s 125th anniversary camp.

He enjoyed letting the park be used for night landing exercises by helicopters from RAF Benson.

He became a deputy lieutenant of Oxfordshire and, among other things, held the county’s first citizenship ceremony in Oxford, which he was very proud of.

In his spare time, Camoys enjoyed shooting and collecting artefacts of all kinds for Stonor Park and spending his summer holiday with his children at his wife’s family home in Ibiza.

A warm-hearted, 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.

In 1966 he married Elisabeth (Beth), daughter of Sir William Hyde-Parker, 11th Bt, of Long Melford in Suffolk.

They had a son, Ralph William Robert Thomas Stonor, who was born in 1974 and inherits the barony, and three daughters, Alina, Emily and Sophie.