John Baring, seventh Lord Ashburton, who has died aged 91, played many roles at the heart of the establishment. He was perhaps best remembered for his long stint as chairman of his family’s bank, Barings, guiding it successfully through cultural change when the big bang opened up the City to international competition, and he was a calming chairman of BP from 1992 until 1995, after sacking his predecessor, the controversial Bob Horton. In later years he presided over the founding of the successful Grange Park Opera.
He was the direct descendant of Francis Baring, first Lord Ashburton, who founded Barings Bank and became president of the Board of Trade. His father was Alexander, whom he succeeded to the title in 1991, and his mother was Doris, the daughter of Viscount Harcourt.
Educated at Eton and Trinity College, Oxford, Baring joined the bank in 1950, became a managing director at 27 and served as chairman for 15 years from 1974 until 1989, a period of huge change for the City. He played active external roles in insurance and property and in attempts to support British manufacturing industry in the difficult years of the 1980s. He was chairman of the National Economic Development Council’s committee on finance for industry, served on the board of Dunlop as it vainly struggled to escape its tag as the biggest industrial casualty in Britain’s private sector, and was a director of the electronics company Pye, and later of Jaguar. He was a director of the Bank of England from 1983 until 1991.
His long stint at Barings was characterised by his successor as chairman, Peter Baring, as “steady progress guided by his firm and discriminating judgment” but this underplayed the transformation he oversaw. When he joined in 1950, the bank had 200 staff and a balance sheet of £30m, compared with 2,400 and £3bn when he retired. He reshaped it, splitting banking from investment management, demolished its old headquarters, introduced profit sharing and opened up successful activities in Asia, which ironically were to prove its downfall.
In his valedictory annual report in 1989, he identified an “enormous increase in competition” stemming from the internationalisation of business with the attrition of exchange rates and regulation and the power of computer and communication systems. Sheer competitiveness, he argued, was bringing “lapses of behaviour”: “We must do everything in our power to ensure that our personal behaviour as businessmen is no less upright than we would expect of ourselves as private individuals.” Six years later, on the bitterest day of his life, the activity of a single rogue trader in Asia, Nick Leeson, would bring the bank crashing down.
Baring’s time as a director of British Petroleum (now BP) began in 1982 when the government still held more than 30% of the shares and it was seen almost as a branch of the civil service. But rapid change was put in hand, with chemicals, shipping and US interests all rationalised, and sale of the government’s holding. In 1990, a new chairman, Horton, was appointed, and he attempted to drive change even faster. A natural autocrat, who insisted he wanted to drive individual empowerment and presided over innumerable management workshops, Horton was undone by the 1991 depression, which drove down prices, margins and profits. As he stubbornly banked on rising prices, and BP headed for a loss, Ashburton led the criticism and, as the longest-serving director, had the task of sacking Horton as chairman and chief executive.
Baring was himself appointed chairman, with David Simon (now Lord Simon of Highbury) as chief executive running the day-to-day business. Although pleased to be asked, Baring maintained it had never been part of his gameplan. The partnership was successful. Three years later, when he stepped down, the targets – debt reduced by $1bn, profits raised to $2bn and capital spending cut to $5bn – had all been achieved. Observers credited him with bringing equilibrium and teamwork to a boardroom “which had gone through a war”, describing him as a healer and a good people person – “no kind of a snob”. It was, said one, “a rare moment of boardroom harmony for BP”.
By contrast, his treatment of historic listed buildings was far from emollient – bringing him the nickname “Basher Baring”. In 1955, he bought the early-19th-century mansion Stratton Park in Hampshire, which had been the bank’s wartime headquarters, demolishing it for a modern house and preserving only an empty portico. He also oversaw the demolition of the bank’s Norman Shaw-designed headquarters in the City.
In 1964, he purchased the Grange Park estate in Hampshire, another former Baring possession containing a house designed to resemble a pair of Greek temples. Baring wanted “to bring back to my family a very beautiful piece of land”. He planned a new house near the lake and controversially applied to demolish the Grange. The Architects’ Journal commented that he had “plumbed depths of barbarity previously unknown even in the hard world of merchant banking”.
After four years, he received permission and took out fireplaces and staircases. But the public mood had changed and the Council of Europe telegraphed Edward Heath, the prime minister, asking him to save “one of Europe’s great neoclassical monuments”. Eventually the rotting house was taken under the care of English Heritage, with Baring contributing an undisclosed amount for upkeep.
In 1998 Wasfi Kani, then chief executive of Garsington Opera, approached Baring about founding a new summer opera festival on his land. Grange Park Opera began with a 20-year lease and an appeal brought in £4m to construct an indoor theatre within the ruins. Its performances and magical setting proved a highly successful addition to the summer opera season. But by 2015 the Barings and Kani were unable to agree about future use of the theatre and Kani moved Grange Park Opera to a new theatre constructed at West Horsley Place in Surrey. Operas and other musical events have continued at Grange Park as the Grange festival.
Baring is survived by his second wife, Sarah (nee Spencer-Churchill), whom he married in 1987; and by two sons and two daughters from his first marriage, to Susan Mary Renwick, which ended in divorce.