The lord on the board and the gilded rogue

The last Lord Ribblesdale, who died in 1925, is remembered chiefly as the subject of a remarkable portrait, known as ‘The Ancestor’, by John Singer Sargent. For those who enjoy the byways of social history, this tall, unmistakably aristocratic figure in late-Victorian hunting garb is also remembered for other things: he was a celebrated amateur boxer capable, it was said, of knocking out any man in the House of Lords; he was a long-time denizen of Rosa Lewis’s louche Cavendish Hotel in Jermyn Street; George Bernard Shaw is believed to have used him as the model for Professor Higgins in Pygmalion; and he surprised London society in 1919 by marrying as his second wife the former Mrs John Jacob Astor, née Ava Willing of Philadelphia. His walk-on part in the history of corporate governance is, by contrast, largely forgotten — but almost as colourful to those like me who enjoy the byways of business history.