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.

Ribblesdale was perhaps the ultimate example of a ‘lord on the board’ — or what Tiny Rowland of Lonrho once described as a corporate ‘Christmas-tree decoration’. He was a director of the City Equitable Fire Insurance Co, which collapsed in February 1922 and became the subject of a leading case that defined the extent to which non-executive directors could be held responsible for the actions of executives — an issue that is still argued over every time a big company goes astray, from Enron to Northern Rock. If City Equitable’s story sounds unpromisingly dusty, it’s not: the bankruptcy was the result of spectacular fraud by the era’s most gilded rogue, Gerard Lee Bevan.

For years I have been stalking Bevan — who died in Cuba in 1936 — with a view to bringing him back to life as a semi-fictional character. But for now let us concentrate on his erstwhile friend Thomas Lister, 4th Baron Ribblesdale, one of several upper-class stooges whom Bevan took for a humiliating ride.