Lord Aberconway

Shipbuilder with a passion for gardening who was drawn into an ultra-secret act of appeasement

Charles Melville McLaren, industrialist: born 16 April 1913; director, English China Clays 1935-87, chairman 1963-84, president 1984-2003; called to the Bar, Middle Temple 1937; director, John Brown & Co 1939-85, chairman 1953-78, president 1978-85; succeeded 1953 as third Baron Aberconway; President, Royal Horticultural Society 1961-84 (Emeritus); married 1941 Deirdre Knewstub (one son, two daughters; marriage dissolved 1949), 1949 Ann Lindsay Bullard (née Aymer; one son); died London 4 February 2003

Charles Aberconway was one of the last of the old-fashioned, autocratic yet patriarchal industrialists, a long-serving President of the Royal Horticultural Society and the witness who, albeit 60 years later, revealed the last, and most shameful and secret, acts of appeasement, in August 1939.

He was born Charles Melville McLaren in 1913. The McLaren family were originally natives of Argyll but had moved to Edinburgh in the early 19th century – his great-grandfather, a draper, was a leading MP, known as the "member for Scotland". Two of his sons, including Charles, the first Baron, were Liberal MPs. Charles was also chairman of John Brown, then the largest of all the many shipyards on the River Clyde. He had further improved the family's fortunes by marrying Laura Pochin, whose family owned English China Clays, the biggest concern of its type in the world.

His son, also Charles, who succeeded as the second Baron Aberconway, had married Christobel Macnaghten, one of the best-known and best-loved society hostesses of her day. At Eton their son Charles was captain of the Oppidans (i.e. the non-scholars), took Mods and Greats at New College, Oxford, and was called to the Bar in 1937, although he never practised and was called up almost immediately, passing a relatively quiet war as a lieutenant in the Royal Artillery and then returning to the family businesses.

During the 30 years after he succeeded his father to the title as third Baron in 1953, Aberconway became one of the best-known industrialists in Britain. Unlike his father, he always listened to the arguments of those around him, but once his mind was made up he was decisive to the point of autocracy – "I don't care what people think of me," he is once alleged to have said. His strongest and longest links were naturally with the two family companies. He was a director of English China Clays for 52 years – and chairman for 21. But he was best-known as a director of John Brown from 1939 until 1985, and above all as chairman for 25 years from 1953.

Like every other shipbuilding firm in Britain, John Brown was plagued by such seemingly interminable and intractable industrial disputes that in 1965 Aberconway unsuccessfully offered the firm to Harold Wilson's government for a nominal £1, provided only that the new owner kept the workforce intact, a typical example of his genuine concern for his employees. Aberconway was proud of his inheritance and was successful in his bid – rightly considered a rash one, due more to pride than commercial common sense – to build the QE2, the last and biggest liner ever to be built in Britain. The contract proved a millstone and in the early 1970s was completed only when his firm had merged into Upper Clyde Shipbuilders.

As one of the business "great and good", Aberconway was also deputy chairman of Sun Alliance and London Assurance, and a director of the National Westminster Bank. Sensibly he left the board of Westland Aircraft after nearly 40 years on the board in 1985 just before the almighty row which led to the resignation Michael Heseltine from the Government in early 1986.

But Aberconway was even more famous as a figure in the horticultural world. Through his grandmother Laura Pochin, he inherited Bodnant House, complete with a hundred acres of world-famous gardens overlooking the North Wales coast. These had first been laid out by Laura's father in 1875 and had been given to the National Trust in 1949 but Aberconway continued to live there and to take full responsibility for them. He made fortnightly weekend visits to Bodnant, processing round the gardens in knickerbockers and accompanied by his wife, the head gardener, Mr Puddle – and a suitably attired butler. But he was not just a lordly overseer, for he possessed a deep knowledge of plants and a passionate love of gardening – he won many prizes for his camellias and rhododendrons.

His knowledge and enthusiasm proved invaluable assets to a long-serving and very active President of the Royal Horticultural Society – indeed Aberconway's only recorded intervention in the House of Lords came in 1980 when he objected to a proposed development of a disused airfield near the RHS's gardens at Wisley in Surrey. Among his innovations in his 23 years in office were the support of "cultivar registration" – defining different species of plants – and his dynamic support of the Chelsea Flower Show. At the opening every year he would repeat the – usually justified – mantra "I think I can say without fear of contradiction that this is the finest Chelsea Flower Show ever". But he was no progressive, resisting demands for more women members of the RHS council or for better access for wheelchairs and guide dogs.

Nevertheless his gardening interests were not confined to Chelsea and Bodnant. As Commissioner-General he was responsible for the first urban garden festival, held in Liverpool in 1984, and was a director of similar festivals held in other dilapidated cities – Stoke-on-Trent, Gateshead, Ebbw Vale and Glasgow: a city to which he was naturally greatly attached.

Aberconway's historical importance came to light only in 1999 when he showed 38 pages of previously secret documents to Andrew Roberts, the biographer of Lord Halifax – the "Holy Fox" – who was Foreign Secretary from 1937 to 1940. These demonstrated clearly that the Chamberlain government was, in Roberts's words "willing to go further to appease Nazi Germany, in order to dissuade Hitler from invading Poland, than was ever hitherto supposed". The shaming conspiracy in which Aberconway was a participant involved an ultra-secret meeting between seven British businessmen and Hermann Goering on the Baltic island of Sylt, a meeting unmentioned either by Halifax or in the Foreign Office documents.

The meeting was organised by Birger Dahlerus, a respectable Swedish civil engineer who had become a trusted neutral intermediary between the Nazis and the British government. Through his business contacts Dahlerus had got to know Charles Spencer, a Conservative party activist and director of John Brown, who had arranged a secret dinner for him at a London club in early July 1939. At the dinner it was agreed that "it would of course be best if an attempt were made to solve the problem by negotiation before the killing started".

The result was the meeting on Sylt between Goering and a seven-man British delegation led by Spencer which had official, if secret, backing from the British government. It was natural for him to bring some of his colleagues from John Brown, who formed four of the seven-man delegation – including the young Aberconway. The delegation reiterated the official government line that Britain's guarantee to Poland was still valid, but they agreed to "give Germany financial and industrial prosperity and the lebensraum she had been seeking . . . if she did not actually invade Poland".

The businessmen were completely taken in by Goering and none more so than the young Aberconway. He was a "jolly man . . . and had considerable personal magnetism", Aberconway told Roberts. He was "vain but sincere – and we believed his genuineness. He never ranted or raved, but talked quietly throughout our talks . . . he smiled whenever the context of the talks permitted."

Like so many other secrets the talks became well known within London society. Asquith's daughter Lady Violet Bonham Carter, always a staunch supporter of Winston Churchill, said to Aberconway, "I hear you went and met Goering before the war." He pointed out that the meeting had been approved by the Foreign Office and, although Aberconway was the most junior member of the delegation and could not be blamed, she interrupted, "Charles, how could you?"

She never spoke to him again.

Nicholas Faith

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