Sir John Smith

John Lindsay Eric Smith, financier and philanthropist: born London 3 April 1923; director, Coutts and Co 1950-93; founder, Manifold Trust 1962; OBE 1964, CBE 1970; founder, Landmark Trust 1965; MP (Conservative) for Cities of London and Westminster 1965-70; Lord-Lieutenant of Berkshire 1975-78; Kt 1988; CH 1994; married 1952 Christian Carnegy (two sons, two daughters, and one daughter deceased); died Windsor, Berkshire 28 February 2007.

John Smith changed the fate of historic buildings in Britain. Houses and cottages, factories and workshops, disused stations and forts - yeoman buildings that 50 years ago were disparaged, ill used or disregarded - are now the subject of reality television programmes, of competitive efforts of restoration, and the source of national pride. Without the Landmark Trust, which Smith founded in 1965, and his no less significant contribution to the funding of other preservation projects through the Manifold Trust - for ships, museums, libraries and canals and countless other causes - the picture might be very different.

Smith's achievement with the Landmark was not just in saving precious "minor" buildings but in using the trust and its work to re-educate public sensitivity towards architecture - and also towards a wider awareness of the environment.

As a champion of buildings, Smith complemented the work of two other, very different, visionaries. Nikolaus Pevsner had done a matchless survey with his unpretentious "Buildings of England" series of books for Penguin; while John Betjeman used his popularising gifts as writer and broadcaster to bring respectability to once-despised architectural genres. But it was Smith, a generation younger, a financier and serious student of architecture, who saw the need, and found the means, to preserve the less exalted buildings of Britain (of whatever category) and to give people daily experience of living with them. Where Pevsner and Betjeman had been journalist pedagogues, Smith was a more private, practical prophet, with the drive and imagination to realise his dreams.

The idea for the Landmark had come to Smith while he was serving on the executive committee of the National Trust. He was driven, in 1965, to found the trust after trying, and failing, to take a hand in the preservation of a junction house designed by Thomas Telford on the Shropshire Union Canal. From the first, it was his intention to rent Landmark buildings out to people for holidays - in the hope that these holidaymakers might be affected by their stay in an historic building and return home to spread the word in favour of preservation.

The money came from the Manifold Trust, a charity set up by Smith and his wife, Christian, in 1962. The Manifold was the fruit of a meeting at the Royal Exchange Assurance (Smith was deputy governor), where he was struck by one unusual transaction. He spotted that the purchasing of the end of long-term leases could be a fruitful money-making source for a charitable trust. The National Trust turned down the idea, and Smith set up the Manifold to make use of it. For 30 years or more the Manifold produced what he described as a "cataract of gold" for the Landmark and other charitable causes.

Soon the Landmark was taking on five to six properties a year. Forty-one years on, there are 184 Landmarks, including 23 on Lundy Island, four in Italy and four in the United States. They include forts, manor houses, mills, cottages, castles, gatehouses, follies and towers, and range from the austerity of a Martello tower in Suffolk to the exoticism of the Pineapple folly at Dunmore. Some of the properties, including Palladio's Villa Saraceno in the Veneto or Saddell Castle, Strathclyde, are grander than anything Smith imagined saving back in 1965. But the eclecticism of the trust's portfolio is part of its glory.

At the Landmark, great care was taken to establish an approach to restoration where the building was not over "restored", so that the building's spirit was maintained, along with its fabric. In this way, Smith hoped to retain or re-establish half-forgotten building skills. While he was susceptible to the theatre of great set-piece architecture - his favourite interior was Thornhill's magnificent Painted Hall at Greenwich - he generally cared for craft more than aesthetics, for functional rather than assertive architecture.

He and his wife went to great trouble in finding the right furnishings for the Landmarks, and an appropriate library to add to the pleasure of staying in the buildings. The sense of gently achieved authenticity that the Landmark established more than 30 years ago is now the norm for anyone looking to restore a period building in a sensitive way.

John Smith was born in London in 1923 and grew up in Sussex, the eldest son of a banker squire. His parents had reduced their gargantuan Victorian house, Ashfold, from 40 bedrooms to 24. The works there gave the young John his first taste of a building site. He used to frequent the estate carpenters' shop, and became fascinated by tools and materials.

After Eton, he joined the Fleet Air Arm and was a navigator in the divebombing raid on the German battleship Tirpitz in Kvaenangen fjord, Norway, in July 1944 (his Barracuda was holed by flak and was out of petrol as it landed back on its carrier). He was serving in Ceylon when the Second World War ended.

Oxford, where he went up as a 22-year-old, was the place that made John Smith. He never lost his affection for the city. He read History at New College, and was part of a stellar generation that included Tony Benn, Ludovic Kennedy and Teddy Hall, a lifelong friend, the father of carbon dating. There Smith met his future wife, Christian Carnegy, a poet reading English.

Smith's decision to become a director of Coutts Bank in 1950 was a turning point in his life. In making this act of filial piety he gave up long-cogitated plans to become an architect. If he was an architect manqué - and he sometimes lamented that he was - it was surely to the higher good of architecture, not least because his expertise made him an excellent collaborator with some of the finest architects of the post-war era, including Raymond Erith, Francis Pollen and Philip Jebb.

The Smiths were the oldest and grandest of banking families. Their firm had first emerged in Nottingham in 1658. After the First World War, it was merged with the National Provincial Bank. John Smith's father, Eric, became chairman of this merged bank, and Coutts was one of its subsidiary businesses. John Smith thus became the ninth generation, in unbroken succession from father to son, to work in the Smith bank or its successors. There was a Smith Society in the City of London, where the descendants of the founding father - Dorrien Smiths, Abel Smiths and Vivian Smiths - met for tribal gatherings, and John Smith had founded a Smith Society at Oxford University, one of the first societies for dons and undergraduates to dine together.

Smith was just as proud of the forebears of his mother, Helen Williams. She was the granddaughter of Sir George Williams, founder of the YMCA (the largest voluntary body in the world), and great-granddaughter of Thomas Cook, founder of the biggest travel agency in the world.

When Smith established the Landmark Trust he had been a director of Coutts for 15 years, was on the board of Rolls-Royce and the Financial Times, and was on the point of becoming Conservative MP for the Cities of London and Westminster. He and Christian had moved from Sussex to Shottesbrooke, in Berkshire. All the main markers of their life were in place.

The Landmark worked not merely because it was a groundbreaking idea, one that touched a nerve in Britain. It succeeded because of Smith's qualities as a leader and organiser. He had one of the sharpest minds of his generation - a great problem-solving mind - and a wonderful capacity for taking pains. "I have gone to a great deal of trouble," he would say.

An establishment maverick, he was a conservative who continuously questioned motives, judgements and methods - his own and those of the society around him. He did not care for the honours system but was happy to admit his pleasure - he delighted in being contrarian - at being made first a knight and then Companion of Honour. He was High Steward of Maidenhead (an ancient feudal office) and Lord-Lieutenant of Berkshire (a modern royal one) and it amused him that either dignity should have been given to a man called John Smith - a name that signifies Everyman.

Smith was never easy on himself. He had seeing eyes and the bearing and learning of a great Victorian divine, and became a figure of fascination - indeed of near-myth - in both the worlds of finance (he was a regular figure in his prime on the City pages) and the world of historic buildings. (He was known by one friend as "Deity".)

His wit, and he enjoyed jokes and teasing, might be alarming to the slow-witted or uninitiated, but it was coupled with a high courtesy, notably an ability to launch into his interlocutor's deepest interests, and the more eccentric these interests the better. His individuality made him uneasy with the compromises of Parliament (he stepped down as MP after five years) and committee life in general.

He and Christian struck the most elegant figures at the many events they held. Their most spectacular party venue was the Painted Hall at the Royal Naval College, Greenwich, where Smith had eaten his meals as a midshipman, and where a grand dinner was given - the guests arriving by river - to commemorate the 30th anniversary of the Landmark.

But the gathering which best encapsulated John Smith's achievements and concerns was the party for HMS Warrior at her berth in Portsmouth in 1987. Smith's contribution to the preservation of historic ships - notably Brunel's SS Great Britain, brought back to Bristol from the Falkland Islands on an ocean-going barge in 1970, and the wartime cruiser HMS Belfast, moved to her permanent berth on the Thames at Bankside in 1971 - was no less remarkable than that he made to the built environment. And Warrior was his most extraordinary act of maritime rescue.

Launched in 1859, Warrior was the largest, fastest and most formidable warship of her day, the first great ironclad. She was removed from the active list in 1883, and since the 1920s had been at Pembroke Dock, a floating jetty at the Llanion oil depot. In 1979, when the oil depot closed, the Ministry of Defence gave her to the Warrior Preservation Trust (set up by Smith for the purpose) in return for his undertaking to restore her. It was a breathtaking challenge, in terms of research, funding, and craftsmanship. But, after eight years' work at Hartlepool, this hauntingly beautiful ship, restored in every detail, was towed round to Portsmouth - with Smith and two friends as passengers.

Smith was a great traveller, often to unexpected places (Antarctica, twice, and St Helena) or at challenging times (Argentina, Czechoslovakia and Russia soon after the Second World War). If a boat or train was making a final, or unusual, journey, he and his wife would try to be on it.

During these journeys, and throughout his life, Smith kept notes of things that struck or amused him. He saw more than most even of his venturesome generation and, with his discerning eye and sense of history, preserved much that was important from the past.

"Material progress," he wrote in 1998, means that we no longer have to foul our surroundings in order to survive. Indeed it now

seems that we cannot survive if we do. It is those who still preach cheapness at any price who are out of date, while those who preach against waste, whether of buildings or of other resources, are modern. Far from being something restrictive, preservation is now constructive, and creative as well . . . History is part of our environment; so is the way people live, their scale of values, and how they treat each other and the rest of creation.

Louis Jebb