Robert Henry Benson

Artist Info

Robert Henry BensonManchester, England, 1850 - 1929, London

Benson, Robert Henry [Robin] (1850–1929), merchant banker and art collector, was born on 24 September 1850 at Fairfield House, Fairfield, near Manchester, the eldest of three children of Robert Benson (1814–1875), merchant banker, and his wife, Eleanor (1824–1883), daughter of Vice-Admiral Constantine Moorsom. He was educated at Eton College and at Balliol College, Oxford, where he was a notable athlete and gained a blue.

In January 1873 Benson was admitted to the Inner Temple to read for the bar, but before starting pupillage he was sent by his father to Boston in October 1874 to learn about the family firm's American business, in the aftermath of the financial crash of 1873. The sudden death of his father brought him home and on 19 January 1875 he and his younger brother Constantine became partners in the City mercantile and banking firm of Robert Benson & Co. They soon discovered that the firm was in no position to withstand the losses incurred by the financial failure of several major creditors, its precarious condition having been masked by lapses in accounting procedures. On 16 June 1875 the firm's failure was announced, leaving Robin and his brother with little of their once substantial inheritance.

Although the Bensons had left the Society of Friends in 1836, it was with the help of old Quaker connections that in the autumn of 1875 Robin Benson was able to enter into a partnership with the banker John Cross (who was briefly married to the novelist George Eliot at the end of her life). The new firm of Cross, Benson & Co. subsequently engaged in the business of investment, principally in American securities for private clients. Benson proceeded to build up a sound, profitable, niche business in financing railways in the American west, and he amassed a large personal fortune through identifying Chicago and the mid-west as a growth area; at that time, during the depression after the 1873 crash, the City viewed ‘Yankee’ rail stocks with suspicion and Benson thus bought cheaply before renewed demand in 1879 caused prices to surge higher. He also invested in mid-western railroad and land development companies through his brother, who was based in St Paul. Cross retired in 1883, when the firm became Robert Henry Benson & Co.; it reverted to Robert Benson & Co. in the following year.

Robin Benson had a forging role in the creation of the investment trust industry through two friends, Robert Fleming and Alexander Henderson, later Lord Faringdon; they sat on the boards of each other's trusts and unofficially acted together to invest in railways in the United States and South America. In 1889 Benson founded the Merchants' Trust which, with a capital of £2 million, largely concentrated on American railway investments, though it also invested in southern African ones. His involvement in the financing of southern African railways and mining development increased when, after the Jameson raid, his brother-in-law Albert Grey, later fourth Earl Grey, was appointed administrator of Rhodesia and replaced Cecil Rhodes as chairman of the chartered British South Africa Company. Benson knew Cecil Rhodes and, concerned about the potential for an abuse of power, was instrumental in the separation of the concessionary and financial functions of the chartered company. Robert Benson & Co. managed the £1 million flotation to form the Charter Trust and Agency Company, which managed the financial side of the business and of which Robin Benson was a director. He sat on many other boards, including those of several infant electricity companies, as the finance of technological innovation in electrical power and machinery attracted his interest, and he was also chairman of the Anglo-American Telegraph Company.

On 7 July 1887, Benson married Evelyn Mary (1856–1943), daughter of Robert Stayner Holford (1808–1892), MP and art collector, of Westonbirt, Gloucestershire, and Dorchester House, and they had three sons and two daughters. After his marriage he devoted increasingly more time to interests not directly concerned with banking. The foremost of these was his collection of Italian pictures, which was of outstanding importance. Benson had begun to collect works of art before his marriage under the guidance of William Graham, a noted collector, and his earliest Italian acquisitions were in 1884 with the purchase from the dealer Martin Colnaghi of Portrait of a Collector by Mario Basaiti, Madonna and Child, attributed to Mainardi, and A Triumphal Procession with Prisoners by Andrea Schiavone. From this modest beginning the collection built up by Benson and his wife grew into one that David Lindsay, twenty-seventh earl of Crawford and earl of Balcarres, himself a discerning collector, called the finest personal and the finest specialized collection he had come across. Confined to pictures from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, it included four panels by Duccio di Buoninsegna, as well as works of old masters ranging from Bellini, Giorgione, and Botticelli to Correggio, Titian, and Veronese.

During the First World War, the bank's business was reduced to a holding operation. This meant that Benson was able to write about economic policy, preparing for Arthur Balfour A Résumé of War Finance (1916); he also pondered business conditions after the war and published a booklet in 1918 advocating the creation of a central bank to ‘do for the lock-up capital in Government Securities what the Bank of England does for the Bill Market’ (Benson, 47). After the war he realized that his firm could only survive with increased capitalization. In 1924, therefore, Benson brought his three sons into the partnership and recapitalized the firm by consigning a major portion of his early Chinese porcelain and pottery collection for sale at Christies in July 1924. He converted the partnership into a limited company in 1926, but on the death of his brother-in-law Sir George Holford, long a sleeping partner in the firm, the large Holford share of the firm's capital had to be realized by his estate. Benson nevertheless replenished the shortfall in the capital—but only through the sale of his picture collection. Joseph Duveen had long coveted the collection and it was sold to him en bloc for $4 million in 1927. Robin Benson left a permanent record of the Italian collection in his illustrated Catalogue of Italian Pictures Collected by Robert and Evelyn Benson (1914), as he did for another family collection sold in 1926, The Holford Collection at Westonbirt (1924) and The Holford Collection, Dorchester House (1927). The pictures later found a home in major galleries throughout the world.

Benson had long been active in public life, serving as a trustee of the National Gallery from 1912 and also as a trustee of the Tate Gallery. He was a member of the council of the Victoria and Albert Museum and joined the executive committee of the National Art Collections Fund in 1903, the year of its foundation, and became treasurer in 1906, the year he was actively engaged in saving Velázquez's Rokeby Venus for the nation. He was also one of the pillars of the Burlington Fine Arts Club, contributing largely to its periodical exhibitions, and he wrote the introduction to the 1893 exhibition, ‘Luca Signorelli and his school’. He frequently lent pictures of his own and, through his brother-in-law, from the Holford collection, to exhibitions at the major galleries.

During Benson's later years he neglected the City for the attractions of family life. He rented Buckhurst Park, Withyham, Sussex, from Lord De La Warr for twenty-four years and considerably improved it entirely at his own expense. The only sign that he remembered the financial difficulties of his youth was that he wished his capital to remain liquid and not tied up in maintaining an estate—a sensible approach during a time of agricultural depression. He was musical, and as a patron of the Royal College of Music he would arrange for a college quartet to play at Buckhurst house parties and invite his guests to sing and play in what one called ‘a real orgy of music’. He was an affectionate father, delighting in the company of his five children and keen to do all he could for them.

A slim, dark-haired man of middle height with a neat, fine beard, he was good-looking and possessed of a quiet charm that could have enabled him to slide effortlessly through life if he had been less conscientious and intellectually agile. He carried his learning lightly and was full of enthusiasm about books, ideas, art, rose champagne, and philosophical debate. He was tolerant in his judgement of others, incapable of malice, but hated meanness. During a visit to Paris he bought an expensive present and was furious to be charged extra for the string required to tie the parcel.

Benson died of a paralytic stroke on 8 April 1929 at his London home, Walpole House, on Chiswick Mall, and was buried in the churchyard at Westonbirt, Gloucestershire. The firm suffered very badly from the Wall Street crash and the onset of the depression, but Benson's three sons, including Sir Reginald Lindsay (Rex) Benson, played a key role in its subsequent recovery.

Jehanne Wake

Sources

J. Wake, Kleinwort Benson: a history of two families in banking (1997) [incl. C. Sebag-Montefiore, ‘R. H. Benson as a collector’, 480–87] · R. H. Benson, State credit and banking (1918) · private information (2004) · b. cert. · d. cert. · CGPLA Eng. & Wales (1929)