Albemarle Bowes Lyon, veteran Coutts banker and favourite nephew of the Queen Mother – obituary
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Albemarle Bowes Lyon, who has died aged 83, was a long-serving director of Coutts & Co, the private bankers to the Royal family, and a favourite nephew of Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother.
“Alby” Bowes Lyon was recruited into Coutts in 1963 by its chairman, Sir Seymour Egerton, and joined the board in 1969, when it still operated in the mode of earlier days, with directors in black frock coats sharing an open office and dealing collectively with all aspects of business in fixed daily routines. But change followed the merger of Coutts’ parent National Provincial with Westminster Bank to form NatWest, and the arrival of the consultants McKinsey & Co to introduce a structure of divisional roles for individual directors.
This was, a colleague recalled, “a snag so far as Alby was concerned”, there being no specific job for him until older men retired. But he ventured on secondment to Germany before finding an ideal niche for his talents in the bank’s French department, with a wider brief attracting and looking after European customers, many of whom became personal friends.
Coutts’ historian, Edna Healey, recorded that in Bowes Lyon’s era – he retired in 1993 – the bank’s directors included two other cousins of the then Queen, the Marquess of Cambridge and Earl Granville: “All took their duties seriously for, as contemporaries frequently remarked, there was no room… for those who did not work their passage.” At the same time, his colleague also observed, “it seems to me that Alby really enjoyed himself.”
Michael Albemarle Bowes Lyon was born on May 29 1940, the second son of Michael Bowes Lyon and his wife Elizabeth, née Cator. Alby’s father Michael – a Royal Scots officer whose health never recovered from being a PoW during the First World War – was the eighth of 10 children (the future Queen Mother being the ninth) of the 14th Earl of Strathmore and Kinghorn.
Their surname records an 18th-century marriage alliance between two landed dynasties, Lyon of Forfar (twice descended from Robert the Bruce) and Bowes of Co Durham. By a complex succession, Alby’s elder brother Fergus inherited as 17th Earl in 1972; their twin sisters became Lady Mary Colman (wife of the Garter knight Sir Timothy) and Lady Patricia Tetley.
Though his childhood home was at Biggleswade, much of Alby’s early life was spent at Glamis Castle, the family seat which had a special place in his heart. He was a page to Princess Margaret at the coronation in 1953, the year he went to Eton, where he described himself as a “middle of the roader”. He read French and German at Magdalen College, Oxford, with an interlude in Vienna which fuelled lifelong enthusiasms for opera and European history.
Loved for his gentle demeanour and lively sense of humour, Bowes Lyon was a regular guest of his aunt at Royal Lodge in Windsor Great Park and Birkhall on the Balmoral estate. In later life he travelled tirelessly to explore historical sites, shoot game and watch opera, especially Wagner and Richard Strauss, often combining all three passions with visits to former clients.
He was generous in support of a range of charities and maintained a strong Christian faith with a preference for the Book of Common Prayer, often attending Holy Communion at St Martin-in-the-Fields, close to his Whitehall flat.
In his mid-thirties, Alby Bowes Lyon told the Coutts staff magazine: “I may be a bachelor now, but I certainly don’t intend to remain so.” In fact he did, while devoting himself to wider family life as a favourite uncle and cousin, constantly in touch and always interested in the lives of the young. Pipers played for his burial at Glamis.
Albemarle Bowes Lyon, born May 29 1940, died October 30 2023
