The Earl of Airlie obituary

A year into his role as lord chamberlain, the 13th Earl of Airlie asked Queen Elizabeth II, a friend from childhood, whether she would back him if he introduced some significant changes to the management of the royal household.

The answer was an unequivocal “yes”, and so he commissioned Peat Marwick McLintock (later KPMG), the royal auditors, to investigate the running of the “firm”, as Prince Philip called it. The result was a 1,393-page report, completed in 1986, which recommended 188 changes. All of them were approved by Airlie’s employer, who made one small but notable input: “Why,” she asked, “have I got so many footmen?”

As lord chamberlain from 1984 until 1997, Airlie presided over a regime of financial reform and the first substantial reorganisation of the royal household since the early years of Queen Victoria. His strategy ruffled the feathers of the more entrenched courtiers and retainers, but he was backed all the way by the Queen, to whom he could talk with total frankness.

He came to Buckingham Palace in December 1984 after running the merchant bank Schroder Wagg. He found an organisation burdened with outdated practices, symptomatic of which was the reluctance of his predecessor, the popular Lord Maclean, to discuss anything of significance on the telephone — Maclean preferred to commit it to paper and then dispatch the missive to its destination by a liveried footman.

As one official put it: “The lord chamberlain’s office, with all its protocol, was from another world, straight out of the 1920s. People came in at 10am and had dry martinis at noon. But you couldn’t fault them on state occasions, banquets, parades and so on.”

Airlie, a Scottish aristocrat who could trace his ancestry back to the times of the Pictish tribes, and whose family had a history of royal service, blended the dynamism of a successful banker with the attributes of a traditional courtier. He was, colleagues recalled, part-City wizard and part-Highland chieftain.

He shared Maclean’s taste for ceremony and his very first task was to practise walking backwards holding his white staff of office — the lord chamberlain’s role as he precedes the sovereign at great state occasions.

Airlie found that the ceremonial aspect of his duties ran with well-oiled efficiency. He also found little to criticise in the private secretary’s office, which dealt with the Queen’s official engagements and her relationship with the prime minister and the government. In most departments of the palace, however, he detected a general lack of integrated long-term planning, and he decided to get the Queen on side and persuade his colleagues into accepting a corporate style of management.

“He was,” a former official said, “a great hands-on moderniser. He was always popping into one’s office to bounce ideas off you.”

Airlie’s long-term aim was to make the royal household master of its own destiny. Over the years it had been subsumed into the civil service and that, he said, was not a good thing. He told colleagues: “It is the job of the household to provide a strong, independent support and bastion for the sovereign.”

The household then employed more than 400 people and the maintenance of the palaces had been run for years by the environment department. The Queen’s collection of paintings and art treasures lacked staff and funding, and the office of the privy purse was having to cope with the effects of inflation and short-term cash injections, under the wary eye of the Treasury in Whitehall.

Airlie’s reforms transformed the creaky internal management, with resulting cost-effectiveness. The palaces regained control of their own maintenance and the royal collection, which had been run by the lord chamberlain’s department, became independent and profitable, mounting innovative exhibitions and starting social outreach programmes. For the first time in a century it was able to buy new works.

Airlie then started negotiating a new arrangement for the civil list (now the sovereign grant), the method by which the government reimbursed the Queen and other members of the royal family for the cost of carrying out public duties. In 1990 the drip-feed annual review, agreed in the 1970s, was replaced with a ten-year settlement which assumed an annual 7.5 per cent inflation rate. A side-effect was the avoidance of the perennial “Queen gets pay rise” headlines favoured by the popular press. Two years later, government financing of royal expenses was ended for all members of the royal family except the Queen, Prince Philip and the Queen Mother.

The civil list settlement was reached at a time when public and political opinion was out of sympathy with the Queen over her exemption from paying tax on her private fortune. She was expected to challenge any proposals to remove this privilege but in 1993, to the surprise of her advisers, she capitulated after the briefest of discussions. Airlie had prepared the ground by winning over Prince Philip, knowing well that as far as domestic issues were concerned the Queen invariably bowed to his opinion.

In 1992, the year the Queen referred to as her “annus horribilis” after Prince Charles separated from Princess Diana and a devastating fire broke out at Windsor Castle, Airlie helped to persuade the monarch to meet most of the restoration costs herself. Crucially, he also set up the Way Ahead group: this committee of senior members of the royal family and their closest advisers would meet twice a year to discuss the reshaping of the monarchy’s work, to enable it to keep pace with social change.

David George Coke Patrick Ogilvy was born in 1926, the fourth of six children to the 12th Earl of Airlie and his wife, née Lady Alexandra Coke, the daughter of the 3rd Earl of Leicester. Though he would officially become the 13th earl, he was, strictly speaking, the 11th if one observed two 18th-century “attainders” imposed because of the family’s support of the Jacobite rebellions of 1715 and 1745, and only lifted by parliament in 1826. The earldom dated back to 1639.

His grandmother, Mabell, Countess of Airlie, was lady of the bedchamber and confidante of Queen Mary. His father was lord-in-waiting to George V and lord chamberlain to Queen Elizabeth (both as consort to George Vl and as the Queen Mother).

David attended the 1937 coronation of George VI and Queen Elizabeth, at which he served as a young page to his father: he was thought to be the last surviving person to have attended the historic event.

He left Eton early, at 17, to fight in the Second World War with the Scots Guards in Germany, Malaya and Austria, where he became aide-de-camp to the British high commissioner. He resigned his commission in 1950 to study estate management in Cirencester, in preparation to inherit the family’s estates. Lord Ogilvy, as he was known until he succeeded his father as earl in 1968, was touted as an eligible match for Princess Margaret; it was his younger brother, Angus, who would marry the Queen’s cousin, Princess Alexandra.

In 1952 he married Virginia (“Ginny”) Ryan, a 19-year-old heiress from Newport, Rhode Island, and the granddaughter of the Jewish-American financier Otto Kahn. Ryan was the first and only American lady of the bedchamber to the Queen; she also ran a bulb and flower farm on their 69,000-acre estate, where they lived in the 15th-century Cortachy Castle. She survives him along with their six children: Lady Doune Ogilvy; Lady Jane Ogilvy; David Ogilvy, 14th Earl of Airlie; the Hon Bruce Ogilvy; Lady Elizabeth Ogilvy; and the Hon Patrick Ogilvy.

In 1953 he joined J Henry Schroder & Co, where he trained as an investment manager; in 1973 he became chairman of the group’s London bank, Schroder Wagg, where he was a shrewd driver of change. He had decided to switch from “gentleman farmer” to banking, he said, when he found himself in hospital for several months, recovering from a broken back after a riding accident. In 1977 he was promoted to the chairmanship of the parent company, Schroders.

Ten months before his retirement he resigned to assume the role of lord chamberlain, and was said to have taken a considerable cut in salary.

As well as overseeing reforms as head of the royal household, Airlie was an impresario of pageantry who supervised almost every royal function during his tenure, including the Duke of Windsor’s funeral in 1972, the weddings of Princess Anne and the Prince of Wales (now Charles III), the Queen’s Silver Jubilee celebrations and Lord Mountbatten’s funeral.

His final missive on August 31, 1997, was to advise on the Queen’s response to the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, and to chair the funeral planning committee, which meant careful consideration of both royal protocol and the wishes of Diana’s family, the Spencers. In a 2002 interview he made a public apology for Buckingham Palace’s immediate response to her death, including its initial unwillingness to lower the palace standard to half-mast; he acknowledged that the public mood had been misjudged.

Tall, silver-haired and dashing, he was in good company when he was included in the International Hall of Fame’s 1972 list of “the world’s 12 best-dressed men” alongside Mick Jagger, Sidney Poitier and his own brother, Angus. Further accolades came in 1984 when he was appointed GCVO and, in 1985, a Knight of the Order of the Thistle, Scotland's oldest order of chivalry.

Though he would become one of the late Queen’s oldest friends, their relationship had a rocky start: at one of his early birthday parties he was presented with a pedal car, which his father suggested he should invite Princess Elizabeth to have a ride in. He recalled his tantrum: “I said: ‘Certainly not. This is my birthday, this is my car, and nobody else is going to have a ride in it’.”

The 13th Earl of Airlie KT GCVO PC, merchant banker and courtier, was born on May 17, 1926. He died on June 26, 2023, aged 97