History of the Stewarts | Famous Stewarts
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Stewart was born in London in 1935. His parents instilled in him a belief in public service. His father was a professor of pharmacology at London University, and came from a family of entrepreneurs and politicians, including a Liberal MP.From the age of six Ian was already collecting antique coins, and this became a lifelong passion. Stewart attended Haileybury College, then got a first class honours degree at Jesus College, Cambridge. After national service in the RNVR, he joined the City merchant bank of Brown Shipley in 1960, becoming a director from 1971-83. He then became MP for Hitchin, and then from 1983-92 was member for North Hertfordshire.
After a short spell as under-secretary of state for defence procurement he returned to the Treasury to serve as economic secretary under Nigel Lawson between 1983 and 1987. Remarkably, even as a minister he made time to write articles for learned journals on, inevitably, numismatics. The British Academy recognised his scholarship and elected him a Fellow in 1981.
In the 1987 parliament he had short spells as armed forces minister and as security minister in the Northern Ireland office. His ministerial retirement was prompted by a back injury in early 1989. In 1992 he left the Commons, and was created a life peer taking the title of Baron Stewartby of Portmoak in the district of Perth and Kinross. Out of ministerial office he resumed his financial interests, becoming chairman of Throgmorton Trust, and then deputy chairman of Standard Chartered Bank.
Family mattered greatly to Stewart. In 1966 he married Deborah Buchan. They first met when she was a secretary at Brown, Shipley, and were engaged nine days later. She was a granddaughter of John Buchan, Lord Tweedsmuir, a politician who was better known as the author of The Thirty Nine Steps. They had three children: Henry is a corporate financier and, before becoming full-time mothers, Lydia worked in financial press relations and Louisa as a headhunter. Buchan’s mother’s house in Broughton, near Peebles, was, latterly, the family home.
The house in Broughton was the scene for a disaster that shook Stewartby. In 2007 thieves stole more than 1,000 of his Scottish coins, some dating from the 12th and 13th centuries, and the finest private collection of Scottish coins put together. Among those stolen were the first Scottish coins to be minted. The theft and the frustration of his ambition to catalogue his entire collection affected him deeply, but he rallied to publish English Coins 1180-1551 in 2009. Last year he gifted his collection to the Hunterian Museum in the University of Glasgow. Donal Bateson, the curator of coins and medals at The Hunterian, described Lord Stewartby as the doyen of Scottish numismatics. "He will be much missed in the realm of collecting and research on the coinage of this country," Mr Bateson told The Herald. "It was a surprise and delight when he and Lady Stewartby visited The Hunterian and proposed to gift his Scottish coins to the university: the number, range, depth and quality exceeded our expectations.”
Stewartby had a long involvement with The Stewart Society, as a member since 1952. He was an Honorary Vice President and had served as Vice -President and President of the Society and for many years sat on the Council of the Society.
His final years were sadly marred by a long and debilitating illness that he bore with fortitude. Perhaps his greatest achievement had been managing to keep his different interests, family, politics, banking and coins, in balance.
Lord Stewartby, politician and numismatist, was born August 10, 1935. He Lord Stewartby, politician and numismatist, was born August 10, 1935. He died after a long illness on March 3, 2018, aged 82
