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Sir Henry Beresford-Peirse Bt
Late Scots Guards
by Keith Millar
formerly Scots Guards
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 After his prep school’s wartime evacuation to Blair Castle, followed by Eton, Henry joined Sgt Ferguson’s Brigade Squad in October 1951 for his National Service. It was a cold winter and the Trained Soldier made a lasting impression with his speed in lighting a camp stove with, in Henry’s words, coke broken into lumps ‘no bigger than a pigeon’s bollock’.
The Brigade Squad was commanded by Capt (later Gen Sir Michael) Gow, a tall, alarming and impeccable figure with an impressive moustache. When summoned to Company Orders for some very minor misdemeanour, barely visible dust on a mess tin, one was subjected to an eloquent reprimand emphasising the danger to the Army along the lines of ‘for want of a nail a shoe was lost, etc’. The Guards Depot was followed by Pirbright and Eaton Hall in the equally cold second half of the winter early in 1952.
After receiving his commission, Henry served for a few months back in Pirbright, then joined the 2nd Battalion at Windsor from where he lined the Mall on Coronation Day, and for the last three months moved with the Battalion to Gort Barracks, near Dusseldorf. He commanded a platoon in Left Flank with an easy air of authority; he was very popular with his men, and when he left the Regiment in October 1953, his platoon presented him with a tankard, an unusual recognition for a National Serviceman!
After the Army, Henry went to the Ontario Agricultural College for two years, and then joined an investment firm, Cochran Murray and Hay in Toronto. ‘No one in Canada is called Henry’, said his first Senior Partner, ‘from now on, you are Hank here’, and so he remained to many of his early friends for the rest of his life. He spent seven years in Canada before returning to London eventually to join the Fiduciary Trust Company of New York, an old and much respected firm of Investment Managers. He became the senior director in London and specialised in the Tokyo stockmarket.
Henry succeeded his father as 6th Baronet in 1972, and retired from the City in 1991, coincidently with the peak of the Japanese stockmarket, to run his family’s estate in Bedale, North Yorkshire, where he spent much of his time for the next twenty years. He was passionate about his trees, as befitted the son of a former Chairman of the Forestry Commission.
Throughout his life, Henry had a quiet and very infectious charm, which made an immediate impact, and he collected a very large circle of friends. He died suddenly, after a short illness in January, 2013.
He and his wife, Jadranka, to whom he was devoted for forty-seven years, founded the International Trust for Croatian Monuments in 1991, when so much of Croatia’s cultural heritage had been destroyed. Jadranka is now organising a concert in Henry’s memory and in aid of the Trust, on Tuesday, 9th June 2015, to be held at Holy Trinity, Sloane Square. See Notices for further information. |
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