Sir Iain Noble

Sir Iain Noble, 3rd Bt, who has died aged 75, was an idealistic businessman and laird who made it his mission to arrest the decline of Gaelic culture.

Sir Iain Noble Photo: PETER JOLLY

His most notable achievement was to found (on his land on Skye) the Gaelic college of Sabhal Mòr, a thriving institution which has attracted substantial funding. As a result numbers of both students and local residents have risen in a period when depopulation could otherwise have extinguished local communities.

Noble might be described as something of an extremist. He insisted, for example, that his employees spoke Gaelic and favoured positive discrimination for native speakers in the jobs market. In 2003 he highlighted the damage that immigration was doing to Skye: “I don’t have any English blood in my veins, a thing which I am inordinately proud of. Look at all these English people ... buying up all the houses. Who can stop it and how can we do it? Does that mean I must be a racialist? I think I have to confess that I am. It doesn’t mean I don’t like foreigners. I love them, all colours. I have many Indian friends and even one or two black ones. But I don’t want them to settle and create ghettos in my patch of the country. ”

This speech drew indulgent tutting from those who knew Noble and gasps of horror from those who did not. Charles Kennedy, the local MP and then the Liberal Party leader, acknowledged that the remarks “would be found offensive” but pointed out that “Sir Iain is a well-known and colourful character on Skye”. Noble himself appeared to relish the mischief he was making. His less charitable critics pointed out that he “sounded like someone from the Nazi party of the 1930s”.

Iain Andrew Noble was born in Berlin on September 8 1935, the son of the diplomat Sir Andrew Noble, 2nd Bt, and his Norwegian wife. Iain was educated in Shanghai and Buenos Aires before being shipped home to Eton and University College, Oxford, where he was a dedicated member of the Caledonian Club. After National Service he worked for a London stockbroker before joining the Scottish Council for the Development of Industry, where he championed the idea of a road bridge to Skye.

It was in the late 1960s that his star began to rise, largely due to his partnership with a pragmatic young solicitor, Angus Grossart. Determined to see investment channelled through Scottish rather than English boardrooms, the pair decided to establish the merchant bank Noble Grossart.

The bank thrived, but within a few years Noble and Grossart had gone separate ways. Noble had purchased a large swathe of the heavily crofted southern part of the island of Skye, reportedly for a mere £120,000 – a price that reflected the generally-held view that ownership of croftlands was often more burden than prize.
Throwing himself into a host of projects to boost the local economy, he soon established knitting, fish farming, tourism and whisky initiatives in the run-down area. At the core of every enterprise was the unique premise that those who could and would speak Gaelic would be employed in preference to others.
Shuttling between Edinburgh and Skye, Noble still found time to establish more than two dozen companies, in insurance, banking, and shipping. At the core of his success was imagination and flair, and his willingness to take gambles on unfashionable causes, sticking to them with a dogged, sometimes infuriating, determination.
Sabhal Mòr was initially a tiny college, established in 1973 in an old stable block; the courses were not only in the Gaelic language but also in music and crafts. But it soon became associated with Noble’s nearby hotel and pub, which acted as a common room for students who would sip his specially bottled whisky. Initially those students were only a handful. Today there are hundreds.
Iain Noble was appointed OBE in 1988. He died on Christmas Day and is survived by his wife, Lucilla, whom he married in 1990.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/8306881/Sir-Iain-Noble-Bt.html