ObituaryJohnny Noble
Scottish laird whose experiment in oyster farming led to a national chain of restaurants and brought prosperity to a remote communityJohnny Noble, who has died aged 65, was an oyster farmer, fish exporter, wine importer and restaurateur, a laird, and the owner of one of the finest and most welcoming country houses in Scotland. His largest achievement was the prosperity and optimism he brought to his own small community in Argyllshire. Second to that was his provision of good, unfussy food and drink at reasonable prices to tourists and travellers, which is a rare phenomenon in the Highlands and Islands.
In the late 1980s he and his partner, Andrew Lane, founded an oyster bar at Cairndow, at the head of Loch Fyne, which became a beacon for any driver taking the often stormy road from Glasgow to southern Argyll and Kintyre. For many people it is now a destination in itself: the purpose of a trip over the road's summit, the Rest-And-Be-Thankful, and a cheerier venue than, say, the Duke of Argyll's palace further down the road, or eating places where the tartare sauce comes in little packets, and strangers to Scottish cuisine plump for haggis drizzled with rosemary jus .
Highland history is littered with schemes for economic self-sufficiency, intended to prevent the drain of people. Many have failed. Noble's was a very large success. Today there are 16 Loch Fyne fish restaurants throughout Britain (another six will open this year), while around the original and its smokehouse there has grown a museum, cafe, and shops selling plants, food and handicrafts.
These and other enterprises - some owned or part-owned by Noble and others encouraged by him on land he leased - provide about 200 jobs around Cairndow. As Cairndow's population is only 160, there is actually a labour shortage. Workers travel 30 miles from Dunoon to a village that, 25 years ago, faced the common Highland prospect: a settle ment of retired shepherds and second-home owners.
Many aspects of this story are unlikely. The head of Loch Fyne can be a gloomy place. During the 19th century, Cairndow was little more than an inn on the coach road to Inveraray. It was Campbell territory; a branch of that family had an old mansion there and famous people dropped by (Dorothy Wordsworth, Queen Victoria), but most people and freight travelling west from Glasgow took the sea routes to the south. Then, early last century, Noble's great-grandfather, Sir Andrew Noble, bought thousands of acres around Cairndow and commissioned the architect Robert Lorimer ("the Lutyens of Scotland") to demolish the old Campbell house at Ardkinglas and build a great retreat in its place.
Sir Andrew had made the family fortune as the leading partner in William Armstrong's armaments and warship works in Newcastle (its commissions included the Japanese fleet which de feated the Russians in 1905). The new Ardkinglas was completed in 1907, one of the last great country houses and equipped (like Armstrong's Cragside) with electricity and central heating. In their Edwardian heyday, the house and estate gave employment to dozens of servants, shepherds, builders, gardeners, foresters and gamekeepers. Numbers shrank after the second world war, but even when Noble inherited Ardkinglas on his father's death in 1972, the estate was still the mainstay of Cairndow's way of life. Death duties ran at 70% of inheritable value; the easy choices were to sell up or convert Ardkinglas into yet another cavernous Highland hotel. Noble decided that he would somehow make it pay.
Little about his career up to that point suggested this would work. He was born the middle child and only son of John Samuel Brunel (the famous engineer was a distant relation) Noble and Elizabeth Virginia Lucas, whose brother was a founding partner of Warburg's bank. He was educated at a Fife prep school and Eton. His national service was as a second-lieutenant in the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders, where his platoon won the regiment's Scottish country dancing championship and saw Egypt - but no action - in the 1956 Suez campaign.
He flunked Oxford after a year, and did not survive much longer as a junior at Warburg's. He recalled that one day old Mr Warburg asked a colleague, "Vot are zose strange shoes vizzout laces that Johnny is vearing?" to be told they were called "Loafers". Noble would say that it sealed his fate.
After that came the wine trade, ending with the liquidation of his company, French and Foreign Wines, in 1975. He was a member of Boodle's. He was a good shot, and in his cavalier youth made a pair of seal-skin slippers out of a victim which had been eating the salmon, to be upbraided by a tearful family of holidaymakers: "Why have you killed poor Jumbo? He was our friend." He read the Spectator. He never married.
Out of these details anyone who did not know Noble might construct a personality, at home perhaps in the Drones Club. This would be wrong. Noble was neither patronising nor grand, and understood the comedy of everything he superficially represented. He followed Chelsea to cup ties and, later, supported Celtic in the Scottish League. He was a devout Europhile. He played curling. He drove badly. He loved trees; his arboretum contained the highest tree in Britain - when six feet of it snapped from the top, he wondered if he might retain the record by giving it a plastic prosthesis. And he ate in his own restaurant several days every week, haddock and chips or shellfish bisque, anonymous to the coach parties who surrounded him.
He had a gentle manner but a loud whisper, which got him into difficulty. Once, in his restaurant, a woman luncher overheard him discussing another, obnoxious luncher with a member of his staff, and asked that he be removed. Noble left obediently with the words "fair enough".
To spend an hour or two in his company - at a picnic on the shore, or (more likely) speculating from under a waterproof about how much more rain could possibly fall on Ardkinglas - was to be cheered up. His urbanity managed to be both satirical and kind. His work came to mean everything to him.
Likeability and diligence make a formidable combination. The people who worked with him gave him great loyalty. They saw what he was trying to do and helped him to do it. In 1978, when he and Andrew Lane began their first project, their oyster farm, they proceeded by trial and error; in Scotland, they were pioneers. For a time they sold fish and shellfish from a roadside stall. Eventually his firm sold to 20 countries, including Hong Kong and California, and won a Queen's Award for Export.
In recent times, very few Scottish lairds can rest as content as he should. He is survived by his sisters, Sarah and Christina, and their children.
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