Lord Aberconway, 89; Shipbuilder Met With Goering in Secret on Eve of War

Lord Aberconway, a shipbuilding magnate who secretly met with Adolf Hitler’s aide Hermann Goering weeks before the German invasion of Poland, has died. He was 89.

Aberconway died Tuesday in a London hospital, his family said. They did not give the cause.

Aberconway, born Charles Melville McLaren, kept details of his participation in a 1939 meeting with Goering secret for 60 years, revealing it only to historian Andrew Roberts in 1999.

Twenty-six at the time of the meeting, and the head of the shipbuilding firm John Brown & Co., Aberconway was invited to join six other British industrialists planning to meet Goering on the island of Sylt off the German coast.

Details about the meeting, which was approved by then-Foreign Secretary Lord Halifax, stirred controversy when they became public in papers Aberconway gave to Roberts.

Roberts said documents indicated that the delegation had raised the possibility that Britain would offer Germany some concessions on Poland if the Nazis agreed not to invade.

Critics called the supposed offer appeasement and said it encouraged Hitler to send his troops into Poland by leading him to believe Britain was unlikely to oppose him.

Aberconway dismissed that interpretation and said that the industrialists had relayed to Goering the official British policy that a German invasion of Poland would lead to war.

“We were there to make absolutely clear to Goering that Britain was prepared to fight for Poland,” he said.

Aberconway, who served in the Royal Artillery during World War II, inherited his title and the chairmanship of the shipbuilding giant John Brown and the mining company English China Clays when his father died in 1953.

Under his leadership, John Brown built the Queen Elizabeth II, its last ocean liner.

The company lost money constructing the vessel and struggled as British shipbuilding hit hard times in the 1960s.

Trafalgar House bought the firm in 1986.

Aberconway, who attended the prestigious Eton school and Oxford University, was well-known for his passion for gardening, and headed the Royal Horticultural Society from 1961 to 1984.

Gardeners came to expect him to pronounce annually that that year’s Chelsea Flower Show in London was the best ever.

He married Deirdre Knewstub in 1941. The couple had a son and two daughters before their marriage was dissolved in 1949. Aberconway married Ann Bullard shortly after, and the two had a son.

He is survived by his wife, four children and a stepdaughter.