US Edition The 3rd Lord Aberconway, who has died aged 89, was the last surviving member of a group of British businessmen who held secret meetings with Reichsmarschall Hermann Goering in a last-ditch attempt to avert war; later he served for 23 years as president of the Royal Horticultural Society.
For 60 years, Aberconway kept his counsel about his visit to Germany in August 1939; then, in 1999, he decided to release a collection of documents which, some historians maintained, threw a new light on the Chamberlain government's willingness to appease Hitler.
In 1939, following the German invasion of Czechoslovakia, Goering approached Birger Dalherus, a Swedish civil engineer of his acquaintance then working in London. Goering wanted Dalherus to act as a neutral go-between through whom he (Goering) could make unofficial contact with the British government.
One of Dalherus's business contacts was Charles F Spencer, a prominent Conservative and a director of the Clydeside shipbuilders John Brown - of which Aberconway (then the Hon Charles McLaren) was also a director. With the private blessing of Hitler and the British Foreign Secretary Lord Halifax, a meeting between Goering and his advisers and a group of seven British businessmen, was subsequently arranged in a large farmhouse on the German Baltic island of Sylt.
Before Aberconway told his story, historians had assumed that Halifax had encouraged the meeting because he hoped to impress the Nazi leadership with Britain's determination to fight in the event of a German invasion of Poland. But the Aberconway documents led some, notably the historian Andrew Roberts, to question that analysis.
During three days of talks, the businessmen dutifully repeated the official British line that the guarantee to Poland still stood; yet they seemed to have gone beyond that stance in suggesting that Germany could obtain "financial and industrial prosperity and the lebensraum she had been seeking", if only she did not actually invade Poland. This could be effected, it was suggested, through a new four-power conference, attended by Chamberlain, Hitler, Mussolini and the French Prime Minister Edouard Daladier, with the status of the Polish port of Danzig and the disputed Polish Corridor at the top of the agenda.
Although the group emphasised that they were speaking for themselves, and not for the British government, it seems possible that, albeit with the best of intentions, they may have encouraged the Nazi leadership in its view that Britain did not have the stomach for a fight. Three weeks later, the Blitzkreig on Poland began.
Aberconway never accepted that he and his colleagues were wrong to go to Germany, and rejected any implication that there had been some kind of clandestine plot to betray Poland. "We were there to make absolutely clear to Goering that Britain was prepared to fight for Poland. The Government felt this message was not getting through," he said.
Not all Aberconway's contemporaries seemed to be convinced, however. At a reception after the war, the Liberal politician Lady Violet Bonham-Carter met Aberconway, whom she knew. "I heard you went and met Goering just before the war," she said. When he replied that he had gone with the approval of the Foreign Office, she interrupted him: "Charles, how could you!" They never spoke again.
Charles Melville McLaren, the eldest son of the second Lord Aberconway, was born on April 16 1913. The title had been granted in 1911 to his grandfather, a prominent Liberal MP and chairman of John Brown and Co, who, by virtue of his marriage to a rich heiress, Laura Pochin, had inherited the Bodnant estate in north Wales with its magnificent gardens.
After Eton, where he was Captain of Oppidans, Charles went up to New College, Oxford, to read PPE. He was called to the Bar at the Middle Temple in 1937 but never practised, instead following his father into business.
He became a director of John Brown in May 1939 and, after the war, in which he served in the Royal Artillery, he succeeded his father as Lord Aberconway in 1953, and also took over the family industrial interests as chairman of English China Clays and of John Brown, the Clydeside firm that had built the ocean liners Queen Mary and Queen Elizabeth, and the royal yacht Britannia.
Aberconway was a good chairman who showed loyalty to his workforce, and always studied his brief and consulted his fellow directors before taking a decision. He was, though, unfortunate that his years at the helm coincided with a crisis in shipbuilding and, despite his best efforts, he had to witness the closure of the shipyard. Although he was successful in his bid to build the QE2, mounting costs and a shortage of skilled labour turned the contract into a loss-maker which probably hastened the yard's demise.
Aberconway also inherited the family passion for horticulture. His father had given the 100-acre gardens at Bodnant to the nation in 1949, but Aberconway continued to direct their upkeep for the National Trust and lived in the house. In 1974 he added to his father's endowment with a gift of £131,000.
Aberconway won many Royal Horticultural Society prizes for his camellias and rhododendrons, on which he was an authority. He became a member of the RHS council in 1958, and president in 1961. For the next two decades, he dominated the annual Chelsea Flower Show, imposing his purist standards on exhibitors and marshalling visitors in a new one-way circulatory system in the great marquee. He became famous for his annual dictum: "I think I can say, without fear of contradiction, that this is the finest Chelsea Flower Show ever," or words to that effect. He was usually right.
After retirement as RHS chairman, he was made president emeritus of the society, and subsequently served as commissioner-general of the 1984 International Garden Festival at Liverpool, and director of the national garden festival at Stoke-on-Trent in 1986.
He married, in 1941, Deirdre Knewstub, with whom he had a son and two daughters. The marriage was dissolved, and he married secondly, in 1949, Ann Bullard, with whom he had a son.
Lord Aberconway died on February 4. He is succeeded by his eldest son, Henry Charles McLaren, born in 1948.