Sir Peter Smithers

Smithers had dabbled with gardens on his postings around the world as a wartime naval intelligence officer, MP, Foreign Office minister and diplomat, but pressure of work limited his achievements. When he finally settled, on a magnificent site above Lake Lugano, Smithers, with a landscaper and a gardener, planted 10,000 species and varieties, including 150 types of magnolia, Japanese and deciduous azaleas, rhododendrons, peonies, acers, gardenias and wisterias. He attracted visitors from around the world, and his impressive tally of awards culminated in the Schulthess Prize for the best garden in Switzerland in 2001.

The garden was carefully designed to mature with its owner so that in later years Smithers, wearing his battered floppy hat from Lanvin in Paris, was able to restrict his gardening to his terrace while the rest flourished as a selfsustaining ecosystem, tended only by a part-time gardener.

He also combined his love of gardening with a long-held passion for photography, holding a score of one-man exhibitions in Britain, the US, France and Italy. He won several Royal Horticultural Society awards, including the Gold Medal for photography five times.

Smithers retained an active interest in world affairs, writing regular letters to national newspapers, mostly about the EU, the UN and the war on terror.

Writing to The Times after Hurricane Katrina destroyed much of New Orleans last year, he recalled Washington during Pearl Harbor and the appalling lack of co-ordination among the US authorities and noted “how organs of the US Government still seem to spend more time fighting one another for turf than fighting the enemies of today: terrorists and a dangerously unstable world weather system”.

He considered himself to be a true European, but for him that meant good co-operation between strongly independent states; he was opposed to the euro and believed that the Council of Europe was sufficient and that other institutions were unnecessary. He also believed that Conservative and Labour governments had failed the British electorate by not holding a referendum on the European constitution.

Peter Henry Berry Otway Smithers was born in 1913 in Yorkshire and, because his parents were busy on war duty, was initially brought up by his grandmother and a nanny who was a keen naturalist. He was educated at Harrow and Magdalen College, Oxford, where he was awarded a demyship in History.

He was called to the Bar in 1936 at Inner Temple and later joined Lincoln’s Inn. He spent two years in Chancery Chambers before being commissioned into the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve in 1939. After falling gravely ill with measles while at sea, he was posted to shore duties and served in France, escaping two days before the fall of Paris. He then worked in naval intelligence at the Admiralty where he met Ian Fleming and is believed to have been part of the inspiration for James Bond — a Bank of England official in the 1959 book Goldfinger is called Colonel Smithers.

Shortly before Pearl Harbor, Smithers was posted to the US as the assistant naval attaché. Concern at the number of Allied vessels being sunk in the Yucatán Channel led to Smithers being posted to the British Embassy in Mexico and the British Legation in Panama to monitor U-boat communication with the shore. Smithers had a taste for unusual cars and on arriving in Mexico spotted one similar to his own. At a party soon after, he met its owner, Dojean Sayman, from St Louis, Missouri, and they were married almost immediately.

His effervescent young wife introduced Smithers to her artistic circle, which included Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, Juan Soriano, José Clemente Orozco, Rufino Tamayo and Miguel Covarrubias and the architect Luis Barragán.

After the war, Smithers moved to Itchen Stoke, near Winchester, where his late father had been active in local politics, and was elected to the Winchester Rural District Council, serving for three years. He became a director of a machinery manufacturer set up by his grandfather, Henry Berry, and was a director of the publishers Butterworths. He later recalled his role in ending the firm’s unhappy association with a young Robert Maxwell whose dubious business methods were already evident.

Smithers was selected as Tory parliamentary candidate for Winchester and won the seat back from Labour in the 1950 general election. His maiden speech noted the importance of imports from South America and the West Indies and the following year became chairman of the Tory MPs’ West Indies committee and later became vice-chairman of the Conservative Parliamentary Foreign Affairs Committee. In 1952 he was appointed parliamentary private secretary to the Minister of State for the Colonies and in 1956 succeeded Airey Neave as PPS to Alan Lennox-Boyd, the Secretary of State for the Colonies. He was a delegate on the Consultative Assembly of the Council of Europe in 1952-56 and also in 1960 and was the UK delegate to the UN General Assembly from 1960 to 1962.

Despite his workload, he developed his late father’s garden and also that of his mother, — the latter, next to Winchester Cathedral, had three medieval streams running through it. He also published The Life of Joseph Addison (1954) — the fruits of 12 years of research into the 18th-century essayist.

In July 1962 he was appointed a junior Foreign Office minister, one of 11 backbenchers brought into the Government by Harold Macmillan who had sacked a third of his Cabinet in the reshuffle later dubbed “the Night of the Long Knives”.

In 1964, despite disapproval from the Labour Government, Smithers was appointed Secretary-General of the Council of Europe in Strasbourg. This obliged him to give up his seat in Parliament.

After his term of office, Smithers prepared to return to Britain but a combination of what he saw as a decline in standards in this country and the vetoing by Edward Heath of a proposal by Harold Wilson to give him a life peerage persuaded him to settle in Switzerland.

Smithers was knighted in 1970. As well as working on his garden, he was a senior research fellow for the UN Institute for Training and Research until 1972 and was general rapporteur at the European Conference of Parliamentarians and Scientists in 1970-77.

In 1995 he published a memoir, Adventures of a Gardener (revised as L’Avventura di un giardiniere in 2005). In the same year Smithers and his wife were made honorary citizens of Vico Morcote. He was appointed a Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur in France and awarded the Order of the Aztec Eagle by Mexico. He was awarded the RNVR Officers’ Decoration with clasp.

Smithers was always happy to show visitors around his garden, but would complain of having to spend time with the people he referred to as “empty bottles”. He had an independent mind and while some of his views drew criticism, his advice was widely sought, especially by Margaret Thatcher when she was Prime Minister.

His wife died this year and he is survived by their two daughters and a stepson.

Sir Peter Smithers, MP for Winchester, 1950-64, horticulturist and photographer, was born on December 9, 1913. He died on June 8, 2006, aged 92.