Sir Herbert Samuel Holt (1855-1941)

He was born in Ireland to a once respectable family that had fallen on hard times at Ballycrystal near Geashill, Co. Offaly. He studied agriculture at Glasnevin where he gained a knowledge of civil engineering but did not - as he claimed - attend Trinity College, Dublin. He emigrated to Canada in 1873 with £100 and finding work as an engineer in time he became a pioneer developer of the energy business. In 1901, he merged the Montreal Gas Company with Sir Rodolphe Forget's Royal Electric Company to create the Montreal Light, Heat & Power Company, monopolizing the supply of gas and electricity to Montreal until 1944. Forget was the majority owner and Vice-President of the Montreal Light, Heat & Power Company while Holt was its President. From 1908 to 1934, he was President of the Royal Bank of Canada and served as its Chairman until his death.

He was a director of some 250-companies worldwide and with assets of $200-million he became one of the richest men in Canada and was knighted by King George V in 1915. However, "everyone respected his business ability, but nobody liked him personally". The publisher Floyd Sherman Chalmers visited him two or three times a month, remembering him as: "Tight-fisted with his money, ruthless when opposed, arrogant, impatient with underlings, his crude raw strength was written in every muscle of his face".

His lack of empathy was nowhere more apparent than when he was quoted as saying: "If I am rich and powerful, while you are suffering the stranglehold of poverty and the humiliation of social assistance; if I was able, at the peak of the Depression, to make 150% profits each year, it is foolishness on your part, and as for me, it is the fruit of a wise administration." His merciless outlook saw his attempted assassination in 1932: Walter E.J. Luther was the New York-born Chairman of the Montreal Stock Exchange and a partner in Craig, Luther & Irvine Ltd. that lost a fortune in Holt Securities before Holt instructed the Royal Bank to cease carrying the firm. Luther went to Holt's office and after a fruitless attempt at remonstration, drew a gun and shot him, and believing that he'd killed him - when in fact he'd only grazed Holt - returned to his summer home and took his own life. When a gossip rag in Toronto picked up on the story, it suggested Holt was shot three times and his bodyguard had in fact shot Luther and the suicide was a cover-up.

In 1890, at "Rockmount," Sherbrooke, he married Jessie, the eldest daughter of Andrew Paton, of Sherbrooke, Quebec. They were the parents of three sons (listed) and for the most part lived comparatively modestly in a three-story house at 297 Stanley Street in Montreal. In the early 1930s, they built Ballycrystal/Bally Crystal House, their winter home in the Bahamas on Nassau's Eastern Road overlooking Paradise Island. Holt's niece, Mrs Helena (Holt) de Vere Drummond was the mother-in-law of John Astor M.P.