Robert Hunter (National Trust)

Sir Robert Hunter, KCB (27 October 1844 – 6 November 1913) was a solicitor, civil servant and co-founder of the National Trust.

From the 1860s Hunter was interested in conservation of public open spaces, and worked with other pioneers in this field, including Octavia Hill and Hardwicke Rawnsley. After acting as adviser to Hill in her campaigns to save Hampstead Heath and other open spaces, he worked with Rawnsley to save land in the English Lake District from industrial development. In 1893 the three campaigners agreed to set up a national body to acquire vulnerable properties and preserve them for the nation. At Hunter's suggestion it was entitled "the National Trust for Places of Historic Interest or Natural Beauty", generally known simply as "the National Trust". Hunter was the founding chairman of the trust's executive board.

From 1882 until the year of his death Hunter was solicitor to the General Post Office. His negotiations in that capacity were estimated to have saved the British taxpayer many millions of pounds.

Hunter was born in the south London suburb of Camberwell, the elder child and only son of Robert Lachlan Hunter, a master mariner and shipowner, and his wife, Anne, née Lachlan. He was educated privately until 1861 when he was admitted to University College, London. In the same year his family left London for Dorking, which was his first contact with the commons and hills of Surrey which he would come to love in later life.

Hunter was awarded a first-class degree in logic and moral philosophy in 1863. At his father's suggestion he took up a post as an articled clerk in a firm of solicitors in London. Finding the work uninteresting he read for a Master's degree in his spare time.

In 1866 the philanthropist and politician Henry Peek ran a contest offering prizes of £400 for essays on the best means of preserving common land for the public. Hunter's entry, "The Preservation of Commons in the Neighbourbood of the Metropolis", was one of six winning essays. He traced the history and legal standing of the rights of common: "substantial privileges which were maintainable at law. Though a person claiming common of pasture in another's soil had no interest in that soil, yet he had a certain right over it, and could prevent by legal process any dealings with it which would prejudice this right." This principle, Hunter maintained, had been extended from old grazing rights to a modern requirement that common land should not be enclosed without due regard for "the health, comfort and convenience of the inhabitants" of nearby urban areas.

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