Richard Gibson, Baron Gibson

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Richard Patrick Tallentyre Gibson, Baron Gibson (February 5, 1916 – April 20, 2004) was a British businessman and administrator.

Educated at Eton and Magdalen College, Oxford he served in the Second World War where he managed to escape from a POW camp following capture in Italy in 1943. Gibson then served with Special Operations Executive and the Foreign Office.

In 1945 he married Dione Pearson a member of the Pearson PLC dynasty. Gibson rose rapidly up the family business consolidating and expanding it media interests eventually to become Chairman.

From 1972 to 1977 he served as Chair of the Arts Council of Great Britain. During this period the Council was under pressure due to government wide spending cuts and reduced corporate patronage with the economic down turn. As Chair Gibson argued against the imposition of admission fees for public museums and galleries (a measure that in the end was only briefly and partially in place) and defended the Council’s more controversial funding decisions against charges of elitism. From 1977 to 1986 he was Chairman of the National Trust a position in which he had personal interest as the owner of Penns in the Rocks, his estate in Sussex.

In 1975 he was made a life peer as Baron Gibson, of Penn's Rocks in the County of East Sussex.