Billionaire Smoker - How could you be more content?

Anton Rupert, who has died aged 89, was one of South Africa's most eminent industrialists and philanthropists; in classic rags-to-riches fashion, he started with a £10 investment which he eventually transformed into an multi-million pound international financial conglomerate.

During the apartheid era, Rupert developed a business empire based on tobacco, liquor and luxury goods which extended to 35 countries and was worth some $10 billion. He was listed in Forbes magazine as among the 500 richest men in the world.

A courteous, quietly-spoken Afrikaner, Rupert was a passionate conservationist, becoming a founder of the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) and promoting the concept of trans-frontier reserves - called "peace parks" - under which some of southern Africa's largest national parks are being amalgamated across national boundaries. He also co-operated with former president Nelson Mandela and his successor, Thabo Mbeki, in shaping South Africa's black empowerment policy, under which the country's businesses, great and small, are being opened up to encourage black entrepreneurship and active participation in the economy.

Anton Edward Rupert was born at the Karoo town of Graff-Reinet on October 4 1916. He helped to pay his way through the University of Pretoria by starting a dry-cleaning business, which soon went bankrupt. It was to be his worst, and most salutary, business failure. After completing his masters degree in Chemistry he tinkered with hand-rolling cigarettes in a garage at his home.
Calculating that there would always be a great demand for tobacco, regardless of what happened in the world, he developed a cigarette-making company named Voorbrand, soon to be renamed Rembrandt Ltd, whose overseas tobacco interests were eventually consolidated in Rothmans. He made his first investment in liquor in 1945, running the Distillers Corporation which did much to lift the status of South African wines internationally.

Using his flair for marketing, Rupert soon acquired interests in an array of South African companies ranging from gold mining to banking and medical supply interests, demonstrating a shrewdness that belied his modest, self-effacing demeanour. As South Africa became increasingly isolated because of its apartheid policies, Rupert moved his major interests, including Rothmans, offshore by establishing the Luxembourg-listed Richemont company. He anticipated the growing aversion from tobacco products and, through Richemont, diversified into luxury goods with Cartier, Montblanc and Dunhill.

Rupert's own aversion from his country's apartheid policies was expressed quietly but forcefully. He did not get on well with Dr Hendrik Verwoerd, regarded as the founder of apartheid, which Rupert considered a misguided vision of South Africa's future. In the 1980s he publicly urged the government of PW Botha to "get rid of the dead, stinking albatross of apartheid".

He maintained steady behind-the-scenes pressure on successive white South African governments to look for an alternative policy that would involve partnership with the black majority. This contributed greatly to the eventual release of Nelson Mandela, free and fair elections and the advent of majority government. Partnership had been the cornerstone of his business philosophy, and he saw no reason why it could not apply to politics.

Rupert retired from the active day-to-day running of his empire in 1990, handing over the reins to his son, Johan. He continued with lively participation and sponsorship of his many other interests in the arts and in conservation.

He remained a moderate cigarette smoker until the end, believing that he had to demonstrate some loyalty to the product on which his fortune had been based.

Doctors said that he never fully recovered from the loss of his wife, Huberte, who died aged 86 in October last year after 60 years of marriage. Anton Rupert died at his home in Stellenbosch on January 18. He is survived by a son and a daughter.

B W Robinson - Scholar of Persian miniature painting, Japanese swords and Catches

B W Robinson, who died on December 29 aged 93, formulated the bases for the classification and chronology of Persian miniature painting upon which scholars continue to depend; he was also a world authority on both the arts of the Japanese sword and the work of the celebrated 19th-century print maker Utagawa Kuniyoshi.

"Robbie" to his friends, BW Robinson to his readers, he was Keeper of the Department of Metalwork at the Victoria and Albert Museum from 1966 until his retirement in 1972. He then spent four years as Keeper Emeritus, helping to establish the museum's Far Eastern Department. Robinson had joined the V&A's staff in 1939, and throughout his working life there - with a break for war service - he consistently combined a powerful intellectual range with a structured routine of careful study and regular publication. This enabled him to build up the most impressive knowledge and expertise in fields well outside the immediate area of his day-to-day professional concerns, as well as within.

Many of Robinson's publications and in particular his important catalogues of Persian miniatures and manuscript illuminations in public collections - including those in the Bodleian, Chester Beatty, India Office, and John Rylands libraries published between 1958 and 1980 - are, and will long remain, essential points of reference for the serious scholar.

Equally, A Primer of Japanese Sword-blades (1955), The Arts of the Japanese Sword (1961) and Kuniyoshi (1961) have all come to be considered indispensable items in the library of any museum curator or collector in those fields. Robinson's book Kuniyoshi: the Warrior Prints (1982) won the Uchiyama Memorial Prize of the Japan Ukiyoe Society.

The great success of the V&A's loan exhibition Persian Miniature Painting from Collections in the British Isles (1967) - later described by the Museum's Director, John Pope-Hennessy, as "one of the most sensitive and sheerly beautiful exhibitions that had ever been held in the museum" - was due entirely to Robinson's sure connoisseurship and skill. He also provided the inspiration for the museum's Kuniyoshi centenary exhibition in 1961 which, commentators agreed, firmly established that artist's reputation as the last great master of the Japanese colour-print.

Basil William Robinson was born in London on June 20 1912, the only child of William Robinson and his wife Mabel (née Gilbanks). The family lived in Stanhope Gardens and on wet afternoons young Robbie (he never liked the name Basil) would be taken to the museums at South Kensington, where his fascination with eastern art began. The Arms and Armour and Oriental collections at the V&A became firm favourites, and it was there that Robbie first saw and fell in love with Persian miniatures - starting with a Layla and Majnun manuscript of Qasimi, left open in the display case at a miniature showing Majnun in the wilderness.

His enthusiasm showed no signs of abating, and once he had become familiar with the V&A's limited Persian manuscript holdings, his mother began to take him to the British Museum. There Dr Lionel Barnett once showed them the delightful Shahnama (Book of Kings) of 1486.
Mabel Robinson also took her young son to call on the secretary of the Royal Asiatic Society, Miss Ella Sykes, who thereafter sent Robbie a book every Christmas. One of them - A Persian Caravan, by A Cecil Edwards - he would continue to re-read, with great enjoyment, for the rest of his life.

By the time he went to Winchester as an exhibitioner in 1926, Robinson had already accumulated, by way of birthday and Christmas presents, a small library of books about Persia and Persian art, including histories of the country by Sir John Malcolm and Sir Percy Sykes (Ella's brother), and Ernst Kühnel's Miniaturmalerei im islamischen Orient (minus one or two illustrations his father considered unsuitable). By the time he left school, he had acquired all nine volumes of the Warners' translation of the Shahnama, as well as Sir Thomas Arnold's Painting in Islam - the latter bought with some of the £5 he received for winning the Kenneth Freeman Prize with a paper on Greek sculpture. In the spring of 1931, during Robinson's last year at Winchester, the great International Exhibition of Persian Art opened at Burlington House. Robinson attended the exhibition on several occasions, once as guide to his housemaster, and at other times with Miss Ella or Sir Percy Sykes. On one embarrassing occasion, Robinson recalled, "Sir Percy gave a running commentary on the exhibits in a loud voice, with the result that, although his remarks were addressed directly to me, we soon found ourselves followed by a growing crowd which must have numbered 20 or 30 by the end. As we left the exhibition he said to me: 'I wanted to give these people the benefit of my knowledge and experience.' "

From Winchester, Robinson went up to Corpus Christi College, Oxford, where what he later described as "an excess of extra-curricular activities" - such as drawing cartoons for Isis and playing the guitar in the University jazz band - led to his securing only a Third in Greats.
He nevertheless persuaded the university authorities to allow him to stay on for a further year to write a BLitt thesis on the collection of Persian miniatures in the Bodleian Library. This was to form the basis of the comprehensive catalogue he would later produce.

Oxford was followed by a short spell as a prep school master at Bognor, and then the offer of a place at the V&A. Having always wanted a museum post, he accepted at once, and took up his duties in January 1939. After a few months in the library, where his first job was to re-catalogue the small collection of Persian manuscripts, Robinson was transferred to the Department of Metalwork, with its extensive Islamic and Far Eastern collections. He remained there until the outbreak of war in September, and then from 1946 until his retirement.

After call-up and a year in the ranks of the Royal Sussex Regiment, Robinson was sent out to India. He was commissioned in the 2nd Punjab Regiment, Indian Army, and served in India, Burma and Malaya. Arriving at 14 Army HQ, Comilla, East Bengal, in 1944, Robinson fell in with two officers at the mess bar. After a few drinks they asked him his name and, on the spur of the moment, he answered "Kegworthy" (a character from PG Wodehouse). Thereafter he was known in the Army as "Keggers".

Two chance wartime encounters enabled Robinson greatly to advance his knowledge of eastern art. In India he found a bearer who wrote, and taught him, Nastaliq script; and when later, in Malaya, at the time of the Japanese surrender, Robinson was given the task of listing and cataloguing the Japanese swords - many of them with blades handed down in a family over generations - he enlisted the help of a Japanese PoW, Colonel Yamada, who was expert in the field, to assist and teach him. A large, amiable figure, with an air about him of the Victorian era to whose music-hall songs and traditions he was much attached, Robinson was a great encourager of the young and a dependable friend to people all over the world. He always remained, for instance, a firm friend to Colonel Yamada.

An enthusiastic singer of traditional English songs - he once impressed a party of Uzbeks in Samarkand with his rendering of The cheerful 'arn blows in the marn' - Robinson founded the Aldrich Catch Club, which met regularly at his London house to sing rounds and catches of the 15th-19th centuries, often ones which Robinson himself had unearthed. He had a phenomenal memory for songs, and with RF Hall compiled The Aldrich Book of Catches (1989). In 1967 Robinson was elected honorary president of the To-ken Society of Great Britain. He was president of the Royal Asiatic Society from 1970 to 1973, and Keeper Emeritus (one of the last) at the V&A from 1972 to 1976.

He was a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries and a Fellow of the British Academy. He gave the Hertz Lecture at the British Academy in 1983, taking as his subject "Persian Painting and the National Epic".

His later publications included Persian Paintings in the Royal Asiatic Society (1998) and The Persian Book of Kings (2002).

Robinson married first, in 1945, Mary Stewart, who died in 1954. He married secondly, in 1958, Oriel Steel, who survives him, together with their son and daughter.