By 1988, the businessman Christopher Ondaatje had made a great deal of money as a publisher and stockbroker on the Canadian stock exchange. As he later described it to Sue Lawley on Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs in 2002, while on holiday in Tanzania he decided to give up his business interests and devote himself to “having fun” – travelling, writing, spending time with his family, and giving large chunks of his wealth away.
He had already invested in a home for himself, Glenthorne, a rambling 19th-century house in a remote place next to the sea north of Exmoor, allowing him to turn his attention to British institutions, including the National Portrait Gallery, the Royal Geographical Society, the Royal Society of Literature and the Labour party. He approached philanthropy in the same way as his business transactions, doing research on how the money could transform institutions.
I first met Ondaatje in September 1996, when I was director of the National Portrait Gallery. We were in the early stage of raising money for a new wing, actually a back-of-house extension, designed by Jeremy Dixon and Edward Jones. We had been promised funds by what was then the Heritage Lottery Fund on condition that we raised £4m. I intuited, as it turned out correctly, that this was a project which Ondaatje might be willing to help fund.
He did so with extraordinary generosity, providing the great bulk of the matching funding required for a building project that opened in May 2000 as the Ondaatje Wing. Although the project is now nearly invisible under its recent make-over, it transformed the way the public used the gallery and its visitor numbers. At a time when public institutions were being required to seek private support, Ondaatje demonstrated how venture philanthropy could be used to good effect.
Ondaatje had been born in Kandy in what was then Ceylon (now Sri Lanka) to a prosperous tea-planting family of part-Dutch, part-Sinhalese descent, one of the four children of Mervyn Ondaatje and Doris (nee Gratiaen). But, as his younger brother, the writer Michael Ondaatje, terrifyingly describes in his 1982 memoir Running in the Family, their father took to the bottle and his parents divorced after Christopher had been sent away to boarding school in the UK. It was a humiliation that gave him his drive and determination, and the ambiguity of his relationship to the British.
Educated at Blundell’s school in Devon, Ondaatje excelled at sport, but had to leave a year early when the money for his education ran out. In 1951, his mother moved to England, to Notting Hill Gate, in London, where she ran a boarding house. Christopher went to work for National and Grindlays Bank in the City, but realised that the prospects for someone part-Sinhalese were not good, so, in 1955, aged 22, with 13 Canadian dollars in his pocket, he emigrated to Canada.
In Toronto he joined a brokerage firm, Burns Bros & Denton, for a year before moving first, into selling advertising and copyrighting for magazines in Montreal and then into financial journalism back in Toronto. In 1959 he married Valda Bulins, a Latvian-born, tennis-playing science graduate.
Ondaatje discovered he had a great gift for making money, became a founding partner in 1970 of the stockbrokers Loewen Ondaatje McCutcheon, established a publishing firm, Pagurian Press, in 1967 and used it as a vehicle for wider-ranging investments. His wealth made it possible to buy Meisner’s Island off the coast of Nova Scotia and persuade his brother Michael to study at Toronto University.
In 1983, Ondaatje was visiting Blundell’s when he discovered that Glenthorne, which he had visited as a schoolboy, was for sale. He bought it, renovated it, and filled it with his library and collection of Victorian furniture, portraits and Sinhalese antiquities. He began to spend an increasing amount of time in England, for which he had a strongly romantic, partly nostalgic and imperial fondness, in spite of the fact that he sometimes felt cold-shouldered by the British establishment.
Meanwhile, Ondaatje was establishing himself as a writer. It was always assumed that this was in competition with his younger brother, Michael, who was so colossally successful – best known for his Booker prize-winning novel The English Patient – but I never saw evidence of this. It was more a way of pursuing his interests in travel and exploration.
His first book, co-written with Gordon Currie, was Olympic Victory: The Story Behind the Canadian Bob-Sled Club’s Incredible Victory at the 1964 Winter Olympic Games (1967), describing his involvement as a member of the second bobsleigh team. This was followed the same year by The Prime Ministers of Canada, 1867-1967.
In 1992, he published The Man-Eater of Punanai: A Journey of Discovery to the Jungles of Old Ceylon. Sindh Revisited: A Journey in the Footsteps of Captain Sir Richard Burton appeared in 1996, and a second book following the routes of the Victorian explorer, Journey to the Source of the Nile, was published in 1998; he was passionately interested in the life of Burton.
These led him to support the Royal Geographical Society, where he funded its handsome new lecture theatre and helped the digitisation of its collections. He also supported an annual prize for the Royal Society of Literature “for a distinguished work of fiction, nonfiction or poetry, evoking the spirit of a place”, and was, for a time, joint owner of the Literary Review.
It was perhaps more surprising, since his politics were not obviously of the left, that he became a donor to Tony Blair’s Labour party, but he regarded Blair as nearly as rightwing as Margaret Thatcher. He got on well with Tessa Jowell and enjoyed playing tennis with the Labour peer and party fundraiser Michael Levy. He was made CBE in 2000 and knighted in 2003.
Ondaatje is survived by Valda, his three children, David, Sarah and Jans, his brother, Michael, and sister Gillian (his sister Janet predeceased him), and 18 grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
• Philip Christopher Ondaatje, financier, philanthropist and writer, born 22 February 1933; died 20 July 2026
