Sir Robert Hunter (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.
Life and career
Early years
Hunter was born at Addington Square, 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. 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 Neighbourhood 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.
The six essays were published in one volume in 1867. In the same year Hunter was admitted solicitor.
Commons Preservation Society
thumb|right|upright|[[Octavia Hill]]
Hunter worked with the society to save common land from enclosure. He instituted legal actions that ensured protection of Hampstead Heath, and Berkhamsted, Plumstead, Wimbledon and Tooting commons and other open spaces threatened with enclosure. Most of the principles of public interest expounded in his 1866 essay were incorporated into English law in 1875. In 1882 Queen Victoria went to the forest and formally declared it "available for her people's enjoyment". Both Hunter and Rawnsley, building on an idea put forward by Ruskin, advocated a trust that could buy and preserve places of natural beauty and historic interest for the nation.
The need for such a body was emphasised in 1886, when the owner of Sayes Court, a manor house in Deptford, wished to give it to the nation, but could not because no national organisation existed to accept the gift. He established a permanent trust under the chairmanship of the vicar of the parish, and presented the house and gardens with a substantial financial endowment to maintain them.
thumb|left|upright|[[Hardwicke Rawnsley]]
In November 1893 Hill, Hunter and Rawnsley met at the offices of the Commons Preservation Society. They agreed to set up a national body, to propagate the formation of a "National Trust for Places of Historic Interest or Natural Beauty". In July 1894 the trust was formally inaugurated under the presidency of the Duke of Westminster. At the inaugural meeting Rawnsley declared, to cheering, that the aim was to establish "a great National Gallery of natural pictures". and the bill was passed in August 1907.
By the time of the 1907 Act, the trust had acquired 25 properties in England, Wales and Ireland, ranging from 850 acres of open country in the Lake District, to common land in Surrey to castles in County Cork and Derbyshire to coastal land in Cornwall and Cambridgeshire. In religion, he was a broad-church Anglican.