The stick furniture market folded as he exited it in 1992, the property boom in his chosen Australian state of residence Western Australia collapsing around him and the several far less honest contributors to that extraordinary bubble.
On the other hand, Sidney Nolan's First Class Marksman which he owned twice was eventually sold for $5.49 million to create an auction record for an Australian art work and Nolan's financial eminence was sustained..
The painting is now part of the collection of the Art Gallery of NSW which bought the painting. McAlpine had bought it for $825,000 in 1989 but sold it for considerably less than the record to entertainer Steve Vizard..
Lord McAlpine's interest in the artist, who he met in he 1960s when he had a bookshop in Cork Street London and published some of his poetry, developed famously when he saw his Dog and Duck Hotel illustrated on a Qantas first class menu.
So he bought the painting in 1972 through Sweeney Reid and Melbourne's Southern Cross Gallery in Melbourne for $60,000 in a well publicised transaction which gave heart to both Nolan's market and Australian art in general.
McAlpine simultaneously discovered the “real” and haunting Australian bush well away from the city version on his perch in Broome, where he had an aviary, watched the migration of the birds and built the tasteful Cable Beach Resort. Locals and heritage buffs acclaimed him for saving the town from high rise.
Brought up to a life of luxury and with the inclination and family fortunes emanating from one of Britain's major construction companies, he had money to spend on his follies.
He almost exhausted the lexicon of collectables which for him ranged from chickens and parrots to police truncheons.
His interest in parrots resulted in the luxury reprint of Francois Le Vaillant's Histoire Naturelle des Perroquets which was launched on November 30, 1989 at a function in Sydney's Intercontinental Hotel which he half owned.
This is considered in the antiquarian book trade to have been one of his most profound follies but a delightful publication. With an initial $10,000 subscription price (and a recommended retail price of double that when published) copies can now be obtained for as little as $3000 each.
In one of his memoirs, Once a Jolly Bagman, and in various interviews McAlpine conceded that he was more of a dealer than a collector and often bought too late and sold too soon. His buying his enthusiasm certainly got the better of him and he swept through the rustic Australiana trade with an open cheque book to the admiration or disdain of those who were the recipients of his largesse or did not.
While print dealer Mr Brian Chester joined with him in an ambitious publishing product, suddenly furniture made from petrol cans and packing cases found a market as he waded into the burgeoning rustic furniture market in big boots (Broome is international wader territory) and a floppy hat.
Donald Cornes and Graeme Dodd prospered as a result but the final accolades went to the late Graham Cornell.
In Journal of a Collector published in 1994 he wrote that one of his favourite pieces of furniture was a chest of drawers made from wooden boxes used to transport cans of oil, Shell Oil's mollusc emblazoned on each drawer.
Australia was a beautiful if inhospitable place where settlers in a primitive environment created a “new cultural tradition” known as first settlement furniture, he wrote.
With 600 colour plates Memories , a survey of his furniture collection published in 1990, presented a lavish original view of life in the colonial period.
Highly eclectic and peripatetic, Lord McAlpine's interest strayed to the more formal colonial furniture of the period and his acquisitions included one of the most celebrated drum tables ever made.
Purchased from other dealers, this type of furniture and the stick variety wobbled in price under the stress of the auction gavels especially when in the early 90s a pilots strike hit Broome's tourist trade and Perth property prices collapsed on the back of WA Inc.
McAlpine was then one of Australia's biggest property owners and he was heavily exposed in the west.
The Australian Financial Review reported that at the Sotheby's sale of the collection in Melbourne on March 28, 1992, McAlpine had learned the art of letting go. McAlpine “takes a bath on a dresser” and many other items the newspaper reported of the sale.
In a packed room helped by the celebrity of the occasion estimates had been fortuitously slashed to a reputed 10 per cent – which helped create a much better than expected outcome of $308,841 - or about one quarter of the retail price.
The top price in the sale was fetched by a breakfront bookcase, which had belonged to Alexander Berry (a millionaire colonial art patron) and sold for $44,000. This was far removed from the six figure prices paid for colonial drum tables and to which fine pieces of colonial furniture now rarely aspire to.
Typically a pine dresser that was made in Victoria around 1855, sold for $2,860 against the $14,000 it had cost when auctioned by Joel's in Bendigo in 1988.
The offering was saved by the art trade, which was used to attending sales in the same Sotheby's building, with Josef Lebovic and Bill Nuttall both acquiring pieces for their private collection; and by remnants of the Queensland developer trade, Mr Michael Gore and the Badas family who all secured bargains from items which had provided many a dealer with a feed on their way up in price.
The fact of the dispersal was a disappointment in that it had been hoped the collection would go to the Sydney Power House Museum where it had been shown three years earlier. But the lack of profits in his Australian operations mean that its gifting under the Cultural Gifts Program would have little benefit to his shareholders.
Lord McAlpine had been treasurer and deputy chairman of Britain's Conservative Party, and was for 15 years a friend and confidante of Margaret Thatcher. The family fortune was built through an international construction business, Sir Robert McAlpine & Sons Ltd, founded by his grandfather.
Throughout life he flitted from one collecting passion to another, at times collecting English chickens, shells, parrots but he appears top have been very fond of Australia and Australians and he showed it.
The old pearling port of Broome became McAlpine's haven in the early 1980s. There, he developed a wildlife park, established an exotic aviary and built the luxurious 550-bed Cable Beach resort, which he later tried to sell before taking it off the market.
He was a paradox preferring humble accommodation and wearing sloppy clothes. In London he dressed in a more business-like fashion and pointed out that there he was a Conservative but in Australia he supported Labour.
His Perth-based company Australian City Properties Ltd, suffered a bottom-line loss of $80 million in the year to October 31, 1990, after property write-downs of $412 million.
His pursuit of Nolans also caused a stir as reports of the prices asked, offered and paid appeared to achieve wide circulation. This was discomforting for those who had to pay tax on their Nolan deals as British Inland Revenue looked closer at the affairs of those involved in the market. The Sidney Nolan Trust's financial problems are thought not to have benefited from these disclosures.
McAlpine moved his expatriate base to Venice where he became a big devotee of glass.
With the recession setting in there was little hope of him repeating the success of his sale at Hartley Wintney in Hampshire of the contents of West Green House where rustic collectibles had also enjoyed a touch of celebrity. These were mainly 19th and 20th century objects such as sheep crooks for catching sheep by the hind legs or small lambs by the neck. Prices ranged from ?420 to ?500 for the lots.
Lord Gowrie, a senior director of Sotheby's which held the sale said in an introduction to the catalogue that he had never encountered a better "eye" than Lord McAlpine's. He was presumably referring to McAlpine's patronage of Sidney Nolan rather than the contents of West Green House, which tended to evoke the Pimlico Lane (that is, slightly decorator inclined) antique shops.
McAlpine’s patronage of Australian art was more long-standing than his attachment to Australia's make-shift decorative art.
The dyslexic McAlpine's commitment to Nolan, whose first name was allowed to be printed as “Sydney” in one of his early books on collecting, took on labyrinth proportions as he bought and sold work including First Class Marksman.
McAlpine started buying Nolans for the Parmelia Hotel from Rose Skinner, then the principal dealer in Perth but ended up with more works by Robert Juniper in the building.
His interest in Australian art followed the exhaustion of his interest in English sporting paintings and American abstract art, prime examples of which he gave to London's Tate Gallery.
He said in one of his books that his greatest admiration in the Australian art trade was reserved for Barry Stern.
Mr Stern said last week in Bangkok where he now resides that he was distressed to hear that McAlpine, who had heart problems, had died at the youngish age of 71.
“He was the most generous of men and a superb host. He was polite to me and my staff always. He was a good listener a fascinating talker.” Mr Stern said he was especially impressed by McAlpine's 100 per cent knowledge of so many subjects.
“He first came to my Gallery as a young man and bought a 20 foot long painting by Adelaide artist John Dallwitz. McAlpine became my biggest client buying the best of Aussie art.”
“He commissioned 450 paintings by Sydney nature artist Humphrey Price Jones....I repeat.....450.”
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