His mother, who had been to finishing school in Paris, survived by teaching French and taking charity from her sister, Mrs Meredith, and their family friend, Sir Casimir Gzowski.

This income helped his mother with her debts and when still a teenager he paid for his brother (the future Brigadier-General Herbert Colborne Nanton R.E., who married a daughter of Sir Henri-Gustave Joly de Lotbinière) to attend the Royal Military College of Canada.

It was not an easy start, and at first Nanton was severely disappointed by the lack of the branch's growth, but he didn't give up and by 1896 the North of Scotland shareholders were told that the subsidiary firm in Winnipeg had become "the largest and best mortgage business in the west".

The company came to represent standards of scrupulous honesty and thoroughness from which they never deviated and became an important link between financiers in Britain, Montreal and Toronto in the development of the young Canadian west.

By 1900, the firm acted as agents for the sale of Galt Coal (founded by Nanton's father's former business partner) throughout the Canadian Prairies and, in the first year, sold 50,000 tons.

In 1902, he concluded the sale of 800,000 acres in Saskatchewan, a deal worth several million dollars, solely on the basis of his personal handshake, testament to his solid reputation.

Nanton was one of a small group of Winnipeg businessmen who directed the massive financing of and servicing for the influx of over a million settlers then pouring into the newly opened Canadian West.

When the son of a Winnipeg family was lying severely wounded in a military hospital in England, Nanton anonymously arranged for a telegram to be sent each morning to the parents, reporting on their boy's condition.

Despite the 1918 flu pandemic coupled with atrocious Blizzards, the three Victory Loan campaigns saw increasing investment each year and in total Manitoba raised $120 million for the war effort, spirited by Nanton.

He transformed the upstairs of his home, Kilmorie, and the ballroom was occupied for three days a week with women knitting and sewing tons of socks, sweaters and scarves, etc., to be shipped to the men of the Royal Winnipeg Rifles in France.

Downstairs, Nanton opened his doors every night to an average of thirty men at one time from The Royal Regina Rifles while they were in training at Winnipeg.

In 1917, Sir Augustus and Lady Nanton converted their summer house on the Lake of the Woods into a convalescent home for wounded soldiers returning from Europe.

Still exhausted from his exertions during the war, Nanton wanted to decrease his responsibilities but he accepted the position anyway, seen as the only man who could pull the committee together, a proof of his enduring reputation.

He struggled through the bank's annual meeting in January 1925, calling for greater communication and collaboration between eastern and western Canada, but it was the last duty he would perform.

The final speaker, his friend George Allan, the first man he had met on arriving in Winnipeg in 1883, gave this outline of his contribution to the Canadian West: You were active in the sales, settlement, irrigation and improvement of our lands, in the laying out and selling of our town sites, in the marketing and milling of our grains, in the development of our livestock industry, in the opening of our mines, in the utilization of our forests, in the construction and operation of our steam and electric railways and electric plants, in the manufacture and sale of building material, machinery and implements, in the establishment and work of our banking, trust, loan, insurance and other financial corporations.