Brigadier Sir Ralph Herbert Rayner MBE (13 January 1896 – 17 July 1977) was a British Conservative Party politician.
He was seconded to the Indian Army in 1917, transferred in January 1919 and served in the Third Afghan War, for which he was made a Member of the Order of the British Empire.
In 1932 he acquired the 2,500 acre[2] Ashcombe estate in Devon, still owned by his descendants, where in 1935 he built as his residence Ashcombe Tower House, situated on a spur of Little Haldon above the stream known as the Dawlish Water, so named after the tower built there in 1833 as an observatory.
Brian O'Rorke was chosen as the architect for the project on the grounds that he had never designed such a house before and would therefore be open to Lady Rayner's ideas.
[3][4] As one of the first British officers to enter Adolf Hitler's Berlin bunker, the Führerbunker, in the Second World War, Rayner was given a red telephone as a souvenir by Soviet soldiers and used it at Ashcombe Tower.