Aylmer Francis Robinson

Life

Aylmer Francis Robinson was born May 6, 1888 at the Robinson family estate in Makaweli on the island of Kauaʻi during the Kingdom of Hawaii. His father was Aubrey Robinson (1853–1936) and mother was Alice Gay Robinson who was his father's cousin. This made him double great-grandson of family matriarch Elizabeth McHutchison Sinclair (1800–1892). Besides various properties on Kauaʻi, the family owned the entire island of Niʻihau since 1864.

He was sent to the St. Mathew's Military School in Burlingame, California, and then graduated from Harvard University in 1910. He returned and worked at a sugarcane plantation in Waipahu, Hawaii in 1911.

He became manager of the Makaweli ranch in 1912, and then a partner in the Gay and Robinson business, formed by his father and uncle Francis Gay. In 1922 he took over from his father who retired from managing the ranch on Niʻihau. He was scheduled for one of his weekly visits when a Japanese warplane crashed on the island after the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. In what became known as the Niihau Incident, the pilot was captured, then freed by one of Robinson's Japanese employees. Robinson led American soldiers to the island, where the remains of both the pilot and aircraft were recovered.

A species of palm tree, Pritchardia aylmer-robinsonii was named for him by botanist Harold St. John in 1947. Although never active himself in politics, he identified himself with the Hawaii Republican Party, and residents of the family island voted solidly Republican even after the rest of the territory and later the state of Hawaii, turned Democratic. He never married, so when he died on April 3, 1967 the family estates went to his youngest brother Lester. The Gay & Robinson sugar business shut down in 2009 after 120 years.