Duke of Buccleuch
Landowner and politician
Born: 28 September, 1923.
Died: 4 September, 2007, at Bowhill, aged 83.
published by The Scotsman, Sept 6, 2007
An ardent fox hunter, he fell when his horse refused to take a drystone dyke near Hawick while he was out hunting with his father's hounds. The hunter fell on him, fracturing his spine and paralysing him from the chest down. Remarkably, he returned to the House of Commons just six months later, the first post-war MP to enter the chamber in a wheelchair. Unsurprisingly, this earned him respect on all sides of the House.
Self-pity was an alien concept. He began to rise at 5am instead of the usual 7am, as, he explained, the same amount of work now took him longer. He had another two years as a Tory backbencher before the death of his father on 4 October, 1973 saw him succeed to the peerage as the 9th Duke of Buccleuch and 11th Duke of Queensberry, one of only 24 non-royal dukes.
The Duke's political career was that of a typical, but by no means complacent, Tory aristocrat. He was a Roxburghshire county councillor from 1958, was narrowly defeated in East Edinburgh at the 1959 general election, and entered the Commons as a Unionist following a by-election in May 1960. The then Lord Advocate, William R Milligan, had been appointed to the bench and the Earl of Dalkeith held the seat comfortably.
In 1961 he was appointed parliamentary private secretary to William Grant, Milligan's successor as lord advocate, and the following year he served in the same capacity in support of Michael Noble, the ebullient secretary of state for Scotland. Dalkeith remained at the Scottish Office until the 1964 general election. His brother-in-law was Ian Gilmour, a fellow Tory MP and future cabinet minister.
He was a ministerial bag-carrier during a period of turbulent decline for the governments of Harold Macmillan and Dalkeith's fellow Borders aristocrat Sir Alec Douglas-Home. He later gave a moving oration at Lord Home's memorial service in Edinburgh.
In opposition, Dalkeith chaired the Conservative Party's sub-committee on forestry - a lifelong interest, professionally and personally - from 1966, and served as president of the Royal Highland and Agricultural Society of Scotland from 1969-70.
Walter Francis John Montagu-Douglas-Scott was the only son of the 8th Duke of Buccleuch and Mary Lascelles. While at Eton in 1940 he helped extinguish a German fire bomb which hit his boarding house, and two years later joined the Royal Navy as an ordinary seaman. He was commissioned the following year and saw action, including the sinking of several U-boats. He later admitted that living through "a grey, angry Atlantic 28 days at a time" fostered his great love of the countryside.
Following the war he studied agriculture and forestry at Christ Church, Oxford, chairing the university Conservative Association when a young Margaret Roberts, later Margaret Thatcher, was a fellow member. He worked briefly for a firm of City merchant bankers and an insurance company before his father arranged for him to work in a small coal port near Edinburgh owned by the family. Ultimately, however, he became a director of the Buccleuch Estates in 1949, and later chairman.
He socialised with Princess Margaret in his youth, but married Jane McNeill, a former model for Norman Hartnell, on 10 January, 1953, at a wedding attended by the Queen, the Duke of Edinburgh, and most of the royal family at St Giles' Cathedral in Edinburgh. The couple set up home at Eildon Hall, Melrose, where he had been brought up, and their first son, Richard Walter John, was born in 1954. Two more sons followed: Lord William in 1957 and Lord Damian in 1970. A daughter, Lady Charlotte Anne, was born in 1966.
Two years after the birth of his last child, tragedy struck, yet Dalkeith's personal courage, vigour and humour despite his confinement to a wheelchair amazed his friends and parliamentary colleagues. He worked with various bodies to champion disabled causes, including the Central Council for the Disabled, the Royal Association for Disability and Rehabilitation and the Scottish National Institution for the War Blinded, the House of Lords providing a useful platform.
In 1978 he was appointed a Knight of the Order of the Thistle, the highest honour in Scotland, and in 1985 was invited by Deng Xiao Ping's son to China to advise the country on the establishment of disability organisations.
The Duke also retained his love of hunting, despite his paralysis. As a result, he was a zealous opponent of Scottish Parliament legislation to ban hunting with hounds, urging pro-hunting supporters to use every legal means to challenge the ban north of the Border.
He also opposed similar legislation in England, retaining, as he did, Broughton in Northamptonshire, often referred to as the "English Versailles". He restored its 18th-century gardens, only for the Labour MP Jack Straw to identify Broughton as a reason why voting rights should be abolished for hereditary peers. The Duke, he said, could not possible represent the common man.
In 2002, the Duke attacked proposals for land reform in Scotland, saying they would "penalise rural families as viciously as a foul disease", and it was as a respected and innovative landlord that he will long be remembered. An ardent supporter of countryside ways, he was a pioneer in opening private land to the public long before that right was secured by legislation. He was also the first Duke to open his homes to fee-paying visitors.
The Duke also oversaw a diversification of his estate business, the Buccleuch Estates, into the lucrative property market, and by 2005 he was believed to be the UK's biggest private landowner, with 280,000 acres, mostly in the Scottish Borders. He encouraged Lord Steel, the former Liberal leader, in the restoration and upkeep of Aikwood Tower, which lay within the Duke's Bowhill estate.
The Sunday Times Rich List estimated his wealth at £85 million, some of which was put to good use through the establishment of the Buccleuch Heritage Trust, which became a noted sponsor of the arts and education. He was also a private donor to the Scottish Conservative and Unionist Party, which he had served as an MP from 1960-73.
A keen bibliophile, "tormentor" of the French horn and art collector, the Duke always pointed out that if his collection, valued at £405 million, was ever sold, 80 per cent of the profits would go to the Treasury. In August 2003, two thieves posing as tourists at Drumlanrig Castle in Dumfriesshire stole the Duke's Leonardo da Vinci masterpiece, The Madonna with the Yardwinder, valued at around £50 million.
When the House of Lords was reformed in 1999 the Duke declined to stand as an elected hereditary peer, but remained interested in local, Scottish and national politics, remarking during one debate that he was "a Scottish nationalist at heart and a British nationalist in my head". Scotland's natural environment was an enduring passion - latterly the plight of Scotland's endangered red squirrel population.
The Duke had been in the Borders General Hospital with a short illness but he insisted on being taken home to Bowhill, where he passed away in the early hours of 4 September. He is survived by the Duchess and their children, Richard, now the 10th Duke of Buccleuch, William, Charlotte Anne and Damian.
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