WALSTON, Hon Oliver 1941-2024
Richard R
Obit in the Times of 19 July 2024:
E X T R A C T
Oliver Walston obituary: ‘barley baron’ who blew whistle about subsidies
Whistleblower about EU farm subsidies was more circumspect about his mother’s adulterous affair with Graham Greene
...A sturdy figure with sandy hair and more than a hint of
devilment behind his spectacles, Walston would point out that his own
2,000-acre farm on rolling chalkland at Thriplow in south Cambridgeshire was
losing money when he took it over in 1971. He dispensed with the cows, pigs,
chickens, turkeys and sheep and put himself at the vanguard of the so-called
“green revolution” in agriculture to become one of Britain’s first “barley
barons”, though in fact he mostly grew wheat....Profits rolled in but he nonetheless pocketed the subsidies
and enjoyed making mischief, especially if it meant exposing what he regarded
as “the disingenuous attitudes of British farmers”....
...Yet far from being a natural champion of market forces, Walston was actually something of an oxymoron in being a “lefty gentleman farmer”. By the end of the Nineties he was so unpopular in NFU circles that Boris Johnson wrote of him in The Telegraph: “If ever a man was inviting an accidental slurry spill in the region of his Mercedes 4×4 it is Oliver. Asking a farmer what subsidy they’re on is like asking a woman their age.”...
...Oliver Walston was born in 1941 the third of six children to Henry Walston (later Lord Walston), a farmer turned politician, first for Labour and then the Social Democratic Party, who originated from a New York Jewish family called Waldstein.
His mother was Catherine (née Crompton), a glamorous American who embarked on a 13-year affair with the novelist Graham Greene during Oliver’s childhood. Staying at Greene’s house in Antibes on the French Riviera, the child would not be allowed to make any noise until the author had completed his daily quota of 500 words...
...He had a brief first marriage. In 1967 he was introduced to a young woman called Anne Dunbar, who was working at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. He told her he was about to travel on the Trans-Siberian Railway. She asked him to bring her back a sable coat. He suggested they discuss it over lunch. They married in 1969 and he took his bride to Britain on the Queen Elizabeth…
Oliver Walston, farmer, was born on June 11, 1941. He died of pneumonia on July 14, 2024, aged 83
https://www.thetimes.com/uk/obituaries/article/oliver-walston-sd98q3tlz
Richard R
Elyse May WALSTON b 2012 reg Q3 Cambs