29th Earl of Crawford
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BREMENMURRAY
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colinp
Earl of Crawford and Balcarres, Tory defence minister and last survivor of 1955 Commons intake – obituary
His roles ranged from chairman of the National Association for Mental Health (1963-70) to Lord Chamberlain to the Queen Mother (1992-2002)
The 29th Earl of Crawford and 12th Earl of Balcarres, Premier Earl of Scotland and head of the House of Lindsay, who has died aged 96, was a liberal Tory who made a rich contribution to the Commons (as Lord Balniel), Edward Heath’s government, the Lords, the Royal Household, the boardroom and the fields of conservation and mental health.
He was also the last surviving member of the House elected in 1955.
His oldest Scottish title – Lord Lindsay of Crawford – predates 1143, but he owed his right to sit in the Lords, until Tony Blair’s cull of hereditaries, to the English Barony of Wigan. His father, the 28th and 11th Earl, had to sell Haigh Hall, near Wigan, because of “penal taxation”; Crawford himself lived in Fife and Hampstead.
Until he succeeded his father in 1975, Lord Balniel was a career politician. Highly rated as a minister, he was unlucky not to have served in Heath’s Cabinet. Helped in securing his seat at Hertford by his uncle Lord Salisbury being the constituency chairman, he held it at five elections despite an influx of Labour-voting new-town tenants….
Defeated in 1974, he accepted a life peerage as Lord Balniel and joined the Opposition front bench in the Lords. But within a year his father died, and he left active politics. He went on to chair, in turn, the Historic Buildings Council for Scotland, the Royal Commission on Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland and the National Library of Scotland.
A dancing partner of Princess Margaret in his youth, who rode in the third Royal carriage at Ascot, Crawford also became First Crown Estate Commissioner, then Lord Chamberlain to the Queen Mother for the final decade of her life. He engineered the removal of her Treasurer, Sir Ralph Anstruther, who had long been incapable of performing his duties.
Robert Alexander Lindsay (always known in the family as Robin) was born in London on March 5 1927, the elder son of the 28th and 11th Earl and the former Mary Cavendish. Educated at Eton and Trinity College, Cambridge, he served with the Grenadier Guards from 1945 to 1949, mainly in the Middle East. After a spell at the British Embassy in Paris, he joined the Conservative Research Department in 1952….
On the Balcarres estate, in the mid-1960s he oversaw the construction, to the designs of the Modernist architect Trevor Dannatt, of Pitcorthie House. His wife transformed the gardens. He became a keen collector of contemporary art and developed an interest in antiquarian books, buying the poet Hugh MacDiarmid’s personal collection.
In 1988, furious that Manchester University planned to sell a manuscript collection donated by the 26th Earl in 1900, he offered to loan them his own Audubon’s Birds of America if they sold their copy instead of the Crawford collection. When they refused, he removed 40,000 of his books from the university.
Crawford was created a Knight of the Thistle in 1996, and appointed GCVO in 2002. For 27 years he was Deputy Lieutenant for Fife.
He married, in 1949, Ruth Meyer of Zurich; she died in 2021. They had two sons and two daughters. He is succeeded as 30th and 13th Earl by his elder son, Lord Balniel, born in 1958.
The 29th Earl of Crawford and 12th Earl of Balcarres, born March 5 1927, died March 18 2023
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Richard R
Earl of Crawford and Balcarres obituary
Empathetic Conservative MP who became a minister under Edward Heath and later served as lord chamberlain to the Queen Mother
… Balniel served nearly 20 years as an MP, entering parliament when Anthony Eden’s Conservatives won the 1955 general election. He rose to become a defence and foreign office minister under Edward Heath, and after the death of Lord Eden of Winton in 2020 he became the earliest elected living former MP.
In 1975, after his father’s death, he became the 29th Earl of Crawford (Scotland’s premier earldom dating back to 1398), the 12th Earl of Balcarres and chief of Clan Lindsay. Thereafter he served as first commissioner of the Crown Estate, managing Britain’s largest property portfolio, from 1980 to 1985, and as lord chamberlain to Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother, from 1992 until her death in 2002, upon which he was appointed GCVO. He marched in her funeral cortège alongside the royal family, most of whom were lifelong friends including the Queen, and he broke his ceremonial wand over the Queen Mother’s coffin during her private interment in the King George VI Memorial Chapel in Windsor Castle…
… He was the third successive Earl of Crawford to be appointed a Knight of the Thistle, Scotland’s highest order of chivalry, but for all his distinguished lineage he was a modest, empathetic man who disliked pomp and had few airs and graces…
… Robert Alexander Lindsay, known to his friends and family as Robin, was born in Marylebone, London, in 1927. His father, David, had served as an MP, and his paternal grandfather had sat in the First World War coalition cabinets of David Lloyd George and Herbert Asquith. His mother, Mary (née Cavendish), was a niece of the Duke of Devonshire. Raised as Lord Balniel, a title his father “lent” him…
… He met Ruth Meyer-Bechtler at an art history summer school in Perugia, Italy. They married in her native Switzerland in 1949 and went on to have four children: Bettina, a teacher; Iona, an art historian; Anthony, an investment manager who now becomes the 30th Earl of Crawford; and Alexander, a documentary film-maker and photographer. The Countess of Crawford died in 2021 after 71 years of marriage…
… He was instead created a life peer as Baron Balniel and for a year, most unusually, he sat alongside his father in the House of Lords until the latter’s death…
… working pro bono for the Crown Estate, the Queen Mother’s household and other worthy causes. He once described his public life as “one long list of chairing meetings”, though he regarded working for the Queen Mother, whom he had known since childhood, as “an honour and nothing but a pleasure”…
Robert Lindsay, 29th Earl of Crawford and 12th Earl of Balcarres KT, GCVO, Conservative politician, was born on March 5, 1927. He died on March 18, 2023, aged 96
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/earl-of-crawford-and-balcarres-obituary-6pppttvfx
Jonathan
He sat in the House of Lords as Baron Balniel. Prior to his leaving that institution in 2019, he was one of only a handful of hereditary peers who had also been created life barons, enabling them to sit in Lords. (There are a total of 6 who remain (shown by their hereditary titles): 3rd Viscount Chandos, 4th Baron Ponsonby of Shulbrede, 6th Baron Redesdale, 18th Baron Berkeley, 18th Marquess of Lothian and 3rd Viscount Hailsham. The 11th Earl of Selkirk also currently sits in Lords, but he disclaimed the earldom.)
