Hon Simon George Warrender (1922-2011)

[Richard R]

A good obit in today's Telegraph:

Simon Warrender, who has died aged 88, was a reluctant British
aristocrat and involved in an undercover wartime mission to arrest a
Portuguese princess.
The assignment to arrest Princess Philippa of Braganza, who was
known to be smuggling industrial diamonds from Uruguay for use in
German munitions factories, came when Warrender was attached to the
staff of Admiral Sir Frederick Edward-Collins in Gibraltar.
Edward-Collins explained the mission: Warrender was to go to neutral
Portugal and pose as a civilian at a hotel in Estoril, where the
diamond handovers were believed to be taking place. After the
briefing, however, Warrender still had some questions. How exactly, he
wanted to know, were the diamonds coming in?
“In the royal fanny, Warrender”, the Admiral replied. “Don’t worry,
you won’t be obliged to conduct a search. Just apprehend the lady.”
Warrender boarded the ship in which she was travelling from Montevideo
and duly arrested the princess .

Simon George Warrender was born in his parents’ house in Mayfair on
August 11 1922, the second son of the Tory politician Victor
Warrender, the future Lord Bruntisfield and a godson of Queen
Victoria. Field Marshal Alexander was a godfather at Simon’s
christening. A great-great-grandfather was the social campaigner the
7th Earl of Shaftesbury; Simon’s Warrender ancestors, meanwhile, had
played a prominent role in Edinburgh, where they had amassed vast
property interests.
At the time of Simon’s birth the Warrender family trust was worth
about £4 million, and he grew up at Exton Park in Rutland, a
“playground for aristocratic sports”. As a child, however, he saw
little of his socialite parents and as a result never regarded them
with affection.
He was educated at Eton, where he became public schools’ fencing
champion but neglected his studies, reasoning that, since his father
had paid £500 to ensure his entry into the Grenadier Guards, “academic
results bore little influence on the future my parents had planned for
me”.
His resentment of his parents and jealousy of his older brother
John, heir to the fortune, led him to develop a deep-rooted antipathy
to the “false standards” of his aristocratic upbringing. His teenage
years featured bitter political rows with his father.
In 1939 he cycled to Portsmouth, where he joined the RNVR as an
ordinary seaman. “Simon,” said his horrified mother, “you obviously
don’t know what you’ve done. You haven’t even learnt to drink gin
yet!”
Warrender’s parents had divorced during the war, and it was with
some misgivings that he returned home. Within half an hour of his
arrival, he had become involved in an angry brawl with his older
brother and, when his father intervened, he stormed out, never to
return.
… In 1949 Warrender, who had a pilot’s licence, got into the cockpit
of a single-engine Percival Proctor and announced that he was flying
to Australia. His ostensible purpose was to find a market for a flying-
boat business in which he had become involved; but his real aim was to
ask Pamela Myer, with whom he had fallen in love when stationed in
Melbourne, to marry him. The flight took 34 days, and they married in
London in 1950 in a ceremony dubbed the “wedding of the year” by the
Australian press; footage was broadcast on Australian television.
… A series of financial ups and downs and the death of a son in a car
accident took their toll on his marriage, and the Warrenders
eventually divorced, though they remained close. Simon Warrender died
on May 8, and is survived by Pamela, their son and two daughters.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/military-obituaries/naval-obituaries/8702850/Simon-Warrender.html

Michael posted news of his death just a day short of three months ago.
Testament to how long some obits take to make it to press:
http://groups.google.com/group/peerage-news/browse_thread/thread/b70b1a1768a81e07/e60cf3f6f11f00ee?lnk=gst&q=bruntisfield#e60cf3f6f11f00ee