Lord Elton 1930-2023
BREMENMURRAY
Richard R
BREMENMURRAY
bx...@yahoo.com
BREMENMURRAY
BREMENMURRAY
David Beamish
"Personable if not always electrifying junior minister under Margaret Thatcher, regarded as tactful, good humoured and hirsute
… Elton was in all senses an old-school working peer who believed in service. Having succeeded to the peerage after the death of his father in 1973, he stayed in the upper house for 47 years until his retirement in 2020. His popularity and personability were factors in his longevity. After the New Labour government’s purge of the hereditary peers in 1999, Elton was one of the 92 who survived through an election conducted among all hereditary peers. [Actually he was one of the15 elected by the whole House life peers and bishops as well as hereditary peers, coming 3rd]
Tall and slim with a mane of thick hair, Elton was one of those peers who only spoke in the House of Lords when he felt he had something worth saying. He would then ruminate elegantly and humorously in a clipped voice, rarely wasting his words.
His combination of serious bearing and sparkling wit sat well with his fellows on all sides of the chamber. A keen amateur artist, he was forever sketching amusing portraits of his colleagues as well as writing limericks about them.
On one occasion after delivering a heavy speech to their lordships he swiftly went to the office of the Official Report (Hansard) before it was printed to arrange the lines to reveal the limerick he had hidden in the text.
… During his long career in the Lords — first as a senior minister, then as a backbencher who rose to the third most senior official role in the House — he was to become an elder statesman to whom newly arrived peers listened and from whom they sought advice.
So committed was he to the Lords that he decided to stand for the role of Lord Speaker in 2006 although he was ultimately defeated by the Labour peer Baroness Hayman. He was not expected to win because the Lords, like the Commons, has a Buggins’s turn arrangement between the main parties for the speakership — and it was Labour’s turn by rotation. The Lord Speaker is the highest authority of the Lords. Elton became deputy lord speaker, instead — itself regarded as a notable achievement.
… Rodney Elton was born in 1930 to Dedi (née Hartmann) and Godfrey Elton, a Labour Party stalwart who was elevated to the peerage by Ramsay MacDonald. Educated at Eton and New College, Oxford, where he read history, Elton was a master at Loughborough Grammar School between 1964 and 1967, then at Fairham Comprehensive, Nottingham, and then a lecturer at Bishop Lonsdale college of education.
After he made a good impression on the Tory benches, Margaret Thatcher immediately put him in her first government in 1979 as a junior minister in the Northern Ireland office. He was considered close to Willie Whitelaw.
In 1981 he was moved to Health and the following year to the Home Office. In 1984 he was promoted to minister of state there, and a year later he became a minister at the Department of the Environment where he safely steered through the Lords the controversial legislation to abolish the GLC.
… Despite losing his automatic right to sit in the Lords he remained as an “excepted hereditary” after the “Weatherill amendment”, moved by the former Commons Speaker, provided for elections to save 92 hereditaries. He was seen as a generally loyal backbencher, defying the whips rarely.
Married to Anne Tilney in 1958, they had four children: Annabel Peebles is head of fine art commissions at the Mall Galleries; Janie Cronin is minister at Nelson St Church, Rochdale; Lucy Gray is a sculptor; and Edward inherits the title and runs the family home and wedding business at Sutton Bonington Hall near Loughborough.
After a divorce in 1979, Elton married Susan Richenda Gurney, who was a lady of the bedchamber to Queen Elizabeth until her death in 2022.
Elton was a committed Christian and in an article for the all-party Christians in Parliament group explained that his father was an Anglican from the Victorian tradition and his mother was a Norwegian Lutheran. “So I was raised in a family with real faith. It seemed to me to be part of the natural world order. I was brought up to believe that my good start in life meant that I owed a debt to others less fortunate and this gained a new perspective with my growing faith.”
He also exercised “a small ministry of prayer for those parliamentarians I, and some of my friends, know to be specially in need of it”.
Elton’s one regret, according to friends, was that he had not retired earlier. He was an enthusiastic painter and wished that he had given himself more time with the canvas and brush.
Lord Elton, politician, was born on March 2, 1930. He died on August 19, 2023, aged 93"