HALL, Col Thomas Armitage CVO OBE 1928-2022
Richard R
He was s of Athelstan Argyle HALL 1894-1963 and Nancy Armitage 1901-86 d of Thomas James DYSON 1862-1933 and Julia Ethel ARMITAGE 1871-1954. He m 1954 Marie(Antoine)tte b 1932 d of Sir Roger Antony HORNBY 1904-87 scion of that gentry family of Pusey House and Lady Veronica Brenda HAMILTON-TEMPLE-BLACKWOOD 1910-71 d of 3rd Marquess of DUFFERIN & AVA 1875-1930 and Brenda WOODHOUSE d 1946, and had two sons and four daus as above.
colinp
He skied for the Army in the 1950s, continued skiing into his eightieth year and in later life served as Lieutenant of the Gentlemen at Arms
Colonel Tom Hall, who has died aged 94, played a prominent role in the development of the French Alpine resort of Méribel as a favoured destination for British skiers. He was also Lieutenant of the Gentlemen at Arms, the sovereign’s ceremonial bodyguard, and an entrepreneur in the field of international language schools....
Thomas Armitage Hall was born on April 13 1928, the only child of Athelstan “Johnny” Hall and his wife Nancy, née Dyson – and a great-grandson of a Herefordshire miller who emigrated to Australia in the 1850s. Johnny Hall was one of three sons of Thomas Skarratt Hall, a small-town Queensland bank manager who invested in a local gold prospect, Mount Morgan, which yielded a fabulous fortune as one of the world’s richest mineral deposits.
After returning to England, the family acquired the Cricket St Thomas estate in Somerset — later the setting for the television comedy To The Manor Born — where Tom spent much of his childhood......
...... in 1980 Hall had become a member of Her Majesty’s Body Guard of the Honourable Corps of Gentlemen at Arms – retired officers who attend the sovereign at state events and garden parties.
One of his first duties placed him close to the altar of St Paul’s during the wedding of the Prince of Wales and Lady Diana Spencer. For the Gentlemen in their 19th Century Heavy Cavalry uniform and plumed helmets, the heat under television lights was oppressive: when Prince Philip “was heard to long for a gin and tonic in the vestry”, Hall recalled, “we sympathised.”
Hall was promoted in 1994 to Lieutenant of the Gentlemen (effectively commanding officer, their honorary Captain being the government’s chief whip in the House of Lords), retiring on his seventieth birthday in 1998. He was also chairman from 1990 to 1996 of the Cavalry & Guards Club, whose Piccadilly freehold he had helped secure some years earlier in a tough negotiation with the property developer Elliot Bernerd.
Appointed OBE in 1966 and CVO on retirement from the Gentlemen at Arms, Hall was high sheriff of Oxfordshire in 1981-2. He skied elegantly until his eightieth year and made his last visit to Méribel this summer, sixty years after his first.
He married, in 1954, Mariette Hornby – daughter of Sir Antony Hornby, senior partner of the stockbrokers Cazenove & Co –, for whom he cared through a long illness before her death in 2020. Three daughters and two sons survive him, a fourth daughter having predeceased both parents.
Colonel Tom Hall, born April 13 1928, died October 12 2022