2nd Earl of Gowrie

[Brian Coleman]

The telegraph web site carries an obituary to 2nd  Earl of Gowrie who has died aged 81 . He was a Cabinet Minister under Margaret Thatcher 

[gorgo...@gmail.com]

Extracts from Telegraph, 24 September 2021 

Lord Gowrie, then chairman of the Arts Council, at the inauguration of the Angel of the North in Gateshead in 1998

The 2nd Earl of Gowrie, who has died aged 81, was a man of letters, a poet, a Conservative politician and a prominent figure in the world of the arts; he was a Minister for the Arts under Margaret Thatcher, and for four years chairman of the Arts Council of England.

Alexander Patrick Greysteil Hore-Ruthven, known to all as Grey, was born on November 26 1939, the elder son of Captain (later Major) A H P Hore-Ruthven, of the Rifle Brigade; his mother was the daughter of an Anglican clergyman.

Grey’s grandfather, Brigadier-General Sir Alexander Hore-Ruthven, VC, had been created a peer as Baron Gowrie of Canberra, in 1935, after a tour as Governor of South Australia. Subsequently, in 1945, after eight years as Governor-General of Australia, he was advanced to Earl of Gowrie.

In 1942, when Grey was three, his father died at an Italian hospital in North Africa of wounds received when leading a commando raid in Tripoli, where he was attached to the Special Air Service Brigade. Grey grew up mostly in Ireland, in Dublin, Donegal and Co Kildare.

When his grandfather was granted the Earldom in 1945, Grey became Viscount Ruthven of Canberra. The new Earl was Lieutenant-Governor of Windsor Castle...

He succeeded his grandfather in 1955 – and in 1956 his great-uncle as Baron Ruthven, of Gowrie (created 1919) – during his schooldays at Eton. 

Down from Oxford, Gowrie seemed set on an academic career. After brief spells working on the TLS and teaching at a girls’ school, where he met his first wife, he went as a postgraduate to Harvard. He was then a visiting lecturer at the State University of New York, Buffalo, in 1963-64; a tutor at Harvard from 1965 to 1968; and Lecturer in English and American Literature at University College London from 1969 to 1972.

He made his maiden speech in the House of Lords in 1968, during a debate on reforming the House. He described himself as “youngish, Toryish and hereditary-ish”, and expressed the view that the hereditary principle could be justified only if it was in a constant state of growth and organic change.

In 1971 he was appointed a Conservative Whip, and Parliamentary Representative to the United Nations. He was then a Lord-in-Waiting (Government Whip) from 1972 to 1974, when the Conservatives lost the general election.

From 1979 to 1981 he was Minister of State at the Department of Employment. When Mrs Thatcher invited him to be Secretary of State, he declined; he felt that whoever held the office should be able to defend his policy in person in the House of Commons. “It was brave,” he said of the Prime Minister’s offer, “but she would have regretted it, and I was thinking of her.”

From Employment, Gowrie moved to the Northern Ireland Office as Minister of State (deputy to the Secretary of State), from 1981 to 1983. Looking back a decade later, he said: “I enjoyed being Minister for the Arts very much, but my particular interest was Northern Ireland.” From 1981 to 1985 he was also a Government spokesman on Employment and for the Treasury.

On leaving the Government in 1985 Gowrie was recruited by Alfred Taubman, the American proprietor of Sotheby’s, to be chairman of, first, Sotheby’s International, from 1985 to 1986, and then of Sotheby’s Europe, from 1987 to 1994. His chairmanships spanned the period of the art-market boom of the late 1980s and its subsequent slump in the early 1990s. Throughout the period, real power at Sotheby’s lay in the hands of the firm’s American executives.

Gowrie became chairman of the Arts Council at a particularly tense moment in its history. For the first time since 1946 the Treasury had cut the Council’s annual grant (by £3 million, to £186 million), and had advised them to plan on the basis of no real increase for the next three years. Moreover, there had recently been a storm of protest over funding cuts for London orchestras, and the whole system of arts funding was subject to widespread criticism.

Lord Gowrie was chairman of The Really Useful Group, the theatre company, from 1985 to 1990, and of Development Securities, the property company, from 1995. He was for a time chairman of the trustees of the Serpentine Gallery. He was a member of the Select Committee on House of Lords Offices from 1997.

His publications include several volumes of his poems, A Postcard from Don Giovanni (1972), The Domino Hymn: poems from Harefield (2005), Third Day (2008), The Italian Visitor (2013) and Collected Poems (2014); The Genius of British Painting (jointly, 1975); The Conservative Opportunity (jointly, 1976); and Derek Hill: an appreciation (1987). He considered the poet W H Auden to be “the one undisputed writer of genius born on this island this [the 20th] century”.

Lord Gowrie was sworn of the Privy Council in 1984. He was a Fellow of the Royal College of Art and in 1997 received the Order of Picasso from Unesco. He had a heart transplant at Harefield in 1999, and also a serious and persistent problem with his hip following a fall in hospital – where, because of the heart and the hip, he remained for the best part of a year.

He married first, in 1962 (dissolved 1973), Xandra Bingley; they had a son, Viscount Ruthven of Canberra, who was born in 1964 and succeeds to the peerages. He married secondly, in 1974, Adelheid (“Neiti”) Countess von der Schulenburg, whose father, Fritz Dietlof Count von der Schulenburg, was executed in 1944 for his part in the July 20 plot against Hitler.

The 2nd Earl of Gowrie, born November 26 1939, died September 24 2021

[colinp]

From the Daily Telegraph 25 September 2021 -  GOWRIE Grey. The Earl of Gowrie, PC. Poet, politician, teacher. Born in Dublin on 26th November 1939. Died at his home in Wales on 24th September 2021, after a long illness.

[Henry W]

From the Court Circular

27 September 2022
Balmoral Castle

The King and The Queen Consort were represented by the Duke of Wellington at the Service of Thanksgiving for the Earl of Gowrie which was held at St. James's Church, 197 Piccadilly, London W1, this afternoon.

[colinp]

The Secretary of State for Justice has approved the succession of Patrick Leo Brer Ruthven as Earl of Gowrie in the Peerage of the United Kingdom.  Lord Gowrie has also proved his succession to the baronies of Ruthven of Gowrie and of Gowrie - College of Arms website