The Earl of Lovelace
Last scion of a noble family, whose antecedents included Byron and an early computer programmer
THE 5TH EARL OF LOVELACE, who has died aged 66, was the last custodian of a distinguished and colourful line of descent stemming from, among others, the poet Lord Byron, the 17th-century philosopher John Locke and Jane Seymour, the third of Henry VIII’S wives.
The family fortunes were founded by Peter King, the son of Locke’s cousin and a grocer from Exeter, who rose to become Lord Chief Justice and, in 1725, Lord Chancellor. He was ennobled that year as Baron King and Ockham. A century later, the 8th Baron, a diplomat, was married to Ada, the only legitimate child of Byron, born to his wife, known as Annabella and in her own right Baroness Wentworth.
Ada was a considerable heiress as well as cousin to Lord Melbourne, then Prime Minister, and in the honours bestowed in 1838 to mark Queen Victoria’s coronation King was raised to the rank of earl.
He took the Lovelace name to acknowledge a family connection of Ada’s. She is often described as the first computer programmer because of her work with the mathematician Charles Babbage. He had proposed an automatic computing machine, the Analytical Engine, for which the countess wrote a governing algorithm. Her proficiency with numbers did not save her, however, from losing vast sums gambling.
Not notably at ease with computers himself, the 5th Earl, Peter Lovelace, was otherwise proud of such links to his forebears and passed much of his life at Torridon House, which served as the eclectic final repository of the family’s history.
Sited in remote, mountainous Wester Ross, northwest Scotland, the sandstone house had been acquired in 1960, though the Lovelaces had had a house nearby with a 12,000-acre estate in the Ben Damph forest since the late 19th century.
Much of the land, now beloved of walkers and climbers, went to the National Trust of Scotland in the Sixties in lieu of death duties when Lovelace inherited the title. In 2015 he sold the house and its contents at auction, reasoning that it was time for others to enjoy them. He himself planned to build a new property at Inverness, which he saw completed just before his death.
Some valuable paintings had gone from Torridon a generation earlier, but the lots included the official purses of Lord Chancellor King, a silver dinner service from 1774 and gothic-style furniture designed by the 1st Earl for Horsley Towers, the house in Surrey (aggrandised by Charles Barry) that had then been the family seat.
The 5th Earl had also inherited John Locke’s bed (not comfortable), his father’s sporting trophies from his time as a big game hunter in East Africa (as well as his gorilla-like gait), and a copy of Astarte. This was the 2nd Earl’s privately printed defence of the charge by Harriet Beecher Stowe (the author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin) that Byron had had an incestuous relationship with his half-sister, Augusta Leigh.
Other treasures included the 1st Baron’s leather-bound diaries; the entries were written in a code that Harvard University is still endeavouring to crack.
Peter Axel William Locke King was born on November 26 1951. His father, the 4th Earl, was an adventurous sort; the novelist Anthony Powell, an Eton contemporary, recalled him crashing an aeroplane and at once going out and buying another. He settled in Tanganyika (now Tanzania), where he founded a club for expatriates, the Fig Tree, thought to feature in Hemingway’s Green Hills of Africa. His friends included Baron Bror von Blixenfinecke, whose wife Karen wrote Out of Africa. When the Baron’s nephew died, Lovelace married his Danish widow, Manon Lis.
Peter, their only child, grew up with his mother’s four children from her first marriage between Torridon and a family house in southern Sweden (he spoke Swedish fluently).
His mother, a force of nature who smoked cigars and was friends with Louis Armstrong, kept him close and he was educated at home by tutors. Torridon was so out of the way that one of the houses on the estate was lit by gas. Diversions included fishing and stalking, although Peter became more conservation-minded in later years.
His father died when he was 13 and subsequently he was sent to a small school in Pimlico, London. Fellow pupils included a young Indian potentate who would arrive by Bentley. As an inquisitive youth in the late Sixties, his great delight was meeting people and he worked as a barman in a series of venues, among them Die Fledermaus, a Nordic-themed nightclub in Soho.
Later he opened a boutique in Inverness selling Swedish clothes. A relation had started the Brooklands racetrack and Lovelace liked to speed across northern Scotland in a bright yellow two-seater Saab. (As a young man, he and a friend somehow managed to strand five cars in a Swedish snowdrift.) For a time he also ran as a hotel the house across the loch previously owned by the family.
After his mother’s death in 1990 Lovelace spent more time in London, speculating in property and attending the Lords as a cross-bencher. While he valued his privacy, he had no airs or graces, treating his fellow peers and ghillies in the same amiable manner.
Indeed, he could be courteous and generous with money to a fault, though he was not without streaks of stubbornness and eccentricity (he had a vehement dislike of Glaswegians). A keen smoker, Lovelace once painstakingly worked out a roundabout itinerary to Australia, via Hawaii, making short hops on airlines that had yet to ban lighting up on board.
His first marriage, in 1980, to Kirsteen, daughter of the singer Calum Kennedy, was dissolved in 1989. He met his second wife, Kathie Smolders, an Australian, when living in Turkey in the early Nineties. They were married in 1994. She survives him, but he had no children or heirs and the peerages become extinct.
The 5th Earl of Lovelace, born November 26 1951, died January 31 2018