Lord Digby
Army officer who served as Lord Lieutenant of Dorset and drove the combine at harvest time
LORD DIGBY, who died on Easter Sunday aged 93, served as an officer in the Coldstream Guards during the Emergency in Malaya and in the British Army on the Rhine; he was later a successful Lord Lieutenant of Dorset. The biographer of an earlier family member, Sir Kenelm Digby (16031665), an English courtier, wrote of the family that “something in all the Digbys caused them to win renown by being at odds with society” – though the rogue gene would appear to have been more prevalent among the females of the species.
In the 19th century a Jane Digby became one of the great adventuresses of her time, leaving a trail of husbands and lovers from Bavaria to Syria. In the 20th century Lord Digby’s oldest sister Pamela (later Harriman), would become, as her obituary put it in the Daily Telegraph in 1997, “Winston Churchill’s daughter-in-law, the lover of some of the world’s richest men, a powerful Washington hostess, a multi-millionairess and finally a successful diplomat” – the American ambassador to France from 1993 to 1997.
Lord Digby’s own career followed a more conventional aristocratic path.
He was born Edward Henry Kenelm Digby on July 24 1924, the third child of Edward Kenelm Digby, 11th Baron Digby, KG, DSO, MC & Bar. His mother Pamela (née Bruce) was a daughter of the 2nd Lord Aberdare.
Young Eddie grew up at his family’s 1,500-acre estate at Minterne Magna near Dorchester in Dorset, which had been bought in the late 18th century by Robert Digby (1732-1815), who had served as an Admiral during the American War of Independence.
The present rambling manor house was constructed between 1904 and 1906 to designs by Leonard Stokes, who considered it to be one his best buildings. The gardens, regarded as among the finest in Dorset, are notable for their historic collections of rare rhododendrons and azaleas brought back by the great Victorian plant hunters.
Edward was educated at Eton and Trinity College, Oxford. He then received an emergency commission into the Coldstream Guards and later attended Octu. Following a period of ill health he received a regular commission and in 1948 embarked with 2nd Battalion for Far East Land Forces.
The next two years were spent in Malaya specialising in wireless communications and living in the jungle. His battalion area, 4,000 square miles in size, included the Cameron Highlands from where, in a letter home, he reported a visit to a “very good hotel”, but added: “I don’t know whether it will remain good as we have just arrested the head waiter and barman as communists.”
He was ADC to General Sir John Harding, the C-in-c, Far East Land Forces between 1950 and 1951. He accompanied Harding on a visit to General Douglas Macarthur during the Korean War and again when Harding became C-in-c BAOR. In 1953 he resigned his commission and the following year joined the Regular Army Reserve.
Digby served as a member of Dorchester Rural District Council in 1962 and was a Dorset county councillor from 1966 to 1981, serving as vice-chairman from 1977. Meanwhile, in 1964 he inherited the barony from his father.
Much of his time was devoted to running the estate. At harvest time he could be found driving the combine, although he admitted preferring farm machinery when it broke down because that was when it became “interesting”.
He also set about converting part of the 69-room Minterne House, which had been a Royal Naval hospital during the war, into flats and opening it to groups such as the National Trust and the University of the Third Age.
In the mid-1960s Digby became chairman of the Royal Agricultural Society of the Commonwealth, attending its conferences in Toronto, Nairobi and Cambridge with the society’s president, the Duke of Edinburgh. He was a non-executive director of the construction company Beazer from 1981 to 1992, playing an important role in its expansion, particularly in the US.
Digby, a keen writer of letters to the Daily Telegraph, was also a fine skier and captained the Lords and Commons’ skiing team for five years during their races against Swiss parliamentarians held in Davos each January.
He served as Lord Lieutenant of Dorset from 1984 to 1999, when he was appointed KCVO. His gift for tact was evident in 2015 when he welcomed a party of visitors from the French town of Louviers. He explained the history of his family but diplomatically said little about the massive painting of the Battle of Trafalgar in Minterne House depicting his ancestor, Sir Henry Digby, in action.
In 2010 Digby came to the aid of Julian Fellowes, the creator of Downton Abbey, after Jean Marsh, co-creator of Upstairs Downstairs, accused Fellowes of “overglamorising” the lives of servants. Digby fondly recalled the Mickey Mouse films played in the servants’ hall at Minterne when he was a boy and that the only beating his father ever administered was for being rude to a servant. “The idea that Victorian servants were downtrodden is nonsense,” he told the Daily Mail. “I still get letters from people telling me that their grandmother had such happy memories serving in my house.”
In 1952 he married Dione Sherbrooke, younger daughter of Rear Admiral Robert St Vincent Sherbrooke, VC, who had an eminent career as founder of the Summer Music Society of Dorset. She survives him with two sons and a daughter. His eldest son, Henry, inherits the title.
Edward Digby, 12th Baron Digby, born July 24 1924, died April 1 2018