Lord Strathcona and Mount Royal
Laird of Colonsay and government minister who helped save the Great Britain and the Bath Festival
THE 4TH BARON STRATHCONA AND MOUNT ROYAL, who has died aged 94, was a Conservative defence minister, one of the saviours of Brunel’s Great Britain, chairman of the Bath Festival during Yehudi Menuhin’s final years as artistic director, and for half a century laird of Colonsay.
Strathcona divided his life between Westminster (he was on the Tory front bench for eight years), the West Country and Colonsay. He inherited the temperate island 40 miles off the coast of Argyll with his title in 1959. Having failed to sell it – he did part with its smaller neighbour Oronsay – he fostered tourism as Colonsay’s population declined from an initial 170.
The island, eight miles by three, had been bought in 1905 by the first Lord Strathcona, who built the Canadian Pacific Railway. The 18th-century Colonsay House became the family seat, though Strathcona moved into the smaller Kiloran, his elder son taking over the House. When he married his first wife in Bath Abbey in 1954, 30 tenants made the 550-mile journey by boat and train, led by a piper. They brought a silver cigarette box, presented to the couple by the estate’s factor.
Inheriting Colonsay, the 4th Baron admitted: “I don’t know the full extent to which my father subsidised the island.” He devised plans to turn it into a resort and “jazz up” its hotel. But he found it hard to balance the books, upsetting locals in 1967 by making 12 of the estate’s 15 employees redundant, and in he 1974 put Colonsay up for sale.
Labour MPS urged the government to intervene, but after his daughter Kate married on the island Strathcona took it off the market. In 1980, with the help of his second wife, he began letting vacant cottages and wings of Colonsay House as 21 holiday units, and reopened its golf course.
A wartime naval officer, Strathcona was deputy chairman of the project to recover the Great Britain from the Falklands. She was brought back to Bristol in 1970, 84 years after her abandonment as a hulk at Port Stanley having been damaged trying to round the Horn, and 34 years after being beached in Sparrow Cove with holes punched in her hull.
Strathcona – who had himself converted a lifeboat into a Chinese junk – reported for The Daily Telegraph on his “bid to save Brunel’s masterpiece from certain death by decay”, financed by £150,000 from the offshore millionnaire Jack Hayward.
The 1,400-ton hulk was patched, refloated and had a pontoon beached under her, while Strathcona combed the islands for items from the ship and accepted ownership of it from the governor. She was towed to Bristol on the pontoon, and greeted by tumultuous crowds on June 23 1970. Strathcona upset Bristol councillors by criticising their initial lack of enthusiasm.
He also bemoaned the difficulties of staging an ambitious festival in Bath with what he deemed insufficient backing from the city, where he then had a home. He succeeded Sir Edwin Leather as chairman of the festival in 1965 following a period as deputy chairman; in 1963 Strathcona had lent one of the soloists his harpsichord. Menuhin was seven years into his tenure and the festival’s reputation was high, but staging an innovative programme each June proved financially taxing.
Strathcona’s first festival as chairman – 1966 – was dominated by a session in which Menuhin partnered the sitar virtuoso Ravi Shankar, who had just captured the imagination of the Beatles. But Menuhin believed the festival had to stage full-scale opera; the Festival Society jibbed at the expense, and after the 1968 festival Menuhin stood down. A triumvirate of Sir Michael Tippett, Colin Davis and the impresario Jack Phipps replaced him.
When Labour’s arts minister Jennie Lee opened the 1969 festival, Strathcona, unusually, showed his political slip. With an election imminent, he surprised her by saying he hoped her successor would do as much for the arts as she had. He completed his five-year term with the 1970 festival, which showed a surplus for the first time in more than a decade.
Donald Euan Palmer Howard was born on November 26 1923, son of the 3rd Baron and Diana, daughter of the 1st Baron Wakehurst. Educated at Eton and Trinity College, Cambridge, he served in the Royal Navy from 1942 to 1947. Demobilised a lieutenant, he studied further at Mcgill University, Montreal – endowed by his grandfather – before joining the business consultants Urwick Orr. In 1957 he moved to Somerset to become joint managing director of Kelston Engineering; he also chaired Tallon, the ballpoint pen manufacturers, and Eagle Star.
For 14 years Strathcona kept a low profile in the Lords. Then, in June 1973, Edward Heath appointed him a Lord in Waiting (government whip). His main function was to greet foreign dignitaries and members of the Royal family at Heathrow, but he did speak for the government, once urging drivers to keep calm when confronted with stupidity on the roads.
In January 1974 Heath made him Parliamentary Under-secretary for the RAF, in the footsteps of his father, who had been a War Office minister in the 1930s. He was there just eight weeks – long enough to arouse comment in RAF messes about his naval beard –before Heath lost the snap “Who governs Britain?” election.
In opposition he was a spokesman on defence and energy, the latter taking up more of his time as Labour moved to exploit North Sea oil and create the British National Oil Corporation. Strathcona helped defeat the government when it sought to give BNOC the edge over private sector competitiors, and to prevent British Gas acquiring an upstream monopoly.
By now deputy Opposition leader in the Lords, he pulled off a hat-trick when Eric Varley, Industry Secretary, bowed to peers’ pressure and removed ship repairing from the Bill to nationalise aircraft and shipbuilding. Strathcona hailed the retreat as proof that “we have exercised our function well”.
Firmly on the side of the Falklanders after the Great Britain, Strathcona in 1977 urged Labour ministers to “own up” if they were planning to hand the islanders over to Argentina without their consent.
When Mrs Thatcher came to power in 1979, she sent Strathcona back to the MOD as Minister of State, with responsibility for procurement. He was the only member of her government – then or for some years to come – with a beard, a factor some blamed for his sacking in her first reshuffle in 1981.
At the MOD Strathcona approved the development of the Stingray torpedo; announced that service personnel would be able to buy their homes on the same terms as council tenants; and bore the brunt of a campaign, headed by Airey Neave’s widow, for ex-prisoners of war to receive back pay snaffled in 1950 by the Treasury. She was supported in this by Lord Shinwell, who had been Minister for War at the time, who said the decision had been taken without his knowledge.
Strathcona’s legacy was a report recommending closure of one of the three “procurement airfields” – Farnborough, Boscombe Down and Bedford. Today only Boscombe continues in service use. He was also part of an MOD group that upheld the claims of short, stubby frigates over the long, thin ones favoured by the Navy.
After the Falklands conflict, he became president of the Falkland Islands Trust. He also chaired the Hales Trophy Trust, which awards the Blue Riband for the fastest crossing of the Atlantic, the Steamboat Association of Great Britain and the Coastal Forces Heritage Trust.
Lord Strathcona married firstly, in 1954, Lady Jane, second daughter of the 12th Earl Waldegrave; they had two sons and four daughters. The marriage was dissolved in 1977, and in 1978 he married, secondly, Patricia Middleton, who survives him.
He is succeeded as 5th Baron by his elder son, Donald Alexander Smith Howard.
Lord Strathcona and Mount Royal, born November 26 1923, died June 18 2018