The Reverend Sir Timothy Forbes Adam, Bt
Actor who worked with Noël Coward but gave up the West End stage for life as a hunting parson
THE REVEREND SIR TIMOTHY FORBES ADAM, 4TH BARONET, who has died aged 95, gave up a career on the West End stage and a landed inheritance for the life of a sporting country parson.
Descended on both sides from grandees of British India, Timothy Forbes Adam was a talented young actor who appeared in London in the early 1950s in Noël Coward’s Quadrille, Peter Brook’s production of Jean Anouilh’s Colombe, and The Three Sisters at the Aldwych Theatre with Ralph Richardson and Celia Johnson. In 1954 he married the actress Penelope Munday while both were in rep at Dundee, returning for the evening performance after the wedding.
Soon afterwards, Forbes Adam’s mother handed over to him the Escrick Park estate near Selby in North Yorkshire which she had inherited from her father, Lord Wenlock. Forbes Adam brought his young family to live there, but an intense Christian faith was already calling him towards the priesthood. Having passed the estate to his younger brother, Nigel – their middle brother Desmond had died in a car accident – he made retreats at the Community of the Resurrection at Mirfield, studied Theology at Chichester and was ordained in 1962.
After a curacy at St Nicholas, Guisborough, he became rector of Barton-in-fabis with Thrumpton, near Nottingham, in 1964; from 1970 to 1983 he was priest-in-charge of Southstoke with Midford in Somerset and thereafter, until 1991, non-stipendiary
minister of Tadmarton, Epwell and the Sibfords in Oxfordshire. Assiduous in his pastoral work, he also enjoyed life to the full – and encouraged those around him to do likewise.
A good horseman, he generally managed to hunt twice a week and loved the company of hunting people. In later years he was ex officio chaplain to the Middleton Hunt – with which, despite pleas from his family, he rode into his seventies. Only the long interruption of the 2001 foot-andmouth outbreak persuaded him that it was time to stop.
Stephen Timothy Beilby Forbes Adam (always known as Timmy) was born in Bombay on November 19 1923, the second child and eldest son of Colin Forbes Adam, who was private secretary to the Governor of Bombay and later chairman of Yorkshire Post Newspapers. Colin’s father, Frank Forbes Adam, 1st baronet, had gone out to India in 1872 as a merchant and prospered as president of the Bank of Bombay.
Timmy’s mother, Irene Forbes Adam, was the only child of Beilby Lawley, 3rd Lord Wenlock, who was Governor of Madras in the 1890s and whose family had been seated at Escrick since 1820. Timmy was still a toddler when the family returned there – at first to live in the vast Escrick Hall, which needed 30 indoor servants, and later in a handsome but more manageable Queen Anne house at Skipwith. Escrick Hall became Queen Margaret’s boarding school for girls.
Timmy was educated at Abinger Hill prep school, which he enjoyed, and Eton, which he loathed – spending as much time as he could making dens by the river with his lifelong friend, Nicholas Mosley. Joining the Army in 1942, he was commissioned in the Rifle Brigade and landed in Normandy in 1944 but on night patrol he was accidentally shot in the leg by a brother officer (and Eton contemporary) and put out of action for nine months; he later served in Malaya and Java.
After demobilisation he went to Balliol College, Oxford, but was rusticated in his first term and did not return. Instead – with the encouragement of his mother, who had herself yearned to be an actress and had made a theatre for the children at Skipwith – he turned to the stage, winning a scholarship to Rada.
Timmy Forbes Adam retired to a farmhouse on what was by then his nephew’s estate. He maintained his vocation as a non-stipendiary minister in the parishes of Escrick, Stillingfleet and Naburn and in priestly support for friends and family. He also took a lively part in country life, enjoying shooting, dancing and dining out across the county, as well as riding to hounds.
He was separated from his wife, though they did not divorce until much later. It was indicative of a worldlier side to his nature that when the alleged adulteries of his youngest daughter Sonia’s then husband, the television actor James Nesbitt, were exposed in a Sunday tabloid, Forbes Adam made a public statement of forgiveness – “Which honest man could not but say: ‘There but for the Grace of God go I?’” – neatly compounding Nesbitt’s discomfiture.
In his later years Timmy Forbes Adam formed a loving partnership with Mary Rose Blacker, née O’neill, which lasted until her death in 2016. He is survived by his daughters, Victoria, Lucy and Sonia; a fourth daughter, Kate, died last year. The baronetcy in which he succeeded his cousin Christopher in 2009 passes to his brother Nigel, born in 1930.
The Rev Sir Timothy Forbes Adam, 4th Bt, born November 19 1923, died March 22 2019