Lord Monk Bretton
Tory hereditary peer and dairy farmer who stood for election to the reformed House of Lords
THE 3RD LORD MONK BRETTON, who has died aged 97, was the sort of Tory peer whose departure from the House of Lords in 1999 robbed the upper house of much of its rural colour and connections.
He succeeded to the peerage on the death of his father in 1933 when he was just nine years old, took his place on the Conservative benches of the House of Lords in January 1948 and made his maiden speech that March in a debate about the slaughter of animals, when he argued for the humane killing of domestic animals used for food.
A Sussex landowner, Lord Monk Bretton was particularly interested in dairy farming, establishing the Kingsbridge herd of pedigree Holsteins at Cooksbridge, near Lewes in the early 1960s.
His contributions at Westminster were infrequent and mainly revolved around rural concerns. In 1953 and again in 1955, for example, he spoke in debates about the need to control the rabbit population.
He rarely rebelled, although in the early 1980s he was one of 41 Tories who rejected government proposals to allow councils to charge for school transport for distances over three miles, and in 1985 he moved an amendment to the Transport Bill (which brought in bus deregulation) to protect some subsidised rural bus routes. The amendment was defeated by just one vote.
In 1999, after 51 years as a member of the upper house, he was among the 208 hopefuls who put themselves forward for election by their peers to be among 75 hereditaries who would remain in a reformed House of Lords.
Lord Monk Bretton pledged that: “If selected, I am now able to shed outside commitments and increase both output and attendance. I see it as a duty that one should offer to serve.”
He was not surprised when he came in 95th, but warned that the Blair government’s reforms to the House of Lords were “a Pandora’s box that may prove problematical for the future”.
Lord Monk Bretton made his valedictory speech in November 1999 in a debate about the dairy industry – “the sheet anchor of British farming” – hoping that a subsequent speaker in the debate would continue to “carry the torch for British dairying”.
John Charles Dodson was born on July 17 1924, the only son of John William Dodson, 2nd Baron Monk Bretton, a diplomat, and Ruth, née Brand.
The Monk Bretton peerage had been created in 1884 for his grandfather, John George Dodson (1825-97), a Liberal MP for East Sussex and friend of Gladstone, under whom he served as Financial Secretary to the Treasury, President of the Local Government Board and Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster.
After succeeding to the title on his father’s death, Lord Monk Bretton was educated at Westminster and read Agriculture at New College, Oxford.
In 1958 he married Zoe Scott, and 10 years later they moved into “Shelley’s Folly”, an eight-bedroom Grade I listed Queen Anne house which his greatgrandfather, Sir John Dodson, a judge, had acquired near Barcombe, East Sussex from the family of the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley.
The house, built in 1686-87 by Theobald Shelley, had acquired two Victorian wings, becoming something of a hotchpotch. Until the Monk Brettons took up residence in 1968 it had mostly been let out – most famously in 1915 to the Marchioness of Queensberry and her son Lord Alfred Douglas, who had scandalised polite society as “Bosie”, the lover of Oscar Wilde.
Before moving in, the Monk Brettons remodelled the house in character with its original appearance, appointing the architect Raymond Erith, a classicist best known for restoring and enlarging 10 Downing Street, to carry out the work.
A longtime member of the Country Landowners’ Association and the National Farmers’ Union, Lord Monk Bretton was appointed a Deputy Lieutenant for East Sussex in 1983 and was a stalwart of the South of England Agricultural Society show from its foundation in 1967.
In 2004 he and his wife sold Shelley’s Folly and moved to live in Switzerland on the shores of Lake Geneva.
They had two sons, of whom the elder, Christopher Mark Dodson, born in 1958, succeeds as the 4th Baron Monk Bretton.