Lord Swinfen
Philanthropist who founded a charity to link doctors in remote places with Western medical experts
THE 3RD LORD SWINFEN, who has died aged 83, survived a problematic relationship with his mother, the novelist Mary Wesley, to become a noted philanthropist and advocate of “telemedicine”.
In 1998, with his wife Pat, a former nurse, he established the Swinfen Charitable Trust, which uses email to link doctors in poor, remote or dangerous parts of the world with medical specialists in the West.
In 1995 the couple had been volunteering at the Centre for the Rehabilitation of the Paralysed at Mirpur, Dhaka, in Bangladesh, because of Lord Swinfen’s work as a fundraiser for a British charity specialising in spinal injuries.
A doctor at the centre showed them a computer “telemedicine” program he was developing to obtain medical advice from a distance, and they immediately wanted to become involved.
“We decided we had to do something to help the needy in the developing world,” Lord Swinfen told an interviewer in 2008. “Everyone was doing something, but no one was providing medical specialists this way.”
Though neither of the Swinfens had used a computer before, working from their 16th-century farmhouse in Kent they established their charity.
Cases started flowing in from around the world, and over time the trust grew to link doctors in more than 80 of the world’s poorest nations, using email and digital cameras, with more than 500 specialists working without pay, many recruited by the Swinfens during visits to medical conferences or by word of mouth, saving many lives.
The Swinfens co-wrote papers on the implementation of telemedicine in the developing world and both were appointed MBE for their services to international telemedicine.
Lord Swinfen was the son of Charles Swinfen (Carol) Eady, 2nd Baron Swinfen, a barrister who had inherited the fortune his father Charles, the first Lord Swinfen, had made at the Chancery Bar before becoming Master of the Rolls (and dying) in 1919.
In 1937 Carol Swinfen had married Mary Farmar (later Mary Wesley, the novelist), the beautiful but rebellious daughter of Colonel Harold Mynors Farmar, CMG, DSO.
In his official biography, Wild Mary, Patrick Marnham explained that she had agreed to the marriage to a man she would describe as “very nice” but “remarkably boring” to get away from her parents. By her account it was a disaster from the beginning. On their honeymoon there was “puzzlingly, no sex”, and they only slept together eight times in the following two years.
Somehow, though, she managed to conceive a son and heir, and Roger Mynors Swinfen Eady was born on December 14 1938 at the family home in Ovington Square, Knightsbridge.
She described her firstborn as a “delightful, outgoing child, who relished physical activities and was the spitting image of his father”.
As a young child, Roger had a rather touching ambition “to have children and live in the same house”, something that would be denied him until his own marriage.
After his birth, Mary considered her wifely duties done. With the outbreak of war, she was recruited by the War Office to decipher German codes and, leaving Roger with an aunt in Suffolk, embarked on a series of affairs.
Through a friend, Betty Paynter, she met Paul Ziegler, a Czech émigré, and had an affair, first with him, then with his married brother Heinz, by whom she became pregnant.
When her unit was moved to Bletchley Park in September 1940 Mary resigned and joined Betty at Boskenna, the Paynter family home in Cornwall, where Betty’s father kept open house for pilots and other officers, including allied émigrés and SOE agents.
When her second son Toby was born in February 1941, her husband accepted him as his own, but with Heinz Ziegler serving in Bomber Command, and her husband in London, she plunged into the uninhibited social life that would become the subject of her 1984 novel The Camomile Lawn.
“It got to the state where one woke up in the morning, reached across the pillow and thought, ‘Let’s see. Who is it this time?’” she recalled.
Heinz Ziegler was killed in action in 1944, and the same year Mary began an affair with another married man, the handsome but unstable would-be author Eric Siepmann.
By this time her marriage to Carol Swinfen was effectively over and in 1945 they were divorced on the grounds of her desertion. During the court proceedings her brother and sister took her husband’s side, causing a family rift, and Lord Swinfen was awarded custody of the children.
Mary and Siepmann eventually married in 1952 and she had another son. However, she and her first husband remained on cordial terms and she continued to see her elder sons, though relations were often strained.
In a letter to Siepmann before their marriage she wrote that Roger was “very nice, but in the middle of his niceness, pop! He is Carol and I get a terrible claustrophobic feeling that I used to have when we were married. I see nothing of myself in him as I do in Toby.”
She also became resentful of the influence of her sister Susan, with whom Roger spent much time as a boy, and Susan’s husband Stephen Scammell who, as Mary saw it, was determined to undermine her relationship with Roger.
Roger was sent, aged eight, to board at Summer Fields School, Oxford, then to a prep school in Cardiganshire, before Westminster. He went on to the RMA, Sandhurst, after which he received a Short Service Commission in the Royal Scots Guards, rising to the rank of lieutenant. He subsequently qualified as a chartered surveyor.
In 1962 he married Patricia Blackmore, a lieutenant in Queen Alexandra’s Royal Army Nursing Corps, with whom he had three daughters and a son.
Mary Wesley attended their wedding and visited them at their home in Kent, though according to Patrick Marnham, they dreaded her visits because she would start them arguing with each other within half an hour of her arrival, and they thought she was unkind to their children (bar one – Mary Wesley was a woman who had favourites).
In 1969 Siepmann took his own life, and on the night after his death Mary told Roger, who until then had believed Toby was his full brother, the truth.
If this was an attempt to mend family fences, it backfired. After inheriting the title on his father’s death in 1977, Roger, urged on by Scammell, attempted to cut Toby Eady, by now a successful literary agent, out of the inheritance on grounds of illegitimacy.
This resulted in a bitter legal action that lasted five years and was finally resolved in Toby’s favour in May 1982, on the day Mary Wesley’s first novel, Jumping the Queue, was accepted for publication.
Mary Wesley went on to find fame and wealth as a novelist, but her rift with her eldest son never fully healed. Two months before she died in 2002, Roger paid her a visit.
“It was such a shock to see him after nearly 30 years,” she told Marnham. “I took care not to say anything difficult. But it was such a shock that I did something I’ve never done before. I sleepwalked and fell in the night and hit my head on a radiator.”
She left Roger nothing in her will, a decision partly attributed to her disapproval of his Conservative politics. “My eldest son annoys me because he’s so like his father,” she was quoted as saying.
Lord Swinfen was an active member of the House of Lords, serving on various committees and taking a particular interest in policy towards the disabled.
As well as spending many years with the John Grooms Association for the Disabled, he served at various times as president of the South East Region British Sports Association for the Disabled and honorary president of the Britain Bangladesh Friendship Society.
He was also patron of the Disablement Income Group, of the
1 in 8 Group, the Kunde Foundation, Labrador Rescue South East, and World Orthopaedic Concern. He was director of the American Telemedicine Association from 2009 until 2013, winning its Humanitarian Award in 2018.
In 1999 he was one of the 92 hereditary peers elected to remain in the House of Lords following the passing of the House of Lords Act. He was appointed MBE in 2016.
Lord Swinfen is survived by his wife and children and is succeeded in the peerage by his son, Charles Roger Peregrine Swinfen Eady, born in 1971.
Lord Swinfen, born December 14 1938, died June 5 2022