Exiled Hungarian aristocrat who
Returned to stand for election
COUNT ISTVAN PALFFY, who has died aged 89, stood as a candidate in the Hungarian parliamentary election in 2018 aged 85, in a constituency that his grandfather had represented from 1872 to 1933. He stood for Momentum, a party of young people which rejected the Right-wing policies of Viktor Orbán.
Pálffy was born into one of the oldest aristocratic families in Europe. When writing his family history, he called it The First Thousand Years. However, he only enjoyed briefly the benefits of aristocratic life. By the time he was 15 he had been declared a class enemy by the Communist regime.
He was expelled from his private school and compelled to work as an unskilled labourer. He was later sent to a forced labour camp before escaping to England in 1956.
Count István Pálffy ab Erdőd was born in Budapest on May 22 1933, the son of Count Ferenc Pálffy ab Erdőd and Countess Júlia Apponyi de Nagy Appony. His father’s family claimed descent from a Swabian knight who had settled in Hungary around the year 970. His mother, whose family was ennobled in the 13th century, was related to Queen Geraldine of Albania.
His parents divorced when Istvan was a baby and his mother later married Patrick Leigh Fermor’s friend, Elemér von Klobusiczky, immortalised as “Istvan” in Between the Woods and the Water.
Both families produced soldiers and diplomats, but it was his maternal grandfather, Count Albert Apponyi, who led the Hungarian delegation at the Peace Conference at Versailles in 1919, of whom Istvan Pálffy was most proud.
The outbreak of the Hungarian Uprising in 1956 allowed Istvan Pálffy to escape the country to England. His great-uncle, Count Albert Mensdorff, had been Austrian ambassador. István already spoke English fluently, and there was a ready-made group of Hungarian émigrés willing to welcome him.
Tall, elegant and with an aristocratic roll to his pronunciation of the letter “r”, he cut a dash at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, where he read Moral Sciences. At Cambridge he had an unusual encounter with CS Lewis on an after-dinner stroll back to his rooms, when, in an attempt to break the ice, Pálffy asked Lewis if he thought the English obsession with the weather had anything to do with the sinking of the Spanish Armada.
Lewis remained silent, but the next day sent Pálffy a note saying he had found a reference in a medieval play showing that the English obsession with the weather predated the Armada’s sinking by several centuries.
On leaving Cambridge Pálffy spent a few years in the advertising industry which provided him with an income but little intellectual satisfaction.
He was a regular patron of the Gay Hussar Hungarian restaurant in Soho, and once arrived for lunch to find a delegation from the Hungarian Communist Party being entertained by some diplomats. The head waiter, asked Pálffy if he wished to be seated away from the group. “Not an inch, put me right up against them,” came the reply.
Pálffy eventually found his intellectual metier in the emerging computer industry and applied his intellect to designing information systems for libraries. His clients were as diverse as the British Museum Library and the Shah of Iran, for whom he spent several years travelling to Tehran to develop the computer system for a proposed National Library.
With the collapse of Communism in 1989, István Pálffy returned to Budapest, where he bought a flat on the Rózsadomb, a hill in Buda overlooking the city. There he was regularly sought out by historians and others curious to know about a man who had survived the vicissitudes of communism without bitterness.
A son and a daughter survive him. His wife predeceased him.