Gordon Lucy: The 7th Marquess of Londonderry - liberal unionist who helped win Battle of Britain

The 7th Marquess of Londonderry was educated at Eton and Sandhurst. He had a military career before reluctantly entering the House of Commons as MP for Maidstone at the General Election of 1906. He went to the House of Lords on his father’s death in 1915 and, like many parliamentarians with military backgrounds, resumed his military career during the Great War, becoming second-in-command of the Royal Horse Guards and being twice mentioned in dispatches.

One of the five Ulster Unionist delegates to the Irish Convention and easily the most liberal, he served on that body between 1917 and 1918.

The Ulster Unionist bottom line in the Convention was to secure the position which Unionists had gained in 1916 (permanent six-county exclusion) without appearing intransigent and unreasonable.

However, Londonderry was attracted to an anonymous federal scheme which would have provided for two provincial legislatures, one for the six counties and another for the twenty-six counties, each with an executive responsible to it, along with an Irish senate which would also have an executive responsible to it. He even offered to table the proposal for discussion.

An appalled H T Barrie, the North Londonderry MP and the leader of the Ulster Unionist delegation, and Adam Duffin, a shrewd liberal unionist linen merchant, managed to persuade him that tabling and advocating such an approach would suggest weakness on the part of Ulster Unionists and thereby prevented Londonderry from breaking ranks.

By virtue of Londonderry’s membership of the Convention, we have the benefit of Horace Plunkett’s evaluation of him. According to Plunkett, the Convention’s chairman, Londonderry ‘had all the charm of his father and a good share of his mother’s brains. He seemed to belong a little more to the later nineteenth and earlier twentieth century than either of his parents’.

He was a Janus-like figure, looking simultaneously to both the future and the past. Some of his interests and thinking were very modern and forward-looking but he also had a fixation with the 2nd Marquess, the most famous member of the family, as Lillian Spender, the wife of the cabinet secretary, recognized in the 1920s.

She noted: ‘he apes his ancestor, the great Lord Castlereagh, wears a high black stock over his collar and a very tightly fitting frock coat and doesn’t look as if he belongs to this century at all.’

Furthermore, he addressed his civil servants as if they were domestics and emphasised his views by striking the ministerial table with his riding crop.

Turning to his more twentieth-century persona, Londonderry was appointed to the Air Council at Westminster in 1919 and Under-Secretary of State for Air in 1920 and developed a life-long passion for aviation. He would have preferred to carve out a career for himself in British politics but was prevailed upon to become Northern Ireland’s first Minister of Education and Leader of the Senate.

Liberal and secular in his outlook, through the Education Act of 1923 (one of the most significant acts of the Northern Ireland Parliament) he sought to create a secular and non-denominational educational system in which religious instruction would be only a voluntary appendage after school hours. He thereby incurred the wrath of the Protestant Churches, the Orange Order and the Roman Catholic Church. His encounters with Protestant Churchmen, and especially Presbyterian ones, were bruising: ‘I was the only person who stood up to the Presbyterians and I should have done more in that direction if I had felt that my colleagues would have (I won’t say supported me) not worked against me. There is no democratic feeling and very little religion amongst a good many of the well-known Churchmen’.

He was liberal in other areas too. For example, he successfully opposed a proposal that would have virtually eliminated female jurors and favoured a more conciliatory approach to law and order than Dawson Bates, the Minister of Home Affairs.

He was critical of the Unionist Party which he thought was incapable of taking ‘the long view’ and its role as a short-term ‘survivalist’ movement primarily geared to quasi-ethnic mobilisation around a single objective: Northern Ireland’s survival as part of the UK. While there is much to admire in Londonderry’s genuinely wider British vision, he unfortunately failed to appreciate that the devolution settlement of 1920 virtually condemned Northern Ireland to parochial politics of exactly that hue.

Disillusioned with Northern Ireland politics, he turned his attention to British politics and became First Commissioner of Works (1928-29 and August to October 1931), Secretary of State for Air (1931-35) and Lord Privy Seal and Leader of the House of Lords (1935).

As air minister, he favoured rearmament and, in the face of serious opposition, encouraged the building of a new generation of fighters and the development of radar, thereby making an important contribution to winning the Battle of Britain.

Very conscious of Lord Castlereagh’s reputation as one of the outstanding British Foreign Secretaries of the nineteenth century, the 7th Marquess sought to emulate his efforts ‘to bring the world to peaceful habits’ by promoting Anglo-German friendship to avert another world war. (He was haunted by the deaths of his brother officers and family and school friends in the Great War.) He visited Germany where he was received by senior Nazis. Ribbentrop, then German Ambassador to the UK (and later German foreign minister), visited him at Mount Stewart. Unfortunately, lacking the Castlereagh’s political acumen, his personal diplomacy was inept. Well intentioned and high-minded, like Neville Chamberlain, he was completely out of his depth.

He wrote two books – Ourselves and Germany (1938) and Wings of Destiny (1943) – but neither succeeded in rehabilitating his reputation. This aspect of his career is the subject of a significant, if perhaps unfortunately titled, book by Ian Kershaw: Making Friends with Hitler: Lord Londonderry and Britain’s Road to War (London, 2004).

The 7th Marquess died in February 1949 at Mount Stewart, aged 70.