Archibald Maule Ramsay

Captain Archibald Henry Maule Ramsay (4 May 1894 – 11 March 1955) was a British Army officer who later went into politics as a Scottish Unionist Member of Parliament (MP). From the late 1930s, he developed increasingly strident antisemitic views. In 1940, after his involvement with a suspected spy at the United States embassy, he became the only British MP to be interned under Defence Regulation 18B. Family and early life Ramsay was from a Scottish aristocratic family; his grandfather was Sir Henry Ramsay, a younger brother of George Ramsay, 12th Earl of Dalhousie. He was educated at Eton College and the Royal Military College, Sandhurst, then in September 1913 was commissioned into the Coldstream Guards. After the outbreak of the First World War, Ramsey served in France for two years, then received a severe head injury before being invalided out and transferred to the War Office in London. Here he met and on 30 April 1917 married Lady Ninian Crichton-Stuart, née Hon. Ismay Preston, a daughter of Viscount Gormanston and widow of Lord Ninian Crichton-Stuart MP, who had been killed on active service in 1915. His wife was the mother of three surviving children. The couple later had four sons together; the eldest died on active service in 1943. As the war was coming to an end, Ramsay served at the British War Mission in Paris. He retired from the Army with the rank of captain in 1920. He spent the 1920s as a company director, near Arbroath, Angus, and became active in the Unionist Party. In the 1931 general election, Ramsay was elected as MP for Peebles and Southern Midlothian. He was not considered a potential candidate for high office; the most senior appointment he obtained was as a Government member of the Potato Marketing Board. Spanish Civil War After the Spanish Civil War broke out, Ramsay became a strong supporter of the Nationalists under Francisco Franco, largely arising out of his opposition to the violent anti-clericalism of the Spanish Republicans and their attacks on the Roman Catholic Church. In the early months of the war, he objected in Parliament to what he saw as bias in BBC news reports on Spain; he pointed to links between Spanish Republicans and the Soviet Union.