Gerard Wallop, 9th Earl of Portsmouth

Early life

Gerard was born in Chicago, the eldest son of Oliver Henry Wallop and Marguerite Walker. His father moved to Wyoming, where he was a rancher and served in the Wyoming State Legislature. After the deaths of his two older brothers without sons, Oliver succeeded as Earl of Portsmouth, and renounced his United States citizenship to serve in the House of Lords. Gerard was brought up near Sheridan, Wyoming in the United States, where his parents farmed.

He was educated in England, at Farnborough, at Winchester College and at Balliol College, Oxford. He then farmed at Farleigh Wallop in Hampshire.

Wallop was commissioned a temporary second lieutenant (probationary) in the Reserve Regiment, 2nd Life Guards on 19 January 1917, was transferred to the Guards Machine Gun Regiment on 10 May 1918, and commissioned a temporary lieutenant on 19 July 1918.

Conservative Party politics

Lord Lymington was Conservative Member of Parliament for the Basingstoke constituency from 1929 to 1934. He stepped down and caused a by-election in March 1934 (Henry Maxence Cavendish Drummond Wolff was elected).

In 1930, Lymington attracted media attention with a speech attacking the Conservative leader Stanley Baldwin as "a scheming old bladder of stale wind", saying the Conservatives needed a new leader immediately. As a result, Lymington was contacted by William Sanderson to ask him to join the English Mistery. Lymington described Sanderson as someone "utterly" dedicated to the English Mistery while being something of a "charlatan" with his talk of the mystical "lost secrets" of the English that only he knew. However, Sanderson sought to flatter Lymington, describing himself as a "Genghis Khan" who would sweep away all opposition and saying that if Lymington joined the English Mistery his name would be remembered in England 10,000 years into the future. In September 1930 Lymington joined the English Mistery, a mystical "back-to-the-land" movement, that sought to find the "lost secrets" of the English. They favoured a return to the Middle Ages, supporting deindustrialisation, the revival of the guild system, organic farming, and rule by the aristocracy. Alongside the return of feudalism and absolute monarchy, the English Mistery's ideology contained virulent racism, wanting to protect the English "race" from "inferior races". In 1933, William Sanderson, the leader of the English Mistery proposed Lymington as the future "Lord Protector" of Britain.

Like much of the British aristocracy at the time, Lymington wanted to recreate a version of the feudal system, which led him to own a lavish estate in the "White Highlands" of Kenya. In Kenya, Lymington treated his black African workers very much like serfs while he behaved like a feudal lord. Lymington was not unique in seeking to live a modern version of feudalism in Africa as it was common for members of the aristocracy in the interwar period to settle in either Southern Rhodesia (modern Zimbabwe) or Kenya to live out their fantasies of being feudal lords. Nor was Lymington unique in rejecting democracy. The establishment of universal suffrage which was achieved in stages over the 19th and 20th centuries along the curtailment of the power of the House of Lords led many aristocrats to complain about their loss of political power, which led for successive governments in Westminster to be more concerned about the interests of ordinary farmers instead of the land-owning nobility. The policy of free trade which kept food prices low was opposed by the land-owning aristocracy who had trouble competing with foreign farmers, and much of the nobility wanted a return to high agricultural tariffs. However, the policy of cheap food via free trade was popular with urban voters who had made up 90% of the electorate by the 1920s, and successive governments were not prepared to risk defeat in the next general election solely for the sake of keeping the landed estates of the aristocracy profitable. The British historian Martin Pugh noted it was no accident that every single aristocrat who owned an estate in Rhodesia or Kenya in the interwar period was active in far right-wing groups that sought to end democracy in the United Kingdom as all of the aristocrats who lived out their feudal fantasies in Africa all wanted to return to the political system where the aristocracy held political power again.

Newton papers

In 1936, he sent for auction at Sotheby's the major collection of unpublished papers of Isaac Newton, known as the Portsmouth Papers. These had been in the family for around two centuries, since an earlier Viscount Lymington had married Newton's great-niece.

The sale was the occasion on which Newton's religious and alchemical interests became generally known. Broken into a large number of separate lots, running into several hundred, they became dispersed. John Maynard Keynes purchased many significant lots. Theological works were bought in large numbers by Abraham Yahuda. Another purchaser was Emmanuel Fabius, a dealer in Paris.

Right-wing groups

Wallop was a member of and important influence on the English Mistery, a society promoted by William Sanderson and founded in 1929 or 1930. This was a conservative group, with views in tune with his own monarchist and ruralist opinions. Lymington's use of Parliamentary questions has been blamed for British government reluctance to admit refugees. Lymington was violently opposed to Britain accepting Jewish refugees from Germany, writing in a letter in 1936 that he was opposed to accepting German Jewish refugees who "had proved themselves unworthy subjects of Germany", going on to write that Britain was being "overrun with the unwanted and unworthy of the ghettoes and bazaars of most of Europe and a good deal of Asia". Lymington wrote that if the Archbishop of Canterbury was really concerned about human suffering, he should "interested himself in European Christians in Spain, Russia and other countries including our own".

A split in the Mistery left Wallop leading a successor, the English Array. It was active from 1936 to the early months of World War II, and advocated "back to the land". Lymington met several times with Sir Oswald Mosley to discuss an alliance between the English Array and the British Union of Fascists. Lymington was willing to work with Mosley, but did not want to see the English Array absorbed into the BUF.

Lymington wrote in one of his pamphlets for English Array: "The conviction that the healthy state of the soil is the foundation of human health as well of that of the crops and animals is one that does not need any explanation for the men of the English Array...If we serve our soil, we can bring back the fertility of the strong breeds that will people the Empire with the desired men and women who will hold it against tides of yellow men and brown". Its membership included A. K. Chesterton, J. F. C. Fuller, Rolf Gardiner, Richard de Grey, Hardwicke Holderness, Anthony Ludovici, John de Rutzen, and Reginald Dorman-Smith. It has been described as "more specifically pro-Nazi" than the Mistery; Famine in England (1938) by Lymington was an agricultural manifesto, but traded on racial overtones of urban immigration.

Famine in England was concerned with the "aliens" and "scum" said to be settling in British cities along with a sustained attack on "international finance" together with panegyrics for the beauty of the English countryside, the "great white northern races of Europe" and the concentration camps of Nazi Germany. Most of Famine in England was concerned about problems with British agriculture, but there was also several chapters devoted to the "scum of subhuman population" in Britain who were "the willing tools of the communist, since revolution means an opportunity to gratify their lusts". Lymington that some of the "scum of subhuman population" were "the dregs of English stock", but he wrote most of the "subhumans" were immigrants. Lymington complained that Britain was accepting far too many "subhuman" immigrants who had "one by one they have 'muscled in' on the Englishman's livelihood till they have everywhere in key positions. With them has come corruption and disrespect for the ancient decencies...This then, is the spawning-ground for panic, looting, revolution and wholesale bloodshed". Lymington suggested Nazi Germany as a model as he praised the "new spiritual awakening of Germany". Lyminton wrote "the happy ones" were people who had "a sane respect for the permanent things around them. They have a family feeling and a racial feeling and a determination to guard their culture". Lymington wrote: "Our northern stock has been continually weakened-first in battle for two thousand years and later by trade, which gave the worse stocks, the people of the ghettoes and bazaar and the Mediterranean types, their opportunity to flourish at the expense of the northern races". Lymington wrote it would be "suicidal" to go to war against Germany again, but warned it was possible because of "the endless propaganda directed in a sinister way against selected dictatorships in Europe". Lymington concluded: "We must therefore become strong, through agriculture and rearmament. Then we may learn how to enjoy peace. The average Englishmen would like to see a prosperous, healthy and strong Germany".

Organic movement

Wallop was an early advocate of organic farming in Britain. He has been described as a "central figure in the organic movement’s coalescence during the 1930s and ’40s."

In 1941, with Rolf Gardiner he founded the Kinship in Husbandry, a precursor of the Soil Association. It recruited Edmund Blunden, Arthur Bryant, H. J. Massingham, Walter James, 4th Baron Northbourne, Adrian Bell, and Philip Mairet.

Later life

In 1948, he moved to his estate at Mount Elgon in the British colony of Kenya, where he owned an estate covering 10,000 acres. He served on the government-appointed Board of Agriculture for Kenya in the 1950s where he sought to modernise Kenyan agriculture and encourage organic farming. In 1957, he became the Minister of Agriculture for Kenya and served until 1960. He did not leave Kenya after independence in 1963 as most of the white settlers did. In 1965 most of his estate at Mount Elgon was nationalised by the Kenyan government, which confiscated the majority of his land owned by the wealthy white settlers to provide land for poor black farmers. Portsmouth was paid for his estate in Kenyan shillings, which could not be converted into British pounds. Even then, Portsmouth did not leave Kenya and instead stayed on as the special agricultural adviser to President Jomo Kenyatta, who apparently greatly valued his advice. As president of Kenya, Kenyatta followed a policy of reconciliation with the white settlers, whom he encouraged to stay in Kenya after independence.

In 1976, Portsmouth suffered a serious stroke, which led him to return to Britain where he lived out his last days as an invalid until his death in 1984.

Family and personal life

He was married twice and had five children.

On 31 July 1920, he married Mary Lawrence Post (divorced 1936), daughter of Waldron Kintzing Post Sr., of Bayport, Long Island, and Mary Lawrence née Perkins. They had two children:

Oliver Kintzing Wallop, Viscount Lymington (14 January 1923 – 5 June 1984; aged 61), married as his second wife, Ruth Violet Sladen, daughter of Brig.-Gen. Gerald Carew Sladen , and Mabel Ursula, of the Orr Ewing baronets, and had:

Quentin Wallop, 10th Earl of Portsmouth

Lady Anne Camilla Evelyn Wallop (12 July 1925 – 25 January 2023; aged 97) who married Lord Rupert Nevill, younger son of Guy Larnach-Nevill, 4th Marquess of Abergavenny.

In 14 August 1936, he married secondly, Bridget Cory Crohan, only daughter of Capt. Patrick Bermingham Crohan by (Edith) Barbara Cory (later Bray), of Owlpen Manor, Gloucestershire. They had three children:

Lady Philippa Dorothy Bluet Wallop (21 August 1937 – 31 August 1984; aged 47) who married Charles Cadogan, Viscount Chelsea and had issue

Lady Jane Alianora Borlace Wallop (24 February 1939 – 30 November 2021; aged 82)

Hon. Nicholas Valoynes Bermingham Wallop (14 July 1946 - 27 July 2026), married Lavinia Karmel, only daughter of David Karmel

Gerard Wallop succeeded to the title of Earl of Portsmouth in 1943, on the death of his father Oliver.

After the war he moved to Kenya, where he lived for nearly 30 years. His seat at Farleigh House was let as a preparatory school from 1953.

Works

Spring Song of Iscariot (Black Sun Press, 1929) poem, as Lord Lymington

Ich Dien - the Tory Path (1931) as Lord Lymington

Famine in England (1938)

Alternative to Death (1943)

A Knot of Roots (1965) autobiography