Claude Bowes-Lyon, 14th Earl of Strathmore and Kinghorne

The Earl was born in Lowndes Square, London, the son of Claude Bowes-Lyon, 13th Earl of Strathmore and Kinghorne, and his wife, the former Frances Smith.[1] His younger brother Patrick Bowes-Lyon was a tennis player who won the 1887 Wimbledon doubles.

After being educated at Eton College, he received a commission in the 2nd Life Guards in 1876 and served for six years until the year after his marriage.[2] He was an active member of the Territorial Army and served as honorary colonel of the 4th/5th Battalion of the Black Watch.[2]

Upon succeeding his father to the Earldom on 16 February 1904, he inherited large estates in Scotland and England, including Glamis Castle, St Paul's Walden Bury, Gibside Hall and Streatlam Castle in County Durham and Woolmers Park, near Hertford.[2] He was made Lord Lieutenant of Angus,[nb 1] an office he resigned when his daughter became Queen. He had a keen interest in forestry and was one of the first to grow larch from seed in Britain. His estates had a large number of smallholders, and he had a reputation for being unusually kind to his tenants.[3] His contemporaries described him as an unpretentious man, often seen in "an old macintosh tied with a piece of twine".[4] He worked his own land and enjoyed physical labour on the grounds of his estates; visitors often mistook him for a common labourer.[5] He made his own cocoa for breakfast, and always had a jug of water by his place at dinner so he could dilute his own wine.[6]

Despite the Earl's reservations about royalty,[7] in 1923 his youngest daughter, Elizabeth, married Prince Albert, Duke of York, the second son of King George V and Queen Mary. Lord Strathmore was made a Knight Grand Cross of the Royal Victorian Order to mark the marriage. Five years later he was made a knight of the Thistle.[8]

In 1936, his son-in-law became king and assumed the name George VI. As the father of the new queen, he was created a knight of the Garter and Earl of Strathmore and Kinghorne in the Peerage of the United Kingdom in the Coronation Honours of 1937. This enabled him to sit in the House of Lords as an earl (because members of the peerage of Scotland did not automatically sit in the House of Lords, he had previously sat only as a baron through the Barony of Bowes created for his father).[8] At the coronation of his daughter and son-in-law, the Earl and Countess sat in the royal box with Queen Mary and their shared granddaughters, Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret.

Later in life he became extremely deaf.[6] Lord Strathmore died of bronchitis on 7 November 1944, aged 89, at Glamis Castle.[9] (Lady Strathmore had died in 1938.[2]) He was succeeded by his son Patrick Bowes-Lyon, Lord Glamis.

He married Cecilia Cavendish-Bentinck on 16 July 1881 in Petersham, Surrey.[1] The couple had ten children. The Earl would part his moustache in a theatrical but courteous gesture before kissing them:[10]

• Forbes, Grania, My Darling Buffy: The Early Life of The Queen Mother (Headline Book Publishing, 1999) ISBN 978-0-7472-7387-5
• Vickers, Hugo, Elizabeth: The Queen Mother (Arrow Books/Random House, 2006) ISBN 978-0-09-947662-7

• Hansard 1803–2005: contributions in Parliament by the Earl of Strathmore and Kinghorne