Richard Verney, 19th Baron Willoughby de Broke

Richard Greville Verney, 19th Baron Willoughby de Broke (29 March 1869 (London) – 16 December 1923) was a British peer and conservative politician.

Baron Willoughby de Broke, circa 1910
"An MFH with a sense of humour". Caricature by Spy published in Vanity Fair in 1905

Life

Verney was the son of Colonel Henry Verney, 18th Baron Willoughby de Broke and Geraldine Smith-Barry and educated at Eton College and New College, Oxford. He married Marie Frances Lisette Hanbury, daughter of Charles Addington Hanbury, on 2 July 1895. They had one son, John Henry Peyto Verney, who succeeded him as 20th Baron Willoughby de Broke.

The historian George Dangerfield described Verney as "a genial and sporting young peer, whose face bore a pleasing resemblance to the horse. ... He had quite a gift for writing, thought clearly, and was not more than two hundred years behind his time".[1] He wrote a book on foxhunting called "Hunting the Fox", which was published in 1921.

Verney represented Rugby, Warwickshire as an MP from 1895–1900.

In 1921, Verney sold the family seat, Compton Verney House, to Joseph Watson (d. 1922), a soap manufacturer from Leeds, who was elevated to the peerage in 1922 as 1st Baron Manton of Compton Verney. He retained an estate cottage in Kineton called Fox Cottage, which became his country residence.[2] Upon his death, on 16 December 1923, his title passed to his son, John Henry Peyto Verney.

His autobiography, The Passing Years, was published posthumously in 1924. According to P. J. Waller, the book is "rightly valued for the picture they present of county society. They colour for historians an otherwise empty abstraction, the deferential community, and divest it of unnecessarily scornful associations of the hubristic and menial kind".[3] M. K. Ashby wrote that "in the whole volume of The Passing Years there is not one metaphor which is not drawn from sport or game or weather or the table".[3]

References
  1. George Dangerfield, The Strange Death of Liberal England (Stanford University Press, 1997), p. 47.
  2. Debrett's Peerage, 1968, p. 1156, Baron Willoughby de Broke.
  3. P. J. Waller, Town, City, and Nation: England, 1850-1914 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983), p. 211.

Publications
  • Lord Willoughby de Broke, 'The Tory Tradition', National Review (October, 1911), pp. 201–13.
  • Lord Willoughby de Broke, The Passing Years (London: Constable, 1924).
  • Richard Greville Verney, Lord Willoughby de Broke. Hunting the Fox (Houghton Mifflin Co, 1921)

Further reading
Parliament of the United Kingdom
Preceded by
Henry Peyton Cobb		 Member of Parliament for Rugby
1895 – 1900		 Succeeded by
Corrie Grant
Peerage of England
Preceded by
Henry Verney		 Baron Willoughby de Broke
1902–1923		 Succeeded by
John Henry Peyto Verney
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