Alan Lennox-Boyd, 1st Viscount Boyd of Merton

The Right Honourable The Viscount Boyd of Merton CH PC DL
Secretary of State for the Colonies
In office 28 July 1954 – 14 October 1959
Prime Minister	Winston Churchill Sir Anthony Eden Harold Macmillan
Preceded by	Oliver Lyttelton
Succeeded by	Iain Macleod
Minister of Transport and Civil Aviation
In office 7 May 1952 – 28 July 1954
Prime Minister	Winston Churchill
Preceded by	John Maclay
Succeeded by	John Boyd-Carpenter
Minister of State for the Colonies
In office 2 November 1951 – 7 May 1952
Prime Minister	Winston Churchill
Preceded by	John Dugdale
Succeeded by	Henry Hopkinson
Member of the House of Lords Lord Temporal
In office 8 September 1960 – 8 March 1983 Hereditary peerage
Preceded by	Peerage created
Succeeded by	The 2nd Viscount Boyd of Merton
Member of Parliament for Mid Bedfordshire
In office 27 October 1931 – 8 September 1960
Preceded by	Milner Gray
Succeeded by	Stephen Hastings
Personal details
Born	(1904-11-18)18 November 1904
Died	8 March 1983(1983-03-08) (aged 78)
Resting place	Church of St Stephen, Saltash, Cornwall
Nationality	British
Political party	Conservative
Spouse(s)	Lady Patricia Guinness (1918–2001)
Children	3
Education	Sherborne School
Alma mater	Christ Church, Oxford

Alan Tindal Lennox-Boyd, 1st Viscount Boyd of Merton, CH, PC, DL (18 November 1904 – 8 March 1983), was a British Conservative politician.

Background, education and military service[]

Lennox-Boyd was the son of Alan Walter Lennox-Boyd by his second wife Florence Annie, daughter of James Warburton Begbie and Anna Maria née Reid. He had an elder half-sister and three full brothers, two of whom were killed in the Second World War and one who died in Germany in April 1939. He was educated at Sherborne School, Dorset, and graduated from Christ Church, Oxford, with a BA later promoted to MA. In the Second World War he saw active service as a lieutenant in the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve with Coastal Forces.^[1]

Political career[]

Lennox-Boyd was elected as Member of Parliament (MP) for Mid Bedfordshire in 1931 (at the age of 26), and was admitted to Inner Temple, as a barrister in 1941. He was a member of Winston Churchill's peacetime government as Minister for Transport and Civil Aviation from 1952 to 1954. In this post he once memorably opined that road accidents were the result not of the taking of large risks, but of the taking of small risks very large numbers of times.

As a Minister, he opened the third Woodhead Tunnel on the British Railways electrified railway across the Pennines on 3 June 1954.^[2]

In 1954, he became Secretary of State for the Colonies, where he oversaw early stages of decolonisation, with the granting of independence to Cyprus, Ghana, Iraq, Malaya and Sudan. He was in office during the Mau Mau Rebellion in Kenya, and was persuaded to stay in office by Harold Macmillan after being censured for the Hola massacre. He talked openly about independence for the Federation of Malaya, and invited the then Chief Minister of Malaya, Tunku Abdul Rahman and his colleagues to Lancaster House to discuss the possibility of independence.

In 1955, Lennox-Boyd threatened to resign from his post when some Tory cabinet members wanted to apply immigration controls to New Commonwealth countries. This was in the early period of the post-Windrush era of immigration to Britain, which had seen an unexpectedly large inflow to Britain from non-white races as a result of the British Nationality Act 1948. This act, implemented by the previous Labour government, granted British citizenship to the entire Commonwealth; in 1955, Lennox-Boyd would either accept controls on the whole Commonwealth or none at all. As the Conservatives were committed to the rights of Old Commonwealth citizens to come to Britain, they chose to have no controls.^[3]

Following the Suez Crisis of 1956, Lennox-Boyd appears to have made the initial approach to writer Ian Fleming about the possibility of Prime Minister Sir Anthony Eden's using Fleming's Jamaican house, Goldeneye, for a rest cure, given the precarious state of Eden's health. Because of security considerations, he initially intimated to Fleming that he wanted Goldeneye for a holiday of his own and, when he resisted Fleming's suggestion that his and Fleming's wife (a close friend of Lady Eden) liaise over the arrangements, Fleming at first assumed that he was planning an extra-marital assignation.^[4]

After the 1959 general election, Lennox-Boyd was replaced as Colonial Secretary by Iain Macleod. In September 1960, Lennox-Boyd was raised to the peerage as Viscount Boyd of Merton of Merton-in-Penninghame in the County of Wigtown. This caused a by-election for his Mid Bedfordshire constituency, which was won by Stephen Hastings. He was further honoured the same year when he was appointed a Companion of Honour. Being opposed to the line taken in Harold Macmillan's Wind of Change speech, Lennox-Boyd subsequently became an early patron of the right-wing Conservative Monday Club. Whilst this may appear to contrast with his earlier objection to racialised immigration controls, according to David Goodhart, this was explained by him being "a believer in the imperial idea rather than racial equality".^[5]

Other public positions and business career[]

Lord Boyd of Merton held the office of Deputy Lieutenant of Bedfordshire between 1954 and 1960 and Deputy Lieutenant of Cornwall in 1965. He was managing director of Arthur Guinness & Sons between 1959 and 1967, and was a Companion of Honour and Privy Councillor.

Mau Mau rebellion[]

In June 1957, Lennox-Boyd, who was Secretary of State for the Colonies, received a secret memorandum written by Eric Griffiths-Jones, the attorney general of Kenya. The letter described the abuse of Mau Mau detainees. The memorandum was passed on by Sir Evelyn Baring, the Governor of Kenya, who is alleged to have added a cover letter asserting that inflicting "violent shock" is the only way to deal with Mau Mau insurgents.

In April 2011 a Guardian report^[6] described a cache of government documents which may indicate that, despite clear briefings, Lennox-Boyd repeatedly denied that the abuses were happening, and publicly denounced those colonial officials who came forward to complain.

Personal life[]

Lord Boyd married Lady Patricia Guinness, daughter of Rupert Guinness, 2nd Earl of Iveagh, on 29 December 1938. His mother-in-law, the Countess of Iveagh, had been an MP in 1927–35 and he was brother-in-law to Sir Henry ('Chips') Channon, also an MP (1935–58), making them jointly a first mother-in-law and child-in-law set of MPs. They had three children:

• Simon Lennox-Boyd, 2nd Viscount Boyd of Merton (b. 7 December 1939)
• Hon. Christopher Lennox-Boyd (22 July 1941 – 3 August 2012)
• Hon. Mark Lennox-Boyd (b. 4 May 1943)

Lord Boyd was knocked down and killed by a car when walking across Fulham Road in London in March 1983, aged 78, and, after cremation, was buried at St Stephen's Church, Saltash, Cornwall.^[7] He was succeeded by his eldest son, Simon.

Lady Boyd died in May 2001, aged 83. She gave her name to the Viscountess of Merton cup, awarded at the Cornwall Spring Flower Show.^[8]

According to many sources Lennox-Boyd was gay.^[9][10] He is depicted in James Lees-Milne's diary of 1942–1943, Ancestral Voices, as being infatuated with the American aesthete Stuart Preston.^[11] Historian and biographer Michael Bloch describes the former regent and Crown Prince of Iraq, Abd al-Ilah, as being homosexual and a "close friend" of Lennox-Boyd. Bloch writes that after Abd al-Ilah was killed during the 1958 anti-Hashemite revolt, "the revolutionaries discovered intimate letters from Lennox-Boyd among the Prince's papers, which they released to the world's press."^[12]

Arms[]

References[]

External links[]

• Hansard 1803–2005: contributions in Parliament by the Viscount Boyd of Merton