Lord Onslow, a Peer by Birth and Contrarian by Nature, Dies at 73

 

Lord Onslow, who was also the seventh Viscount Cranley, 10th Baron Onslow and 11th Baronet of West Clandon, among other things, was 73.

The cause, his family told The Associated Press, was “an illness most courageously borne.” Several British newspapers reported that he had had cancer.

A nominal Conservative and a constitutional contrarian, Lord Onslow continued a family tradition of parliamentary service begun in the 16th century. “I don’t know what Tory policy is on virtually anything,” he told The Daily Telegraph in 2004. “And I’d probably disagree with it even if I did.”

He was one of 92 hereditary peers allowed to stay in the House of Lords after hundreds were swept out by the Labor government of Prime Minister Tony Blair in a divisive reform measure of 1999. (House of Lords reform is the subject of continuing debate in Britain.)

Long before the measure, and long after, Lord Onslow was a favorite of the world news media, for even in a nation known for cheese rolling and competitive nettle eating, he was a somewhat unusual character.

His exploits — including the curious incidents of the wayward bull, the stone testicle and the loose monkey on the Underground — were widely recounted and are well within the realm of probability.

A dapper man given to red socks, pink bow ties and plain speech, Lord Onslow was born on Feb. 28, 1938. His forebears, he liked to say, were cattle thieves who acquired titles through canny political dealings during the Renaissance and afterward.

They created a memorable lineage. “That’s the second baron, known as Dickie Ducklegs,” Lord Onslow told a reporter in 2006 as he traversed the portrait gallery at Clandon Park, the family home in Surrey. “He spent most of his wife’s fortune building this place and defending a woman in Godalming accused of giving birth to rabbits.”

Young Michael attended Eton and the Sorbonne, but was, he later said, “too stupid to have gone to university,” and never obtained a degree.

In 1964, he married Robin Bullard. He once left a stone testicle — a genuine Roman artifact — under her pillow as a present.

Besides his wife, his survivors include a sister, Lady Teresa Waugh (the widow of Auberon Waugh, a son of the novelist Evelyn Waugh); two daughters, Lady Arabella and Lady Charlotte; and a son, Rupert, now the eighth earl. As Lord Onslow’s obituary in The Daily Telegraph of London reminded readers on Wednesday, “He once confessed to a desire to ‘thrash most of my children most of the time.’?”

Lord Onslow had assumed the earldom in 1971, on his father’s death, and for years farmed the family’s 800 acres. He once pursued a runaway bull down a local freeway, which would have been less remarkable had he not been on horseback at the time. He also worked as an underwriter for Lloyd’s of London, once boarding the London Underground, bound for the office, with his pet monkey in tow. It escaped on the train and was later apprehended by the police.

In 1994, the earl astonished listeners by serving as the host of a BBC radio series devoted to hip-hop, thrash metal and the like. (“Hello and welcome to the ‘Supertunes’ chill-out zone, from me, Lord Onslow, your mellow and, I hope, laid-back host,” he intoned.)

Despite his lineage, or perhaps because of it, Lord Onslow had long questioned the right of hereditary peers to serve in the House of Lords. As he once explained, “I have been in favor of Lords reform almost since I have been there, because any House which has me in it really needs its head examined.”

But he became a sworn foe of Mr. Blair’s plan, under which, he felt, peers were sent packing without precisely agreed-upon long-term provisions for replacing them.

“If the government is going to play silly monkeys, I’m going to behave like a football hooligan and” botch “things up,” he said in 1998. (Lord Onslow did not use the word “botch.”)

Despite an eventual compromise that let him and 91 other peers remain, Lord Onslow deplored the arrangement, calling it a “weak half-bastard thing.”

In the end, however, he was philosophical. After all, he acknowledged, it was pure genetic happenstance that had put him in the House of Lords in the first place.

“I find it extremely difficult to justify the fact that because one of my ancestors got” drunk “with George IV I can boss the British people about,” he said in a 1996 interview.

Lord Onslow did not use the word “drunk.”

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With Death Outpacing Birth, a County Slows to a Shuffle

In fact, this community in West Virginia’s northern panhandle holds an unwelcome distinction. With just 71 babies born on average for every 100 residents who die, Brooke County, in which Weirton is partly located, has the largest such gap in the nation among counties in metropolitan areas, save for a handful of places that are magnets for retirees. (Hancock County, which contains the other part of Weirton, is in similar demographic straits.)

The main reason Brooke County is so far off the national number — which is 171 births to 100 deaths — is that it has missed out on one of the dominant demographic trends to emerge from the recent census: the influx of young immigrants into communities across the United States. The median age for Hispanics, by far the largest immigrant group, is just 27, far lower than the median age for whites of 41.

Without immigrants or economic opportunities to keep its younger residents close to home, Brooke County and others like it are showing their age. At St. Paul Catholic Church in Weirton, the Rev. Larry Dorsch has buried 15 people this year and baptized one. The American Legion in Wellsburg has closed because of a lack of young supporters. Volunteer fire departments are so understaffed that people come from other towns to fight fires.

“You can declare a person dead, but you can’t declare a town dead,” said Daniel Guida, a lawyer in Weirton. “Some towns have energy, that spring in your collective step. We’re missing that. We need to get on with Act 2. But how?”

According to Kenneth Johnson, the senior demographer at the Carsey Institute at the University of New Hampshire, there are now 853 counties with similar population trends — “more coffins than cradles,” as he calls it — including parts of the Great Plains, the Midwest and New England. (The problem is even more acute across the Atlantic — countries in the European Union collectively will cross the threshold for having fewer births than deaths by 2015, and would experience population growth only through immigration, according to a 2009 report on aging published by the European Commission.)

West Virginia is the only state in the country with more deaths than births, but other states, like Maine, are not far behind. Mr. Johnson estimates that many white areas will tip into natural decrease in the next 10 to 15 years.

“This is the story of what’s happening to white America,” Mr. Johnson said. “America is built by young people. They are the backbone. But what if they are not there?”

If Brooke County is a postcard from the future, it ended up there because it never adapted from its past.

For decades, it was a steel manufacturing powerhouse, employing thousands of workers in mills along the Ohio River. Weirton Steel, a hulking plant that straddles Weirton’s main street (it was recently used as a set for a science fiction movie, “Super 8,” and in the 1970s for “The Deer Hunter”), was once the largest single private employer in the state.

Now Wal-Mart holds that distinction, and Weirton Steel, now owned by Arcelor Mittal, a Luxembourg company run by an Indian billionaire, is a small fraction of its former size. Grass grows through cracks in the vast, empty parking lots.

Manufacturing jobs, long the lifeblood of the area, shrank by 38 percent statewide since 1990. Now health care is the state’s second-largest employer after government. The number of young people here sagged with the economy. The population under 35 is about half of what it was in 1980, while the number of residents 55 or older has jumped by 23 percent, according to 2010 census data released Thursday.

Now walkers and wheelchairs are more common than strollers. Sunday school classrooms at the United Methodist Church downtown are ghostly quiet, and Brooke High School has just half the number of students it did when it opened in 1969.

Sabrina Tavernise reported from Weirton, W.Va., and Robert Gebeloff from New York.

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