Francis Hastings, 16th Earl of Huntingdon

Memorial to the Earl in Ashby Church

Francis John Clarence Westenra Plantagenet Hastings, 16th Earl of Huntingdon (30 January 1901 – 24 August 1990), styled Viscount Hastings until 1939, was a British artist, academic, and later a Labour parliamentarian.

Background and education

The son and heir of Warner Hastings, 15th Earl of Huntingdon, by his wife Maud Margaret (née Wilson), he was educated at Eton College, Christ Church, Oxford, and the Slade School of Art, London. At Oxford, in 1922, he represented its Polo Varsity Team.^[1]

Artistic and academic career

Hastings' mural, The worker of the future upsetting the economic chaos of the present (1935), in the Marx Memorial Library, London

Huntingdon was a pupil of the Mexican mural painter Diego Rivera and held exhibitions notably in London, Paris, Chicago and San Francisco. He was also appointed a professor at the Camberwell College of Arts and the Central School of Arts & Crafts, London. He later served as chairman of the Society of Mural Painters between 1951 and 1958.

Public life

During the Second World War he was Deputy Controller of Defence of the Andover Rural District Council from 1941 to 1945. Huntingdon succeeded in the earldom in 1939 and took his seat on the Labour benches in the House of Lords. He served under Clement Attlee as Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Agriculture and Fisheries from 1945 to 1950.

He was author of The Golden Octopus and Commonsense about India.

In the House of Lords, he often advocated socially liberal policies, supporting abortion rights, the legalisation of assisted dying, and homosexual law reform.

Family

Lord Huntingdon's first marriage was to Cristina Casati, daughter of Camillo, Marquis Casati Stampa di Soncino by his wife, the artistic muse Luisa, in 1925; they had one daughter:

• Lady Moorea Hastings (4 March 1928 – 21 October 2011). She was from 1957 to 1966 the wife of politician and diarist Woodrow, Lord Wyatt of Weeford before marrying the adman Brinsley Black, named as one of the best-dressed Englishmen in the inaugural issue of Men in Vogue in 1965.^[2] Lady Moorea, who was famously unmaternal,^[3] had one son with each of her husbands:
  • Hon. Pericles Plantagenet James Casati Wyatt (born 1963), became an owner and operator of water parks and recreational vehicle camps in Arizona;^[4][5][6] half-brother to journalist Petronella Wyatt.
  • Octavius Orlando Irvine Casati Black (born 1968);^[7] was at Eton with David Cameron, married to Tory barrister Joanne Cash.

Huntingdon and his first wife divorced in 1943 (Cristina then married Wogan Philipps, 2nd Baron Milford and died in 1953). Huntingdon married secondly Margaret Lane, daughter of Harry George Lane, and former wife of Bryan Wallace, son of the writer Edgar Wallace, in 1944. Lady Huntingdon was a writer and critic and published books on Beatrix Potter, Samuel Johnson and the Brontë sisters. They had two daughters:

• Lady Selina Shirley Hastings (born 5 March 1945).
• Lady Caroline Harriet Hastings (born 12 June 1946).

Lord Huntingdon died in August 1990, aged 89, and was succeeded in the earldom by his first cousin once removed William Edward Robin Hood Hastings-Bass. His wife, Dowager Countess of Huntingdon, died in 1994. In 2014 his daughter Selina, a noted biographer, wrote The Red Earl: The Extraordinary Life of the 16th Earl of Huntingdon.^[8]

References

• Kidd, Charles, Williamson, David (editors). Debrett's Peerage and Baronetage (1990 edition). New York: St Martin's Press, 1990,
• Leigh Rayment's Peerage Pages
• Lundy, Darryl. "Francis John Clarence Westenra Plantagenet Hastings, 16th Earl of Huntingdon". The Peerage.
• The New York Times article on the death of Margaret, Countess of Huntingdon

External links

• Hansard 1803–2005: contributions in Parliament by the Earl of Huntingdon
• www.burkespeerage.com