Hudson Kearley, 1st Viscount Devonport

Hudson Ewbanke Kearley, 1st Viscount Devonport,

Hudson Kearley married Selina Chester in 1888. They had three children: daughter Beryl,[1] and sons Gerald, 2nd Viscount Devonport, and Mark.

Public service

Devonport was elected as a

He played an important part in the passage of the Port of London Bill in 1908 and served as unpaid chairman of the Port of London Authority from 1909 until 1925.

He was elevated to the peerage as Baron Devonport, of Wittington in the County of Buckingham on 15 July 1910.^[6] It was reported in The New York Times that he declined to contribute to party funds in return for the peerage, feeling that his party contribution and unpaid services in relation to the Port of London were great enough to warrant the distinction without payment. After proposing to submit the related correspondence to the press, no money was exchanged.^[7]

This did not save him from being the subject of a savage epigram by Hilaire Belloc:

The grocer Hudson Kearley, he

When purchasing his barony

Considered first, we understand,

The title of Lord Sugarsand,

Or then again he might have been

Lord Underweight of Margarine:

But being of the nobler sort

He took the title Devonport.

He was appointed as

Wittington was his estate where Wittington House was constructed in 1897 based on Sir Reginald Blomfield's design. Bloomfield was asked to significantly enlarge the house in 1908. The gardens of Kearley's estate were maintained by hundreds of gardeners.^[10]

In literature and popular culture

Devonport's wartime measures for the rationing of sugar and other imported commodities were satirised by Neil Munro in his Erchie MacPherson story "The Last of the Bridescakes", first published in the Glasgow Evening News of 12th February 1917.^[11]

References