RIP: Lord Onslow a noble character (in every sense of the term)

Michael William Coplestone Dillon Onslow, the seventh Earl of Onslow, who publicly advocated purging hereditary peers from the British House of Lords but who then, in the sort of full-bore reversal that seems a peerly prerogative, vowed to fight such an action “like a football hooligan” when it threatened to become a reality, died in England on May 14.

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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