My father Robin, Lord Belhaven and Stenton, died on December 2 last year. He would have been 94 in February. “He had a good innings,” people keep saying, and while they are right, this isn’t much of a comfort in the early stages of grief, as anyone who has lost someone they love will know. All the letters my mother and I have received have said what a gentleman he was, and while this may be my inference, it is as though they are mourning not just a man but a whole breed.
My father was a member of the House of Lords for 38 years before it became an overcrowded graveyard for former politicians and prime ministers’ cronies. He inherited his seat in 1961 and felt it was his duty to use his position to help others. He ran a hill farm in Kirkcudbrightshire and later a guesthouse on the Isle of Islay, where he lived the simple life in the true sense of chopping wood, growing his own food and sourcing local game.
