Grey Gowrie

Alexander Patrick Greysteil Hore-Ruthven, 2nd Earl of Gowrie, (26 November 1939 – 24 September 2021), usually known as Grey Gowrie or Lord Gowrie, was an Irish-born British hereditary peer, politician, and businessman.

Lord Gowrie was also the hereditary Clan Chief of Clan Ruthven in Scotland.

He was educated at Eton and Oxford, and held posts in academia for a period, in the US and London, including time working with poet Robert Lowell and at Harvard University.

Gowrie was a Conservative Party politician for some years, including a period in the British Cabinet.

He held ministerial posts under Margaret Thatcher, in the areas of employment and Northern Ireland, and was Minister of State for the Arts, as well as Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, with responsibility for Civil Service reform.

Offered a promotion to full Secretary of State, with responsibility for education across the UK, he turned it down.

Previously an arts dealer, he moved to Sotheby's for a reputed salary of around £150,000, chairing parts of the art auction business.

Alexander Patrick Greysteil Hore-Ruthven was born on 26 November 1939, in Dublin, Ireland, the elder son of Major the Hon. Patrick Hore-Ruthven and Pamela Margaret Fletcher.

His father was the only surviving son of Alexander Hore-Ruthven, later the 1st Earl of Gowrie in its new creation, and his wife Zara.

He had one sibling, younger brother Malise Ruthven, later a writer.

His paternal grandfather was a soldier and colonial official, and his maternal grandfather an Anglican cleric, A. H. Fletcher.

He was known as "Grey", short for his third forename, to most, and "Greysteil" to close friends.

His surname drew on the Ruthven clan of Scotland, a name once outlawed, and the Hore family of County Wexford, Ireland.

His parents were both active in Cairo during the Second World War, his father, "Pat" to the family, as a major in the Rifle Brigade, and his mother working with the intelligence services.

His parents left Grey, at the age of three months, with his maternal grandmother in Ireland.

His father was killed in action at Tripoli in 1942, while attached to the then-new SAS, at which point Gowrie became his paternal grandfather's heir apparent; his grandparents played an active role in his upbringing thereafter.

On his mother's return to Ireland in early 1942 while pregnant with his brother, they lived for a period in what she described as a dreary house in Greystones, County Wicklow.

Hore-Ruthven was educated at Eton, where he contributed poetry, fiction and prose to school magazine Parade; he was later elected to the elite Eton Society, more commonly known as Pop.

When his grandfather, who had been the Governor-General of Australia, was created Earl of Gowrie in January 1945, reviving a title suppressed in 1600, Grey became known by the courtesy title Viscount Ruthven of Canberra.

His family moved for a time to a tower at Windsor Castle, where the 1st Earl was deputy constable, and then returned to Ireland, living in Dublin and Kilcullen, County Kildare.

His mother remarried in 1952, to her partner Major Derek Cooper, and the family moved to a Regency lodge on a 4,000-acre country estate at Dunlewey, a village at the edge of the Poisoned Glen in Gweedore, County Donegal.

The young Lord Ruthven of Canberra succeeded to the Earldom of Gowrie, named for the old Scottish area of Gowrie around Perth, on the death of his grandfather on 2 May 1955; at the same time he succeeded as the 2nd Viscount Ruthven of Canberra, and as the 2nd Baron Gowrie of Canberra and of Dirleton (in East Lothian).

On 16 April 1956, he further succeeded his great-uncle (his grandfather's elder brother), the 2nd Baron Ruthven of Gowrie and 10th Lord Ruthven of Freeland, as the 3rd Baron Ruthven of Gowrie.

The Scottish lordship of Ruthven of Freeland did not descend to him, passing instead through the female line.

He matriculated his coat of arms with the Lord Lyon King of Arms in 1959.

After Eton, Gowrie attended Balliol College, Oxford, and while there he succeeded Paul Foot as editor of The Isis Magazine.

In 1962 he was given charge of the arts budget for the junior common room of his college, and he purchased an early work by David Hockney, who was still in art college.

Entitled The Most Beautiful Boy in the World, it cost £75 but was unpopular with some at Balliol, having a cup of tea thrown at it.

Gowrie arranged an interpretative talk about it, but the JCR declined to retain it, and its dealer bought it back for £80; it was later sold for £13,800.

Gowrie worked for the Times Literary Supplement for a short time, and taught, meeting his future wife while working in a girls' school.

After marriage, he moved to the US, working as a visiting lecturer at the State University of New York (SUNY) at Buffalo from 1963 to 1964, then tutoring at Harvard University from 1965 to 1968, while also working with poet Robert Lowell.

Gowrie returned from the US in 1969, as lecturer in English and American Literature at University College London; he also trained as an art dealer in Bond Street, working with Thomas Gibson Fine Art.

Early deals included a portrait of Peter Lacy by Francis Bacon, which Gowrie offered first, at no commission, to the National Gallery of Ireland.

When the gallery rejected the work of "this disgraceful artist", he sold it to Elton John.

He dealt in Old Masters, Picassos, and David Hockney at an early stage, and on one occasion sold a Jackson Pollock to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., for $2 million.

He produced his first volume of poetry, A Postcard from Don Giovanni, in 1972; David Hockney produced a sketch of Gowrie for its front cover.

He later chaired the Arts Council of England (1994–1998).

He published several volumes of poetry, with a collected edition released in 2014, and a volume on the artist Derek Hill; he was also a contributing author for a book on British painting.

He underwent a heart transplant at Harefield Hospital in his early sixties.

He died at his home in Llanfechain, Powys, Wales, in September 2021.