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Brigadier Valerian Wellesley KG LVO OBE MC DL
The Duke of Wellington
Late Royal Horse Guards
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 The 8th Duke of Wellington, died aged 99 on 31st December 2014. He served his Sovereign, his country, his family and honoured his great ancestor, the 1st Duke and the victor of Waterloo, throughout his life. Well aware of the social changes that followed the Second World War, he once remarked, tongue in cheek, at a meeting of the Royal Zoological Society, that perhaps dukes should be made a protected species. He remained determined to care for his property, and took steps to secure his family’s interests in Britain, Spain and Belgium against threats posed by politicians and high taxation; he was not afraid to be seen backing causes in which he had a personal stake. Above all, he kept a judicious eye on both the 1st Duke’s reputation and the battlefield of Waterloo, becoming exercised by the commercialisation of the site, where the predominant number of imperial eagles and other items bearing the initial ‘N’ in the gift shop implied that Napoleon had really won.
In 1995, after seeing the ‘inglorious flag’ of the European Union flying over the site, he wrote to The Daily Telegraph to protest against the ‘unnatural’ celebrations of the battle’s 180th anniversary. ‘We British have a feeling and respect for the past, something that not all nations understand or share’ he explained; in addition he noted that Napoleon’s headquarters, which had once housed a small museum, was now a discotheque. Shortly before the letters column’s deadline, he rang back to add another line below ‘Duke of Wellington’ at the bottom of the text: ‘Prince of Waterloo’.
Arthur Valerian Wellesley was born in Rome on 2nd July 1915, the centenary year of his great-great-grandfather’s victory over the French. His father was Lord Gerald Wellesley, the third son of the 4th Duke, an author and diplomat who later qualified as an architect and succeeded as the 7th Duke in 1943.
At Eton, Valerian was a member of the shooting VIII. While serving in the corps, he fainted during a parade at Windsor, and when Queen Mary asked afterwards what had been wrong he said he thought he had measles, drawing the comment from George V (who believed such diseases should be experienced in childhood): ‘And high time, too’.
Although he wanted to go straight into the Army, Valerian’s father sent him to read History and Languages at New College, Oxford, where he was a member of the Bullingdon Club; at the same time he enjoyed London society, dancing with suitable girls at grand balls and less suitable ones in subterranean nightclubs. He was remembered by The Duchess of Devonshire as one of the best looking and charming of her prewar escorts and certainly the best dancer, and by Lady Soames as the best mannered man she knew. As a result, he failed his finals and was sent to a London crammer, run by an attractive widow, and then to France to learn French.
He was commissioned into the Royal Horse Guards, where he was taught sword, lance and revolver drill, tent pegging and other cavalry exercises. Before embarking for Palestine in 1940, he paid an Indian at Liverpool docks to tattoo his regiment’s emblem on his left arm. After being posted to Tulkarm with the 1st Household Cavalry Regiment (1 HCR), he made patrols through Arab villages, but was upset after a few months on the mechanization of 1 HCR to be ordered to shoot 14 black horses, which had taken part in George VI’s coronation. He was then part of a column which advanced 500 miles into Iraq, where he found himself hunting, and being hunted by, the canny nationalist leader Fawzi al-Kawukji who, in league with the Vichy French in Syria, was harrying British supply lines. On one patrol he found himself crawling at night through the ruins of the ancient city of Palmyra, outside which he found a French officer’s scarlet cloak; it would remain on the ducal bed for many years until the Duchess threw it out as moth-eaten. On another patrol he was turned back by enemy armoured cars outside El Beida. ‘Apart from the above incidents’, the citation for his MC declared, ‘this officer’s conduct throughout the operations in Syria was exceptionally gallant and he was a magnificent example to all ranks of his squadron’.
While in Cairo he enjoyed the friendship of a Druze princess, who once hid him in her bedroom while she remonstrated with an enraged friend. He took part in the Battle of Alamein before being wounded when a ‘brew-up’ of tea exploded. It was in late 1943 that he learned that his cousin, the 6th Duke, his elder by three years, had been killed with the Commandos at Salerno. His father succeeded as the 7th Duke, and he began to use the courtesy title, Marquess of Douro. On being posted to the staff in Jerusalem he met Diana McConnel, who worked in the office of her father, Maj Gen Douglas McConnel, the GOC. Shortly before their marriage in January 1943 a bomb was discovered outside the Anglican cathedral; it had been due to go off on their wedding day. Nine weeks later he was sent to Italy where, in the course of the difficult advance, he was given a duck which, instead of eating, he kept with a pointer in his armoured car which his men dubbed The Dog and the Duck.
Posted to Germany after the war, he considered leaving the Army until King George VI asked him to stay on, saying: ‘I like to have people I know in the Household Cavalry’. The following year at The King’s funeral he took part in the vigil at the lying-in-state and commanded the Mounted Escort to the coffin; he was later appointed LVO.
Valerian was Commanding Officer of the The Blues in Cyprus during the bloody EOKA terrorist campaign where he always slept with a pistol under his pillow, and as a result of his very successful command he was awarded the OBE (Military). After a spell as Lieutenant Colonel Commanding Household Cavalry and Silver Stick he was promoted to Brigadier and had charge of all Tank and Armoured Car Regiments in BAOR. In his final appointment as military attaché in Madrid, he was in the unusual position of being a diplomat in a country where he was heir to a title (Duke of Ciudad Rodrigo, conferred on the 1st Duke) and to 2,500 acres with a wonderful house which he enjoyed.
On retiring from the Army in 1968 in the rank of brigadier, he turned his attention to the family estates. In order to meet estate duties he sold 1,135 acres at Silchester and 230 at Wellington, Somerset (from where the family had originated). Over the following years he sold paintings, drawings and a 120-piece Sèvres dessert service made for the Empress Josephine. When it was learned that the buyer of the Sèvres was the French government there was a storm of protest in Britain, and an export licence was delayed before it eventually went to the Victoria and Albert Museum for £450,000. The Iron Duke’s papers were dispatched to Southampton University as part of an agreement with the Treasury.
A plan to modernise the Wellington estates included opening to the public Stratfield Saye, the 17th-century house with 7,500 acres between Reading and Basingstoke which had been given by the nation to the 1st Duke, and the creation of a 700-acre country park. He was a really knowledgeable countryman who loved Stratfield Saye and in the course of 40 years, it was estimated that he planted more than one million trees which helped to make the estate so beautiful. As a sportsman he was an excellent shot, and fisherman and accomplished rider and polo player. A fitting image to describe him would see him striding across the park with his thumb stick, Blues tweed cap, dogs at heel and that wonderful half smile and sparkling blue eyes.
The democratic age sometimes posed a threat to the Wellington properties abroad in Spain and Belgium. In Belgium in the 1970s and 1980s, two retired senators (one a descendant of a Napoleonic general) called the Duke’s right to an income of £20,000 a year from the 2,600 acres next to the battlefield of Waterloo a ‘feudal and medieval annuity’. And he could be sure that, wherever he was in the world, nobody would miss the opportunity to serve him Beef Wellington.
In The House of Lords, the Duke was particularly critical of the cutting of the Army’s numbers after the fall of communism, and he was highly critical of the 2003 invasion of Iraq. He also made a pilgrimage to the 6th Duke’s grave near Salerno. In 1997, on the 55th anniversary of the Battle of El Alamein, he visited the Household Cavalry Regiment on exercise in the Egyptian desert. Surrounded by the entire battlegroup, encamped close to where General Montgomery’s 8th Army had been based back in late 1942, Valerian modestly described the ‘worm’s eye view’ of a subaltern serving with 1 HCR.
He served as a Hampshire Deputy Lieutenant, county councillor and as president, trustee, governor and member of a wide variety of over 25 bodies and charities. His many appointments included being the last Colonel-in-Chief of the Duke of Wellington’s Regiment; president of the Game Conservancy; a director of Massey Ferguson; a trustee of the Royal Armouries; and a governor of Wellington College. He was appointed LVO in 1952, OBE in 1957. What gave Brigadier Valerian perhaps his greatest pleasure was his installation in 1990 by HM The Queen as a Knight of the Garter, the greatest honour that Her Majesty has to offer, an award on merit not by accident of birth. He was also an officer of the French Légion d’Honneur, a Knight Grand Cross of the Order of St Michael of the Wing in Portugal, and of the Order of Isabel the Catholic in Spain.
He had a very happy marriage for 66 years before Diana died in 2010, and was immensely proud of his large family, their exploits giving him great pleasure. Not least, he was proud of his grandson Gerald, who joined The Blues and Royals and served in Afghanistan with the Household Cavalry Regiment.
The Duke of Wellington was proclaimed by Brig Andrew Parker-Bowles at the conclusion of his eulogy, using Chaucer’s phrase, as ‘a true, a perfect, gentle knight.’
The heir to the peerages is the eldest of his four sons, Charles, Marquess of Douro.
With thanks to The Daily Telegraph.
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