Charles Manners, 10^th Duke of Rutland (1919-1999)

Charles John Robert Manners, 10th Duke of Rutland was the son of John Manners, 9th Duke of Rutland.

He was educated at Eton and Trinity College, Cambridge, and became a captain in the Grenadier Guards.

He married, firstly, Anne Bairstow Cumming Bell, in 1946 and following their divorce in 1956 he married Frances Sweeny, two years later.

The Duke had one daughter by the first marriage (Lady Charlotte) and four by the second – David, Lord Robert who died in 1964 aged three, Lady Theresa and Lord Edward.

He became Duke in 1940, remaining in that role until his death.

In 1990 marked the rare feat of being a duke for 50 years with a 1,000-guest party at the family seat, Belvoir Castle

Novelist Dame Barbara Cartland  once confessed: “When he was young, the duke was absolutely stunning the most attractive man I have seen in all my life. He is exactly the sort of man who appears as the hero in all my books.”

Despite his £100-million fortune, he once insisted that his slice of the Alliance & Leicester’s pay-out on converting from building society to bank should be bigger than that to smaller savers but his view proved to be a minority one.

The Duke displayed considerable business acumen, both in minerals and as proprietor of the leisure group Rutland Hotels Ltd.

A lifelong Conservative, from 1974 to 1977 he was chairman of  Leicestershire County Council. But in politics too there was a touch of steel in his outlook: in the 1970s he threatened to lie down in front of bulldozers in the event (ultimately unrealised) of open-cast mining in the Vale of Belvoir; and in 1995 he led a group of peers being briefed by accountants on how to take precautions against politicians.