(2nd) Lord Dulverton  


THE TIMES
Wednesday Feb 19, 1992

OBITUARY
LORD DULVERTON
  Lord Dulverton, CBE, TD, 2nd Baron, a former director of the Imperial Tobacco company, died on February 17 aged 76.   He was born on December 19, 1915.
  Although he was the senior member of the Wills tobacco family and had served for 18 years on the board of the company, the second Lord Dulverton was not, like his father and grandfather before him, ever at the helm of the tobacco business.   Rather he was known as a staunch and knowledgeable countryman and for his many gifts to and sponsorships of a wide variety of causes and individuals through his chairmanship of the Dulverton Trust.   The breadth of the trust's interests was notable and covered such disparate activities as financial aid to the Earl of Longford's study group on pornography, which was active in research into the subject in the 1970s, and sponsorship of Gypsy Moth IV, the yacht in which Sir Francis Chichester sailed single-handed round the world in 226 days in 1966-67.   It is to Dulverton's credit that Gypsy Moth IV was eventually preserved as part of the nation's maritime heritage at Greenwich where she can be seen to this day in a concrete dry berth not far from the Cutty Sark.   Lord Dulverton also commissioned the 272ft Overlord Embroidery, which portrays the 1944 Normandy landings, and gave it to the nation.
 
  Frederick Anthony Hamilton Wills was the son of the 1st Lord Dulverton who had been chairman of Imperial Tobacco from 1924 to 1947.   His mother was a daughter of Rear-Admiral Sir Edward Chichester, Bt, and hence he himself was a cousin to Francis Chichester.   He was educated at Eton and Magdalen College, Oxford, where he took his MA and where he became Waynflete fellow in 1982.
  A keen enthusiast for territorial soldiering, he was commissioned into the Lovat Scouts (TA) in 1935.   Throughout the second world war he served with the Loat Scouts and was promoted major in 1944.
  In 1950 he became a member of the board of Imperial Tobacco and in the same year was appointed a joint Master of the North Cotswold Foxhounds.   Hunting was a passion as it had been with his father and "Woodbine Willy" as he was known, was a familar figure in the field.   In 1956 his father died and the second Lord Dulverton inherited his title and estate, then valued at more than £4 million gross.   He inherited, too, the chairmanship of the Dulverton Trust, through which his father had, in his day, been such a munificent benefactor.
  He had married, in 1939, Judith Betty, a daughter of Lieutenant-Colonel the Hon Ian Leslie Melville.   This marriage ended in 1960 in a widely-pubicised divorce, which followed not long after Dulverton's resignation as joint master of the North Cotswold pack.

  He married, secondly in 1962, Mrs Violet Fanshawe, daughter of Sir Walter Randolph Fitzroy Farquhar, 5th Bt, herself a former joint Master of the North Cotswold Foxhounds.
  Besides his many activities on behalf of the family trust Lord Dulverton was usefully able to indulge his love of the countryside, from his Gloucestershire seat, Batsford Park, Moreton-in-Marsh through his work with the Gloucestershire Trust for Nature Conservation, the Forestry Committee of Great Britain, and the Wildfowl Trust and many similar organisations.   A man whose love of the country was backed up by a profound knowledge of matters such as ecological balance, he was a frequent correspondent to The Times pointing out the dangers to the rural environment posed by those he believed ignorant of such matters.   In 1983 he took the paper severely to task for an article which had appeared in it criticising the planting of barren uplands with conifers.
 
  By virtue of his experience as a Scottish landowner, too, he was able persuasively to contest the commonly articulated view that in all cases conifers spell death to the regeneration of the countryside.   In his letters, as in his person, Lord Dulverton could be robust, if not hot-tempered, in argument.   Last November he was fined Pounds 50 for assaulting a nurse and failing to report an accident, after his car had been in collision with the nurse's bicycle.   But he was fundamentally a humane man.   After his divorce, tiring of the publicity which had surrounded it, he went to Jordan where he spent five months living among nomadic tribes and alleviating their drought-stricken plight on behalf of the Save The Children Fund.
  There were two sons and a daughter (and a daughter now dead) of his first marriage.   The elder son, the Hon (Gilbert) Michael Hamilton Wills, succeeds him.