WOULD you be awfully embarrassed to find yourself a member of the same secret communist cell as your own butler? I suppose it’s a situation very few of us will ever need to worry about, but allegedly this was an etiquette poser which Alexander Gavin Henderson, second Baron Faringdon, had to negotiate on a regular basis.

The story goes that Henderson’s butler was the local CP convener, while the baron himself was branch secretary. Meetings were held at Buscot Park, the ancestral pile; after serving dinner, the gentleman’s gentleman would take the liberty of discreetly reminding His Lordship that his presence was required in the library this evening. 

Once the meeting began, Comrade Butler, in the chair, would instruct Comrade Henderson to read the minutes.

The main source for all that is a memoir written many years later by a friend of Henderson’s who had by then turned anti-communist, so it’s probably best taken with a pinch of salt. 

The other well-known story about Lord Faringdon may also be apocryphal. He was famously effeminate and it’s widely reported that he once addressed the House of Lords, not as “My Lords,” but as “My dears.”

What we know for certain about Gavin Henderson is that he was a good and brave man, a genuine hero in two wars, and a socialist who lived a life which was principled, if unorthodox.

Born on March 20 1902, the son and grandson of Conservative members of Parliament, Gavin attended Eton and Oxford and in the 1920s was one of the so-called “Bright Young Things” — the rising generation of aristos and socialites whose lives were dedicated to glittering parties and hilarious japes. 

But, like so many of his contemporaries, he was sobered up by the terrifying advent of fascism, and by the realisation that the only people fighting it with any consistency were the communists.

In 1927 an arranged marriage took place between Gavin and the daughter of a shipping magnate. The union was brief and childless, but in a time when being gay was both illegal and scandalous it gave Henderson a public alibi: he wasn’t homosexual, he was simply divorced. 

The fact that members of his own circle used to refer to him — indelicately, but apparently without censure — as “a roaring pansy” might just have undermined his disguise. So, too, his close friendships with the likes of Tom Driberg and Guy Burgess.

When his grandfather died in 1934, Henderson succeeded to the title of Baron Faringdon, occupancy of Buscot Park, and one of the biggest fortunes in Britain. By the time of his death he’d donated most of the money to the causes he supported.

Whether Henderson was ever formally a Communist Party member or not is disputed, but as The Right Honourable the Lord Faringdon he sat in the Lords as a Labour member, and threw himself into campaigning for the party.

Horrified by western Europe’s refusal to support democracy in Spain, Henderson was from 1936 busy in Spanish solidarity work. He turned part of Buscot Park into a home for scores of Basque refugees. 

His green Rolls-Royce was converted into an ambulance and shipped to the front line. It survived the war, albeit bullet-holed and battered, and was later used back in Britain to raise funds for the war’s victims. 

Henderson himself, a lifelong pacifist, served as a stretcher-bearer in Spain. Once the war was lost, he concentrated on helping republicans escape the country.

In World War II he became a firefighter, where his nickname among the crews was “Lordy.” Henderson distinguished himself during the Blitz in both London and Bristol. 

It was a frightening, exhausting and dangerous job — around 1,000 firefighters were killed during the war — but Lordy’s political commitments never lessened. He was a leading member of the Fabian Society and the National Council for Civil Liberties, and continued to attend the house, where he argued for equal pay for female firefighters. 

As the war went on, and there were fewer bombs falling on Britain, Henderson volunteered for firefighting duties overseas. His work won him medals from Britain, the Netherlands and France.

He remained in public service for the rest of his life. In-between meetings of the Keep Left Group (communists William Gallacher and Phil Piratin were also members), his work as a Labour councillor, and facilitating labour movement conferences at Buscot Park, he set about restoring the great house itself. 

As a result he was seen as one of the first experts in the preservation of Georgian buildings — presumably despite, rather than because of the socialist frescoes he commissioned to adorn several of the walls.

From openly criticising Churchill’s support for the Greek fascists, while part of an official delegation to the USSR in 1945, to rescuing Private Eye from financial collapse 20 years later, “Lordy” remained a tireless rebel — and indeed a tireless lord — until his death in 1977.

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