Edward Russell, 26th Baron de Clifford
Lieutenant Colonel Edward Southwell Russell, 26th Baron de Clifford (1907–1982), was the only son of the 25th Baron de Clifford and Eva Carrington. In 1935 he became the last peer to be tried in the House of Lords for a felony, a manslaughter charge arising from a car accident. He was found not guilty.
Born in Belgravia, London, he was educated at Eton College and studied engineering at Imperial College London. In 1926 he was commissioned into the 21st (Royal Gloucestershire Hussars) Armoured Car Company of the Territorial Army; he was promoted lieutenant in 1929 and captain in 1938. He enjoyed racing cars until 1935 and for a time supported Sir Oswald Mosley and his British Union of Fascists.
In 1926 he married Dorothy Evelyn Meyrick. At nineteen he needed his mother’s consent to marry, but could not obtain it because of his fiancée’s West End connections, so he lied about his age, claiming to be 21, and was fined £50.
In 1928 he made his maiden speech in the House of Lords on road safety, proposing mandatory driving tests for licence applicants. He later spoke in favor of speed limits. Both measures were later introduced by the Road Traffic Act 1934.
On 15 August 1935 de Clifford was involved in a high-speed head-on collision in Surrey, which injured him and killed the other driver, 26-year-old Douglas George Hopkins. Because he was a peer, the case was heard in the House of Lords. The trial began on 12 December, with the Lord Chancellor presiding as Lord High Steward. The prosecution argued the accident showed excessive speed; de Clifford argued that Hopkins had been speeding on the wrong side. The jury acquitted him. He faced a separate dangerous-driving charge, which was not a felony, and the prosecution abandoned the case after his acquittal. This was the last time the Lords tried a peer for a felony; the right was abolished in 1948.
After the trial, de Clifford did not speak in the Lords for nearly forty years. In 1936 he sued The Spectator for libel, settling out of court, and he was named as a co-respondent in a divorce petition, though his marriage survived.
During World War II he moved to the Royal Army Ordnance Corps (1942) and the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers (1943). In 1946 he joined the regular army and rose to lieutenant colonel. He was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in the 1955 New Year Honours.
After the war he separated from his wife and divorced in 1973, the same year he married Mina Margaret Sands. Lord de Clifford died in 1982, aged 74, at Silvington, Shropshire. He was survived by his second wife and two sons from his first marriage. He was succeeded in the barony by his elder son, John Edward.
This page was last edited on 1 February 2026, at 23:32 (CET).