Roger Fleetwood-Hesketh

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Lieutenant-Colonel Roger Fleetwood Hesketh OBE TD DL JP (born Roger Bibby-Hesketh; 28 July 1902 – 14 November 1987) was a British Army officer and a Conservative Party politician. He served as the Member of Parliament for Southport from 1952 to 1959.

He was the first of six children of Major Charles Hesketh Fleetwood-Hesketh and Anne Dorothea Brocklebank Fleetwood-Hesketh. His mother died in 1940 when the British liner City of Benares was torpedoed, with heavy loss of life. Hesketh was educated at Eton and, in 1922, was commissioned into the Duke of Lancaster's Own Yeomanry as a second lieutenant. He studied at Christ Church, Oxford, and was called to the bar in 1928 at the Middle Temple.

During the Second World War, he transferred to the Royal Artillery in 1940. As a lieutenant colonel, he became a member of Ops (B), the deception section of SHAEF, which helped plan Operation Fortitude—the deception effort behind the Normandy invasion in 1944. He later wrote a history of his role and the operation, published after his death. After the war, he went to Germany with his brother to study German intelligence files and to question officers, and he was asked to write a history of deception in Western Europe up to Fortitude.

In the 1970s, a book by Sefton Delmer appeared to copy from Hesketh’s unpublished report. The government claimed Crown Copyright over his material, so he could not publish, though Delmer added a credit in the second edition. Hesketh’s report was eventually published posthumously in 1999 with a foreword by Rupert Allason, who wrote under the pseudonym Nigel West.

Hesketh served as High Sheriff of Lancashire in 1947 and as Deputy Lieutenant of Lancashire from 1950 to 1972. He remained a reserve officer in the Territorial Army with the honorary rank of Colonel until 1957. He received the American Legion of Merit (Officer) in 1948 and was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in 1970, while he was chairman of the Lancashire Agricultural Executive Committee.

The family name changed twice: first in 1907, when his father changed Bibby-Hesketh to Fleetwood-Hesketh, and on 10 August 1956, when he changed his own name to Roger Fleetwood Hesketh (without a hyphen). In the 1960s he rebuilt the family home, Meols Hall in Southport, reflecting his interest in architecture. He died in 1987 at the age of 85.