Evan Morgan, 2nd Viscount Tredegar

Evan Frederic Morgan, 2nd Viscount Tredegar (born July 13, 1893 in London , † April 27, 1949 in Dorking ) was a British nobleman, artist, military and politician.

Origin and service during the First World War

Evan Morgan came from the Welsh Morgan family . He was the only son of Courtenay Morgan, 3rd Baron Tredegar and his wife Katherine Carnegie . His father was promoted to Viscount Tredegar in 1926 . Morgan attended Eton College and then studied at Christ Church College , Oxford. Like many family members before him, he joined the British Army and served in the Welsh Guards from June 27, 1915 during the First World War . For health reasons, he prematurely ended his active military service as a lieutenant. From 1917 he served as a gratuitous private secretary to George Henry Roberts , the Secretary of State for Labor . In 1919 he worked for Sir George Riddell in the press office of the Paris Peace Conference . He then served as the British Legion's liaison officer for Wales. At times he worked in the British Embassy in Denmark.

Eccentric life in the 1920s

Morgan led a quirky and eccentric life as a wealthy heir in the 1920s. As a young man he had already worked as a painter, and his works had been exhibited in the Paris Salon . He later collected paintings, mostly from the Italian Renaissance , and became a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts . He was a member of the American Geographical Society and the Zoological Society . Despite his lack of training, he served as an artistic advisor to the royal family. He was considered a favorite of Queen Maria and the former Prime Minister David Lloyd George , in turn, he is said to have had a great influence on Brendan Bracken , one of Winston Churchill's closest collaborators. On his Welsh country estate Tredegar House , he maintained a menagerie in which, among other things, a kangaroo and numerous birds lived. At garden parties, he carried a parrot on his shoulder. His friends included Aldous Huxley , GK Chesterton, and most importantly Aleister Crowley . Through its influence, Morgan turned himself to the occult and set up a Magik Room in Tredegar , where he managed to keep his occult practices largely secret. Shortly after World War I, Morgan converted to Catholicism . He studied at the English College in Rome , became Grand Crusader of the Order of the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem , Knight of the Sovereign Order of Malta and both under Pope Benedict XV. as under Pius XI. papal chamberlain with cloak and sword . In the 1929 general election he ran in vain as a candidate for the Conservative Party for the Limehouse constituency in East London. In 1932 he met in Bad Wiessee with Rudolf Hess , Ernst Röhm , Edmund Heines and the British artist Sir Francis Cyril Rose in a restaurant for dinner. Morgan maintained loose connections with the National Socialists, among other things he is said to have later met Hermann Göring when he met the Italian dictator Mussolini on Capri .

Next life

After the death of his father in 1934 Morgan inherited his extensive possessions and the title Viscount Tredegar including the subordinate title Baron Tredegar , making him a member of the House of Lords . In addition, he was Justice of the Peace and Deputy Lieutenant of Monmouthshire and Colonel of Honor of the 17th London Regiment , a unit of the Territorial Army . He has held numerous honorary positions, including that of Governor of the Royal Agricultural Society of England and the Royal Welsh Agricultural Society, as well as in the management of various hospitals in Wales. During World War II , Morgan served as battalion commander of the Monmouth Home Guard's 3rd Battalion from 1940 to 1942 , then served as a major in the Royal Corps of Signals in the War Office until 1943 . He is said to have worked for MI8 and was responsible for carrier pigeons . Because of a careless lack of secrecy, he is said to have narrowly escaped conviction by a court martial. After that he left the War Office. Because of his homosexuality , which was still a criminal offense in Britain at the time, Morgan was increasingly socially ostracized. He also developed cancer and died at Honeywood House , his mother's Surrey home , at the age of 55 . His mother died a few months after him.

Marriage and inheritance

Although his homosexuality was well known, Morgan was married twice. His first marriage was on April 1, 1928, when he married Lois Sturt, a younger daughter of Humphrey Sturt, 2nd Baron Alington and Lady Feodorowna Yorke . After her death in 1937, on March 13, 1939, he married Princess Olga Sergeivna Dolgorouky , a daughter of the Russian Prince Sergei Dolgorukov, who lived in British exile . The marriage was annulled in 1943 . Both marriages had remained childless, so that with his death the title Visount Tredegar expired. In order to save inheritance taxes, he bequeathed the family's lands directly to his cousin John Morgan , the son of his uncle Frederic Morgan .

Works

Morgan was not only active as a painter, but also as an amateur writer. Among other things, he published the novel Trial by ordeal. A novel (1921) and the volumes of poetry Fragments (1916), Gold and ocher (1917), Psyche: an unfinished fragment (1920), A sequence of Seven Sonnets (1920), At Dawn, poems profane and religious (1924), The eel and other poems (1926), The city of canals and other poems (1929).

literature

• Paul Anthony Busby: Hush, hush: the peculiar career of lord tredegar. Little Knowledge Publishi, 2013, ISBN 978-0-9576869-0-8
• William P. Cross: Not behind lace curtains. The hidden world of Evan, Viscount Tredegar Book Midden Publishing, Newport 2013. ISBN 978-1-905-91421-0
• TREDEGAR. In: Who Was Who, A&C Black, an imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing plc, 1920–2016; Oxford University Press, April 2014

Web links

• Evan David Jones: MORGAN, EVAN FREDERIC (1893 - 1949), 2nd VISCOUNT TREDEGAR, poet, artist, soldier, and statesman (Dictionary of Welsh Biography, National Library of Wales)
• Evan Frederic Morgan, 2nd Viscount Tredegar on thepeerage.com , accessed October 28, 2017.
• Phil Carradice: Evan Morgan of Tredegar House (BBC Wales)

predecessor	Office	successor
Courtenay Morgan	Viscount Tredegar 1934-1949	Title expired
Courtenay Morgan	Baron Tredegar 1934-1949	Frederic Morgan