Toby Low, 1st Baron Aldington

Toby Austin Richard William Low, 1st Baron Aldington KCMG CBE DSO TD DL PC ( May 25, 1914 - December 7, 2000 ) was a British Conservative Party politician , businessman and soldier.

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Toby Low was the son of Colonel Stuart, who died in 1942, and Lucy Atkin, daughter of Lord Atkin . He studied at Winchester College and New College , Oxford . In 1939 he passed his lawyer exam. In 1934 he joined the King's Royal Rifle Corps Regiment and served in Greece , Crete , Egypt , Libya , Tunisia , Italy and Austria during World War II . In 1944 he was promoted to brigadier , making him the youngest soldier of that rank in the British Army . In 1941 he was awarded the Distinguished Service Order , became Commander of the US Legion of Merit and received the French Croix de guerre .

Low ran successfully in the British general election in 1945 for the constituency of Blackpool North . From 1951 to 1954 he was Parliamentary State Secretary in the Ministry of Supply , after 1954 Minister of State in the Board of Trade and became Privy Counselor . In 1957 he was promoted to a Knight Bachelor degree and chaired a Select Committee of Parliament on nationalized industry. In 1959 he became vice chairman of the Conservative Party .

In 1962, he received the hereditary title of Baron Aldington , of Bispham in the County Borough of Blackpool, and increased his business activities in various companies. He became the director of his family's bank , Grindlays Bank, succeeding his grandfather and father . In 1964 he became chairman of the board of directors of the bank as well as of the General Electric Company , in 1971 a member of the advisory board of the BBC and chairman of the board of directors of the Sun Alliance and the Port of London Authority . In 1972 he was together with the union leader Jack Jones chairman of the board of a joint committee of the port industry and 1977 chairman of the board of Westland . He was also Deputy Lieutenant of Kent .

Lord Aldington was considered a one-nation conservative and supported British membership in the European Union against opposition from his own party. He was convinced that such a union could have prevented World War II. As a member of the House of Lords , he continued to be politically active, such as chairing a commission of the Lords for overseas trade.

When the hereditary peers were expelled from the House of Lords in 1999 , he was given the non-hereditary title Baron Low , of Bispham in the County of Lancashire , and was thus able to remain in the House of Lords .

War criminal allegation

In 1989, Lord Aldington initiated a defamation process against historians Nikolai Tolstoy and Nigels Watts, who accused him of being involved in war crimes in Austria, including the Lienz Cossack Tragedy , which killed a total of 70,000 people. Tolstoy referred to Low as someone “with blood on their hands”. This tragedy was the result of an agreement in the Yalta Treaty , in which, among other things, the repatriation of all Soviet citizens who were in Allied captivity at the end of the war was agreed to be returned to the Soviet Union. B. were prisoners of war or forced labor in Germany; As Chief of Staff to Field Marshal Harold Alexander, Low was one of the officers in charge. Low won the lawsuit and was awarded £ 1.5 million in damages plus £ 500,000 in costs. It was the largest amount of damages ever awarded by a UK court.

Tolstoy had written several books (1977: Victims of Yalta 1981: Stalin's Secret War , 1986: The Minister and the Massacres 1986) in which he alleged that British politicians and officers, on the one hand, and the Soviet Army, on the other, were complicit in the Assassination of white Russian exiles, Cossacks , Croatian militia and civilians who had fled Tito , as well as 11,000 Slovenian anti-communist fighters. Low had initially ignored these books. But then the Briton Nigel Watts, who had business disputes with the Sun Alliance , of which Low was chairman, made these allegations his own by printing 10,000 brochures and mailing them to politicians and other people. Tolstoy insisted on co-indictment with Watts and was assisted in the matter by a number of members of the Conservative Party , including the Lord Seal Keeper and Chairman of the House of Lords, Lord Cranborne, and international celebrities including Nigel Nicolson , Graham Greene and Alexander Solzhenitsyn .

Tolstoy did not accept the verdict against him, declared himself bankrupt and tried a total of 15 courts across Europe to address it. In 1995 the judgment was overturned by the European Court of Human Rights on the grounds that the level of the sentence inappropriately restricted freedom of expression in a democratic society. As a result, the relevant law in Great Britain was changed in such a way that the amount of compensation payments must be realistic. Tolstoy and his attorneys remain obliged to reimburse the costs that Low incurred in the course of the proceedings. That same year, Watts was jailed for 18 months for repeating the allegations against Low.

Tolstoy, who later inherited a fortune from his stepfather, author Patrick O'Brian , did not make a single payment during Low's lifetime, who in turn had spent £ 300,000 on court and legal fees. Two days after Aldington's death, he first paid £ 57,000.

family

Lord Aldington married a daughter of Sir Harold MacMichael in 1947 . The couple had two daughters and a son, Charles Low, 2nd Baron Aldington , who inherited his title after Low's death.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Low officially adopted the additional first name Toby in 1957 . London Gazette . No. 41128, HMSO, London, 16 July 1957, p. 4265 ( PDF , English).
2. ^ ^{A b} Tolstoy pays £ 57,000 to Aldington's estate on telegraph.co.uk on December 9, 2000
3. ↑ ^{a b c} Aldington dies without penny of £ 1.5m award v. December 8, 2000
4. ↑ Dave Zupan: "The Story of Forced Repatriation of Slovenes After World War II" on ithaca.edu (PDF; 75 kB)
5. ↑ Lord Aldington . In: The Guardian , December 3, 2000. Retrieved May 25, 2010. 

Web links

• Toby Low at Hansard (English)
• House of Lords on publications.parliament.uk v. November 17, 1999
• Obituary for The Guardian

predecessor	Office	successor
New title created	Baron Aldington 1962-2000	Charles Low