Patrick Buchan-Hepburn, 1st Baron Hailes

Patrick George Thomas Buchan-Hepburn, 1st Baron Hailes, GBE, CH (2 April 1901 – 5 November 1974) was a British Conservative politician and the first and only Governor-General of the short-lived West Indies Federation, from January 3, 1958, to May 31, 1962, when the country was disbanded.

Buchan-Hepburn was the youngest son of Sir Archibald Buchan-Hepburn, 4th Baronet (see Buchan-Hepburn Baronets), and his wife Edith Agnes (née Karslake), and was educated at Harrow and Trinity College, Cambridge. He was a personal secretary to Winston Churchill and a London County Councillor before being elected to Parliament in 1929. In 1939 he was appointed a Parliamentary Whip for the Conservative Party and Lord Commissioner of the Treasury. During World War II he served in the military, but returned to politics in 1945, serving as Deputy Whip to 1948 and then Chief Whip. He was Government Chief Whip and Parliamentary Secretary to the Treasury from 1951 to 1955. In 1957 he raised to the peerage as Baron Hailes, of Prestonkirk in the County of East Lothian.

With the formation of the West Indies Federation in response to complaints against British colonialism in the Caribbean, lord Hailes was appointed the country's first Governor-General and relocated to Port of Spain on the island of Trinidad. Four years later, the new state was dissolved and he returned to England, where he served as Chairman of the Historic Buildings Council (a predecessor body of English Heritage, formally known as the Historic Buildings and Monuments Commission for England).

Buchan-Hepburn married Diana Mary, daughter of Brigadier-General the Hon. Charles Lambton, in 1945. they had no children. He died in November 1974, aged 73, when the barony became extinct.

References

* [http://janus.lib.cam.ac.uk/db/node.xsp?id=EAD%2FGBR%2F0014%2FHAIS;sib0=159 Janus project: The Papers of Patrick George Buchan-Hepburn, 1st Baron Hailes of Prestonkirk, PC, GBE, CH 1901-1974]
* [http://www.thepeerage.com/ www.thepeerage.com]