File 084 - Lord Newton

Thomas Wodehouse Leah, 2nd Baron Newton, was born on March 18, 1857, in Hillington, Norfolk, England.

He was a British diplomat and Conservative politician. He was educated at Eton (1870-1874) and Christ Church, Oxford (1876-1879). In 1879, he was accepted into the Foreign Office and served as an attaché at the British Embassy in Paris from 1881 to 1886. In 1886, he was elected to the House of Commons as Member of Parliament for his home constituency of Newton, a seat he held until 1898 when he succeeded his father as 2nd Baron Newton and took his seat in the House of Lords. He was appointed a deputy lieutenant of Cheshire in 1901. In 1915, Prime Minister H. H. Asquith appointed him Paymaster-General, with special responsibility for representing the War Office in Parliament when the Secretary of State for War was unable to attend. The same year he was admitted to the Privy Council. In 1916, Lord Newton became Assistant Under-Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs. He became controller of the newly established Prisoner of War Department, and in this position, he negotiated the release of thousands of British prisoners of war. He was also the author of two biographies, “Richard Lyons, 1st Viscount Lyons” (1913) and “Henry Petty-Fitzmaurice, 5th Marquess of Lansdowne” (1929). In 1941, he published his memoirs, “Retrospection.”

In 1880, he married Evelyn Caroline Bromley-Davenport (1859–1931). He died on March 21, 1942, in London, England.