the Duke of Wellington’s Regiment; president of Game Conservancy; a director of Massey Ferguson; a trustee of the Royal Armouries; and a governor of Wellington College. He was appointed LVO in 1952, OBE in 1957. What gave Brigadier Valerian perhaps his greatest pleasure was his installation in 1990 by HM The Queen as a Knight of the Garter, the greatest honour that Her Majesty has to offer, an award for merit not for an accident of birth. He was also an officer of the French Legion of Honour, and a Knight Grand Cross of the Order of St Michael of the Wing in Portugal, and of the Order of Isabel the Catholic in Spain. He had a very happy marriage for 66 years before Diana died in 2010, and was immensely proud of his large family, their exploits giving him great pleasure. Not least he was proud of his grandson Gerald, who had joined The Blues and Royals, and served in Afghanistan with the Household Cavalry Regiment. The heir to the peerages is the eldest of his four sons, Charles, Marquess of Douro He was, as proclaimed by Brig Andrew Parker Bowles using Chaucer’s phrase in conclusion of his eulogy “a true, a perfect, gentle knight.”
Colonel Sir Ralph Carr-Ellison Late 1st Royal Dragoons with acknowledgement to The Daily Telegraph Sir Ralph Carr-Ellison, who died aged 88 on 26th August 2014, was one of northeast England’s most prominent citizens as the long-serving chairman of Tyne-Tees Television and Lord Lieutenant of Tyne and Wear, and as the inheritor of estates in rural Northumberland and urban Tyneside. A family historian described Sir Ralph as “a mixture of the traditionalist and the progressive, the aristocrat and the democrat; an Old Etonian with his feet firmly set in his native North East”. His remarkably full life encompassed a range of business ventures and projects as well as military service, public duties, local politics, land husbandry and fox-hunting. Ralph Harry Carr-Ellison was born on 8th December 1925 on the Hedgeley estate near Alnwick, where he lived all his life, and which had been acquired in 1786 by his ancestor Ralph Carr, a prosperous Newcastle merchant whose son married Hannah Ellison, of Hebburn Hall on Tyneside. The grounds of Hebburn Hall, which became an infirmary, are now CarrEllison Park. After Eton, Ralph joined the 1st Royal Dragoons in 1944. He was commissioned and seconded to the Royal Gloucestershire Hussars, who were preparing for an invasion of Japan but were in fact dispatched to Austria, where they patrolled the eastern frontier to keep out Hungarian refugees. Returning to the Royal Dragoons, Carr-Ellison served in Germany as a captain and technical adjutant until 1949. Four decades of territorial service were to follow: among other roles he commanded the Northumberland Hussars; was honorary colonel of the Northumbrian Universities OTC; president of the North of England TA & VR Association; and ADC (TAVR)
to the Queen. In previous generations, the Carr-Ellisons’ urban properties south of the Tyne at Hebburn and Dunston had subsidised their rural holdings, but post-war rent controls and levies on development reversed that situation, and death duties made further inroads. Having assumed hands-on responsibility on his return from the Army, Ralph set out in the 1950s and 1960s to commercialise the estates and launch other ventures - in the motor trade, agricultural machinery and insurance broking in the spirit of his mercantile forebears. He was drawn into a more public role as a director of the Newcastle & Gateshead Water Co in 1964, and was the first chairman, from 1973, of the Northumbrian Water Authority, formed to coordinate supply across a rapidly urbanising region from the Tweed to the Tees. It fell to him to oversee the construction of Kielder Water - Britain’s largest man-made lake - that had received ministerial approval but was opposed by many neighbouring landowners. Just before Christmas in 1979, as he was visiting tunnelling works, Ralph suffered serious injuries and two months of hospitalisation when a boring machine broke through a wall in front of him; but he saw the project to successful completion of the reservoir in 1981, and the opening of its hydroelectric plant the following year. Meanwhile, he had also been asked in 1966 to be a director of Tyne Tees Television, the regional independent station that had begun broadcasting in 1959. Though he was at first seen as representing the rural interest, he made it clear that his purview extended across the industrial north east and established himself as a forceful boardroom presence. When Tyne Tees and Yorkshire Television merged in 1970 he became deputy chairman of the new parent, Trident, and fought to preserve Tyne Tees against attempts from Yorkshire to reduce its presence in Newcastle to save costs. From 1974 until 1997 (when the group was acquired by Granada) he was chairman of Tyne Tees. If the station was not much celebrated for original programme-making, highlights being dramatisations of Catherine Cookson novels, one exception was the live music show The Tube, first made for Channel 4 in 1982. At the inaugural broadcast, an unruly horde of youngsters descended on the studios accompanied by a large detachment of police. The station’s managing director, Peter Paine, feared for his career when Carr-Ellison arrived to see how things were going, and was relieved to be told: “This is the best thing you’ve ever done.” In the political sphere, he was treasurer of the Conservative Party’s northern area, vice-chairman of the National Union of Conservative Associations and chairman of Berwick-uponTweed constituency, where his name had been bruited as a parliamentary candidate in 1951. Among many other commitments, he was chairman of the Automobile Association from 1986 to 1995. He had a lifelong interest in the scouting movement as county commissioner for Northumberland and a member of the council of the Scout Association. He was chairman of the development trust of Newcastle University, and was closely involved in the creation in 1999 of the regional development agency One North East.
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