Robert Arthur James Gascoyne-Cecil, 5th Marquess of Salisbury, 1893-1972

Robert Arthur James Gascoyne-Cecil, fifth Marquess of Salisbury, was born at the family seat, Hatfield House, on 27 August 1893, eldest son of the fourth Marquess. After spending his early childhood at Hatfield he went to school at Eton and thence in due course to Christ Church, Oxford. His time at Oxford was cut short by the outbreak of the First World War, when he was gazetted to a commission in the Grenadier Guards and served with his regiment in France. Invalided home in September 1915 after having won the Croix de Guerre, he became, in 1916, Personal Military Secretary to the Secretary of State for War; at the conclusion of hostilities he did not return to Oxford but went into the City as a member of a firm of bill brokers and a Director of the Westminster Bank. As a Cecil, representing the latest generation of a family which had served the state with distinction from the days of Lord Burleigh, Queen Elizabeth I’s Minister, whose son became the first Earl of Salisbury (the Marquessate dates from 1789), it was only to be expected that he would, in due course, turn to politics. This he did when, in 1929, as Viscount Cranborne—the courtesy title by which he was generally known until he succeeded his father in 1947—he entered Parliament as Conservative member for South Dorset, a constituency which he continued to represent until 1941. He first attained junior office in 1934 as Parliamentary Private Secretary to Mr Anthony Eden when the latter became Lord Privy Seal with special responsibility for League of Nations affairs. These two travelled all over Europe on League business and so closely and successfully did they work together that when, in 1935, Eden was made Minister without Portfolio, the Government wished him still to have the assistance of Cranborne as Parliamentary Undersecretary of State. As Eden had no Department of his own this was done by appointing Cranborne Under-Secretary of State to the Foreign Office and passing a special Act of Parliament to permit two Under-Secretaries of State of the Foreign Office to sit in the Commons at the same time.