Reginald Manningham-Buller, 1st Viscount Dilhorne facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
The Viscount Dilhorne
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Manningham-Buller in 1961.
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| Lord High Chancellor of Great Britain | |
| In office 13 July 1962 – 16 October 1964 |
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| Prime Minister | Harold Macmillan Sir Alec Douglas-Home |
| Preceded by | The Viscount Kilmuir |
| Succeeded by | The Lord Gardiner |
| Attorney-General for England | |
| In office 18 October 1954 – 16 July 1962 |
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| Prime Minister | Sir Winston Churchill Sir Anthony Eden Harold Macmillan |
| Preceded by | Sir Lionel Heald |
| Succeeded by | Sir John Hobson |
| Solicitor-General for England | |
| In office 3 November 1951 – 18 October 1954 |
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| Prime Minister | Winston Churchill |
| Preceded by | Lynn Ungoed-Thomas |
| Succeeded by | Sir Harry Hylton-Foster |
| Personal details | |
| Born | 1 August 1905 Amersham, Buckinghamshire, England |
| Died | 7 September 1980 (aged 75) |
| Resting place | Deene, East Northamptonshire |
| Political party | Conservative |
| Spouse |
Lady Mary Lindsay
(m. 1930) |
| Alma mater | Magdalen College, Oxford |
Reginald Edward Manningham-Buller, 1st Viscount Dilhorne, PC (1 August 1905 – 7 September 1980), known as Sir Reginald Manningham-Buller, Bt, from 1954 to 1962 and as The Lord Dilhorne from 1962 to 1964, was an English lawyer and Conservative politician. He served as Lord Chancellor from 1962 to 1964.
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Background and education
Born in Amersham, Buckinghamshire, Manningham-Buller was the only son of Sir Mervyn Manningham-Buller, 3rd Baronet, grandson of Sir Edward Manningham-Buller, 1st Baronet, of Dilhorne Hall, Staffordshire, a junior member of the Yarde-Buller family headed by Baron Churston. His mother was the Hon. Lilah Constance, Lady Manningham-Buller OBE, daughter of Charles Cavendish, 3rd Baron Chesham and granddaughter of Hugh Grosvenor, 1st Duke of Westminster.
His uncle's seat of Dilhorne Hall having passed to an heiress ineligible for the baronetcy, Manningham-Buller grew up in Northamptonshire. (Although now pronounced "Dill-horn" by locals, he preferred the older pronunciation of "Dill-urn".) He was educated at Eton College, where he caused a fellow pupil to be expelled for making advances to another boy. He then attended Magdalen College, Oxford, where he took a Third in Law, before being called to the Bar by the Inner Temple in 1927.
Political career
Manningham-Buller was elected to the House of Commons in a 1943 by-election as Member of Parliament (MP) for Daventry. He was briefly Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister of Works in the caretaker government of Winston Churchill before it lost power in the general election of 1945, and became a King's Counsel in 1947. In 1950, his seat became Northamptonshire South.
Law officer of the Crown
When Churchill regained power in 1951 Manningham-Buller was knighted and became Solicitor-General; in 1954 he was sworn of the Privy Council and became Attorney General for England and Wales. In 1956 he succeeded his father as fourth Baronet.
Lord Chancellorship
He continued as Attorney-General under Sir Anthony Eden and Harold Macmillan until July 1962, when he was rather abruptly named Lord Chancellor and sent to the House of Lords to replace Lord Kilmuir. On his appointment he was elevated to the peerage as Baron Dilhorne, of Towcester in the County of Northampton on 17 July 1962. Retained, after Macmillan's retirement, in the cabinet of Sir Alec Douglas-Home, when the Conservatives lost the election of 1964 he was created Viscount Dilhorne, of Greens Norton in the County of Northampton on 7 December, becoming the Deputy Leader of the Conservatives in the House of Lords. In 1969 he was named a Lord of Appeal in Ordinary and continued in this capacity until his death.
Manningham-Buller wrote the first report on the Profumo affair – an internal report for the Macmillan Government (confirmed by his daughter, The Baroness Manningham-Buller, when she appeared on the Desert Island Discs radio programme). Then when Lord Denning was appointed to investigate and report on the affair, Dilhorne passed his report over to Denning. Chapman Pincher in his book Inside Story published in 1978 quotes Manningham-Buller as jokingly saying he could have sued Tom Denning for breach of copyright because significant portions of Manningham-Buller's report appeared in Denning's report virtually unchanged. Denning did include much in his report that was not in Manningham-Buller's report.
Key judgments
Lord Dilhorne held in Newbury District Council v Secretary of State for the Environment; Newbury District Council v International Synthetic Rubber Co. Ltd. [1981] AC 578: "The conditions imposed must be for a planning purpose and not for any ulterior one... and they must fairly and reasonably relate to the development permitted. Also they must not be so unreasonable that no reasonable planning authority could have imposed them. In that case he also introduced the concept of the 'planning unit' which extinguishes previous permitted uses on land that has in practice become a new planning unit. This has stood up the test of recent jurisprudence and a DCLG (then DoE) circular is largely based on its principles.
Bullying manner
In the late 1950s, Bernard Levin gave Manningham-Buller the nickname "Bullying-Manner" in his Parliamentary sketch. When Manningham-Buller was elevated to the peerage as Lord Dilhorne, Levin renamed him Lord Stillborn. Lord Devlin, judge in the Adams case, described Buller's technique thus:
"He could be downright rude but he did not shout or bluster. Yet his disagreeableness was so pervasive, his persistence so interminable, the obstructions he manned so far flung, his objectives apparently so insignificant, that sooner or later you would be tempted to ask yourself whether the game was worth the candle: if you asked yourself that, you were finished."
Manningham-Buller was one of the inspirations for the character of Kenneth Widmerpool in Anthony Powell's A Dance to the Music of Time.
Marriage and children
Manningham-Buller married Lady Mary Lilian Lindsay (1910–2004), daughter of David Lindsay, 27th Earl of Crawford, in 1930. They had a son and three daughters:
- John Mervyn Manningham-Buller, 2nd Viscount Dilhorne (28 February 1932 - 25 June 2022)
- Hon Marion Cynthia Manningham-Buller (26 November 1934 - 10 August 2013), married Edmund Crispin Stephen James George Brudenell.
- Elizabeth Lydia Manningham-Buller, Baroness Manningham-Buller (born 14 July 1948)
- Hon Anne Constance Manningham-Buller (born 13 August 1951), married Sir John Christopher Parsons, KCVO.
Manningham-Buller died in 1980, aged 75, and was interred in Deene, Northamptonshire. He was succeeded in the viscountcy by his only son, John. His second daughter was the Director-General of MI5 from 2002 to 2007 and in 2008 was awarded a life peerage, becoming the Rt Hon The Baroness Manningham-Buller, DCB. His granddaughter is model and media personality Lilah Parsons.
