Christopher Soames, Baron Soames

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The Right Honourable Arthur Christopher John, Baron Soames GCMG GCVO CBE PC (October 12, 1920 – September 16, 1987) was a British Conservative politician and the son-in-law of Winston Churchill. The last Governor of Rhodesia, he had previously been the longtime Member of Parliament for Bedford from 1950 to 1966.

In 1968 Harold Wilson named Soames the British Ambassador to France. In 1978 he was named a life peer in the House of Lords. Soames served in the Cabinet of Harold Macmillan as Secretary of State for War from 1958 to 1960 and Minister of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food from 1960 to 1964 under Macmillan and his successor Alec Douglas-Home. From 1979 to 1981 he was Conservative Leader of the House of Lords and thus a minister in Margaret Thatcher's government concurrent with his duties in Rhodesia.

Soames was the son of Captain Arthur Granville Soames, descendant of a brewing family which became part of the landed gentry, by his wife Hope Mary Woodbine Parrish. His parents divorced early on, and his mother remarried the 7th Baron Dynevor (descendant of the 1st and last Earl Talbot) as her second husband, by whom she had issue including Charles Arthur Uryan Rhys, 8th Baron Dynevor.

Christopher Soames married Mary Churchill (the youngest child of Winston Churchill) on February 11, 1947. They had five children, of whom the best known is his eldest son Nicholas Soames MP, the former Conservative Shadow Secretary of State for Defence.

He is buried within the Churchill plot at St Martin Church, Bladon, near Woodstock in Oxfordshire.

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External links

• Time:Festive Birth of a Nation (Zimbabwe)
• Maximilian Genealogy Master Database 2000
• Nicholas Soames - MP for Mid Sussex