Francis Curzon, 3rd Viscount Scarsdale

Who is Francis Curzon, 3rd Viscount Scarsdale?

Francis John Nathaniel Curzon, 3rd Viscount Scarsdale, was a British peer.

Curzon was the son of the Honourable Francis Nathaniel Curzon, third son of Alfred Nathaniel Holden Curzon, 4th Baron Scarsdale. He succeeded his cousin in the viscountcy in 1977.

Lord Scarsdale, who died aged 76, fought a dozen years of battles against the National Trust over its alterations to his ancestral home, Kedleston Hall in Derbyshire, and another 10 years trying to persuade the trust to take the place off his hands.

Scarsdale saw himself as "the 30th Lord of Kedleston in an unbroken male line of descent". His family stretches back 900 years, but his position was the result of the typical stipulation in the Scarsdale title - that it, and the estate, could go only to a male heir.

The 2nd viscount gave up hope of a male heir after his first wife produced four daughters and he failed to father an heir with his second wife. As next in line, Francis Curzon, an old Etonian captain in the Scots Guards, and son of the third son of the 4th Baron Scarsdale, was invited by a cousin he hardly knew to see the estate for the first time in 1959.

Kedleston Hall has been one of the glories of Britain since the young Robert Adam rebuilt it for the first Baron Curzon in the 1760s, around his collection of Tintorettos, Poussins and Chippendale furniture. As the centre of an estate of 5,700 acres, it included a 500-acre park and an 18-hole golf course.