Francis Newdegate

Who was Francis Newdegate?

Sir Francis Alexander Newdigate Newdegate GCMG was Governor of Tasmania from 1917 to 1920, and Governor of Western Australia from 1920 to 1924.

Born in 1862, he was the son of Lieutenant Colonel Francis William Newdigate and his first wife Charlotte Elizabeth Agnes Sophia Woodford, and grandson of Francis Parker Newdigate. He was educated at Eton and the Royal Military College, Sandhurst, and was commissioned into the Grenadier Guards in 1883. He married Elizabeth Sophia Lucia Bagot on 13 October 1888.

Newdigate inherited estates at Arbury Hall, near Nuneaton and at Harefield, near Uxbridge, on the death of his father in 1893. He assumed the additional surname "Newdegate", differently spelt, under the terms of the will of an uncle in 1902. In 1911 he erected, at Arbury Hall, a monument to the memory of George Eliot, whose father had been employed on the Arbury estate.

He was Member of Parliament for Nuneaton from 1892 to 1906, and for Tamworth from 1909 to 1917. He was on 14 February 1917 appointed Steward of the Manor of Northstead, a mechanism for resigning from the House of Commons, on his appointment as Governor of Tasmania.

He was awarded the KCMG in 1917 upon his appointment as Governor of Tasmania. He was appointed Governor of Western Australia in 1920 where he served until 1924. On retirement he was promoted GCMG in 1925. The Western Australian town of Newdegate is named after him.