Frederick Corfield

Who was Frederick Corfield?

Sir Frederick Vernon Corfield, QC, PC was a British Conservative politician and minister.

Corfield was the son of Brigadier Frederick Alleyne Corfield and Mary Graham Vernon. On 10 August 1945 he married Elizabeth Mary Ruth Taylor at Holy Trinity Church, Brompton in London.

He was educated firstly at Brockhurst Preparatory School and then at Cheltenham College and the Royal Military Academy. He was commissioned into the Royal Artillery in 1935. He was then posted to India until 1939, only to be sent to France with the British Expeditionary Force. By 1940 he was serving in the 51st Division, and mentioned in dispatches, but, as the Germans advanced, the division was cut off and forced to surrender. Thus Corfield spent the remainder of the war as a prisoner of war, latterly at Oflag IX A/Z at Rotenburg an der Fulda. During his time as a prisoner he studied law.

On his return to England he qualified as a lawyer and was called to the bar at Middle Temple in 1946, he spent a year in the army's judge advocate general's branch. This did not suit him. He spent the next decade mainly as a farmer, first on the family farm in Oxfordshire, then on a 300-acre farm in Gloucestershire.