David Macpherson, 2nd Baron Strathcarron

Who was David Macpherson, 2nd Baron Strathcarron?

David William Anthony Blyth Macpherson, 2nd Baron Strathcarron was best known as the "motorcycling peer". He inherited the Barony on his father's death in 1937, but lost his automatic right to a seat in the House of Lords with the passage of the House of Lords Act 1999.

He served in the Royal Air Force in the Second World War, and raced motor vehicles after the war. He was the motoring correspondent of The Field from 48 years, from 1954 to 2002. He died seven weeks after a motorcycling accident involving a dustcart. His obituary in The Daily Telegraph described him as "an engaging amalgam of Mr Punch, Bertie Wooster and Mr Toad".

Lord Strathcarron's father was Ian Macpherson, a government minister in the cabinet of Lloyd George who had been created Baron Strathcarron, of Banchor, in 1936. He attended Eton College and Jesus College, Cambridge. After the outbreak of the Second World War, he joined the RAF in 1941, before he graduated, and flew Wellingtons for Coastal Command on reconnaissance and search-and-rescue missions over the Atlantic Ocean, during the Battle of the Atlantic. He then flew long-range transport missions, and was demobbed in 1947.