Noel Lytton, 4th Earl of Lytton

Who was Noel Lytton, 4th Earl of Lytton?

Noel Anthony Scawen Lytton, 4th Earl of Lytton was a British Army officer, Arabian horse fancier and writer.

He had an intriguing ancestry. He was a descendant of the poet and adventurer Lord Byron, via his daughter Ada Lovelace, arguably the world's first computer programmer. Her daughter Anne married the poet Wilfrid Scawen Blunt; their daughter Judith Blunt-Lytton was Noel's mother.

He was raised just east of the Sussex town of Crawley, in the mansion built by his maternal grandparents on the grounds of their renowned horse breeding establishment, the Crabbet Arabian Stud. He was educated at Royal Military Academy Sandhurst and was commissioned in the Rifle Brigade. He later taught economics there in the 1930s. In the time between the World Wars, he served "as an administrator and keeper of the peace in the area around Lake Rudolph in Kenya." When the British entered the Second World War, he was posted by the military to North Africa, but due to an automobile accident was invalided out to desk duty, which his son describes as extremely frustrating for someone who was used to being athletic and active.

As part of government administration, Lytton eventually went to Yugoslavia to work with Josip Broz Tito's Partisans. There, he also met his wife, Clarissa Palmer, daughter of Brigadier General Cyril Eustace Palmer R.A. They married in 1946 and had five children: John Peter Michael, eventual 5th Earl of Lytton and 18th Baron Wentworth; the Hon. Roland Cyril Lawrence Lytton, Lady Caroline Mary Noel Lytton, Lady Lucy Mary Frances Lytton and Lady Sarah Teresa Mary Lytton. On moving to Exmoor to farm, he dropped the '-Milbanke' from the family name and kept merely the 'Lytton'.