Robert Adair, 1st Baron Waveney

Who was Robert Adair, 1st Baron Waveney?

Robert Alexander Shafto Adair, 1st Baron Waveney was a British Liberal Party politician who served as a Member of Parliament for Cambridge for 8 of the years from 1847 to 1857.

Born in Ballymena, County Antrim, Ireland, he was the older of the two sons of Sir Robert Shafto Adair, 1st Baronet, and his first wife Elizabeth Maria Strode. He married Theodosia Meade in 1836; they had no children.

Adair first stood for election to Parliament in April 1843, when he was the runner-up at a by-election for the Eastern division of Suffolk. He was unsuccessful again at a by-election for the borough of Cambridge in July 1845, but at the 1847 general election he was elected as one of Cambridge's two MPs. He was defeated at the 1852 general election, but that result was overturned on petition and he was returned to the House of Commons at the resulting by-election in August 1854. He was unseated again in 1857 general election, and did not contest the 1859 general election. He stood again one more time, in Canterbury at the 1865 general election, but did not win a seat. He was appointed High Sheriff of Antrim in 1853.

A Fellow of the Royal Society, he succeeded to the baronetcy in 1869, on the death of his father. He was ennobled on 10 April 1873, as the first Baron Waveney. He served as Lord Lieutenant of Antrim from 1884 until his death in 1886, aged 74, when the peerage became extinct and he was succeeded in the baronetcy by his younger brother Hugh, who had been MP for Ipswich from 1847 to 1874.