Denis Carter, Baron Carter

Who was Denis Carter, Baron Carter?

Denis Victor Carter, Baron Carter PC was a British agriculturalist and Labour Co-operative politician.

Carter was born in Elephant and Castle in London, where his parents, Albert and Annie Carter, worked in a tea warehouse and as an office cleaner, respectively. They later moved to Hove to run a sweetshop, and he was educated at the Jesuit Xaverian College in Brighton. He did national service in the Suez Canal Zone in Egypt from 1950 to 1952, and then studied at the East Sussex Institute of Agriculture and the Essex Institute of Agriculture, where he obtained a national diploma in agriculture, winning the Queen's Award for the country's highest marks. He later studied at Oxford, gaining a B.Litt. In 1957, he founded Agricultural Accounting and Management, which grew to manage and handle the accounting for a large number of farms, mainly in southern England and averaging 1,300 acres. In 1968, Carter founded and then worked for 30 years with United Oilseeds, which became a substantial farm trading operation, introducing large-scale oilseed rape marketing into Britain, and with WE & DT Cave, which raised thousands of pigs in Wiltshire.