Maurice Towneley-O'Hagan, 3rd Baron O'Hagan

Who was Maurice Towneley-O'Hagan, 3rd Baron O'Hagan?

Maurice Herbert Towneley Towneley-O'Hagan, 3rd Baron O'Hagan, was a British Liberal and later Conservative politician.

O'Hagan was the second son of Thomas O'Hagan, 1st Baron O'Hagan, the Liberal Lord Chancellor of Ireland in Gladstone's first two governments; and his second wife Alice Mary, daughter and co-heiress of Colonel Charles Towneley; and he succeeded in the barony on the death of his elder brother in 1900, when he was still eighteen. He was educated at Marlborough College and Trinity College, Cambridge.

He was Assistant Private Secretary to the First Lord of the Admiralty Lord Tweedmouth from 1906 to 1907 and served in the Liberal administrations of Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman and later H. H. Asquith as a Lord-in-Waiting from 1907 to 1910.

During World War I he had been a Major in the Essex Royal Horse Artillery, for which he raised a regiment in 1914. He was invalided out of the army in 1918.

He continued to support the Liberals through the years of the Lloyd George government, but switched to supporting the Conservatives under Stanley Baldwin in the mid-1920s. He never again held government office. Many years later, between 1950 and 1961, O'Hagan was a Deputy Speaker and Deputy Chairman of the House of Lords. He remained an Honorary Major in the Royal Horse Artillery and an Honorary Colonel in the 4th Battalion of the Essex Regiment and in the 6th Battalion of the Essex Regiment. In 1909, he assumed by Royal license his maternal grandfather's surname of Towneley in addition to that of O'Hagan.