Hugo, Lord Mallerstang and Swarthfell, DSO & Bar MC MiD

Hugo Robert Walter Edmund Alban Fulke de Clifforde DSO & Bar MC MiD, late Major RA, 25th Baron Mallerstang, 14th Baron Swarthfell, 11th / 13th Baron Mallerstang & Swarthfell, was born 27 October 1919, the posthumous son and only surviving child of Maj. (Bt. Lt.-Col.) Alban Ivo Perceval Hugh de Clifforde VC DSO, late Royal Artillery, and the Hon. Elizabeth Joan Margaret Isobel (née Vypont-Clare), daughter of the baron Garsdale.

He served in the Royal Artillery in the Second World War, in which he was wounded at Singapore and made a prisoner of war by the Imperial Japanese Army, first at Chang-I and then on the Burma Railway.

He is a distant descendant of Amelia, Lady Clare, formerly Abida Mirza Khan, daughter of the then Nawab of Hubli, who converted in religion and married a young ensign in India, moving first to Malta and then to England.

He is the current holder of the Barony of Mallerstang (pronounced, ‘Mawst’n’), created in the peerage of England in 1295 and restored in 1433 after attainder; of the Barony of Swarthfell of the second creation, in the peerage of England, of 1682; and of the Barony of Mallerstang and Swarthfell created in 1713 and regranted with special remainder in 1746, in the Peerage of Great Britain.



Lord Mallerstang is notably the only man successfully to recover, from the National Trust, a country house and estate ceded to HM Treasury in lieu of death duties but mismanaged and left derelict in contravention of the covenants appertaining to the cession.

Life
Lord Mallerstang’s father, the Gunner officer Maj. (Brevet Lt.-Col.) Alban Ivo Perceval Hugh de Clifforde VC DSO, having been gassed during the Great War, did not long survive the Armistice, and died before his son was born. A daughter, Anne Elizabeth Olivia Rose, died in the Spanish Flu Epidemic.

Major de Clifforde had been the grandson of a previous Baron Mallerstang and Swarthfell; and his family, aided by Hugo’s maternal grandparents Lord and Lady Garsdale as to money, took in the Major’s widow and son. From an early age, Hugo de Clifforde intended to follow the profession of arms, and, in the family tradition, as an officer in the Royal Artillery. He made himself to excel, accordingly, in sport, fitness, and mathematics.

His current recreations are listed as being regimental history and – ‘in years well past’ – fell-walking.

Education
Hugo Mallerstang was educated at the Imperial Service College, with a bursary from the Imperial Service College Trust’s fund for the children of fallen officers, and then went through the commissioning course at RMA Woolwich.

Family
With war looming, Hugo de Clifforde made an early marriage. On 30 August 1938, at the Garrison Memorial Church of S Martin and S Oswald Catterick, he married Amelia Gwendoline Olivia (née Taylour-Lowther-Wharton), who died in 1960; she was the daughter of Col. the Hon. James Thomas Anthony Taylour-Lowther-Wharton RA, himself the younger son of the viscount Russendale.

The couple had twin sons, born in 1940: the elder, Geoffrey Ivo Thomas Henry, and the younger, Richard Philip Rodger Alban. Both followed in the family tradition; and both were killed by enemy action, leaving no heirs. Capt GITH de Clifforde RA (4th Regt) VC MC MiD, was killed in the Malayan Emergency / Confrontation in 1965; Capt RPRA de Clifforde RA (29 Commando Regt RA, attached UNC(K), attached HQ 2d Infantry Division US) DSO MiD, was killed by DPRK forces three years after, in, 1968, as an observer in the Korean DMZ.

Career
The young Hugo de Clifforde was commisssioned into the 20th A-T Regt RA, and saw immediate action in France upon the outbreak of war. He then transferred to 85th A-T Regt RA on its formation, as on of its initial cadre of officers. That regiment had the misfortune to be posted to Singapore, where, like all British forces in theatre, it was grievously mishandled from on high.

Caught up in the Fall of Singapore, Cpt Mallerstang DSO MID, as he was by that time, was wounded after heroic efforts in directing a battery as the only surviving officer to hand, for which he was awarded the Military Cross; and was sent to hospital in the city just in time for the IJA to take it over. It was at that time that he received a Japanese bayonet in the balls, putting paid to the prospect of any further children.

Upon the surrender of HM Forces there, he was made a PW, first at Chang-I, and then, when judged sufficiently recovered, upon the Burma Railway, His defiance of his captors cost him dear, but resulted in a Bar to his DSO.

After the Japanese surrender, and a period of treatment and rehabilitation, he got his step to major, and was transferred to 12th A-T Regt RA, in Libya (Tripoli) and then in Trieste.

<p class="western" style="margin-bottom:0in;font-weight:normal">He was a Temporary Lecturer at RMA Sandhurst from 1951 – 1957, and then at Staff College, Camberley from 1957 – 1958.

<p class="western" style="margin-bottom:0in;font-weight:normal">Upon his retirement, he and his wife removed to a smallholding near to Outhgill, in the Eden Valley of Westmorland, not far from Hellgill Hall and the old Mallerstang estates, which were even then being transferred, owing to swingeing death duties, from the family to the Treasury and from the Treasury to the National Trust. There, Major de Clifforde busied himself with a comprehensive history of the Royal Artillery, which has yet to be completed and published; and with the care of his wife, who was in increasingly indifferent health.

<p class="western" style="margin-bottom:0in;font-weight:normal">Upon her death, in 1960, and the entry into HM Forces of his sons, he sold up, and took a small flat in Kirkby Stephen. A proud, uncomplaining, and reticent man, with a horror of being the object of sympathy, he refused to ask or accept any aid from his extensive and in some cases quite wealthy family. He did, when not working on the definitive history of the Gunners, make one friend: Alfred Wainwright, with whom he walked the fells and whom he assisted in planning out the Coast to Coast as it took in the Eden Valley, Mallerstang Edge, the Nine Standards, and the head of Swaledale. It is there that a memorial has long stood to another kinsman of Hugo de Cliffordes’, who was interested in mountains, high places, and geography: Col. Sir Richard Lionel Hugo Fane de Clifforde de Clare RE KCSI CB CIE FRAS FSA FRGS,  “‘Pandit Sahib Bahadur’, Late seconded 3d Sappers & Miners, Indian Army; attached 3d Regt of Cavalry, Punjab Frontier Force; attached 2d Sikh Infantry, Punjab Frontier Force; attached Queen’s Own Corps of Guides, Punjab Frontier Force Indian Staff Corps; Sometime Additional Surveyor General, The Survey of India; Sometime Deputy Director, The Geological Survey of India, directing in part the Great Trigonometrical Survey; Attached, the Indian Political Department; Sometime Agent & Resident to the Princely State of Hubli; Afterward attached in an advisory capacity to the Office of Works as supervisory department to The Ordnance Survey’.

<p class="western" style="margin-bottom:0in;font-weight:normal">After the deaths of his sons in the 1960s, Major de Clifforde left Westmorland for lodgings in West Sussex, in a milder climate and, perhaps, away from the scenes of too many memories. It was there that he learnt, in 1974, of the death of his second cousin Rodger, father to the future Lady Crispin Fitzjames-Holles-Clare-Malet: upon which he found himself having inherited the bare title, without monies or lands, of Baron Mallerstang and Swarthfell. At much the same time, his distant cousin, Brigadier James Rupert Gilbert Henry Fitzjames-Holles-Clare-Malet, had succeeded as Duke of Taunton; and ‘Uncle Hugo’ was – so far as he allowed, not wishing to be beholden even to familial charity – a regular and welcome guest at Wolfdown, where he was revered by Charles, Lord Templecombe (the present Duke of Taunton) and played up to by Lord Crispin. He filled a similarly avuncular role to his two young cousins, Rodger Mallerstang’s daughter the Hon. Connie (now Lady Trulock) and their cousin Ivo’s daughter, the Hon. Arabella. Ivo had been the Lord Mallerstang immediately preceding his and Hugo’s cousin Rodger.

<p class="western" style="margin-bottom:0in;font-weight:normal">It was only upon the death of the Hon. Arabella de Clifforde without issue, she having spent her life after Girton as a wildlife biologist in the Canadian Arctic, and the death of Lord Crispin, that Lord Mallerstang sought the aid of the Duke of Taunton in recovering what he might of the Mallerstang fortunes: not for himself, but because there should now be no abeyance, and his clear heir presumptive was now Rupert, Master of Dilton. This last was much to his satisfaction, Lord Mallerstang having been ‘Uncle Hugo’ to Rupert, Jamie, and Hetty as to their father and their uncle before them; Lord Mallerstang’s only sorrow in his heir was that the ancient Mallerstang title should now become a subsidiary title of the Dukedom of Taunton, at least in the next generation.

Recovery and Restoration of Hellgill
<p class="western" style="margin-bottom:0in;font-weight:normal">Charles, Duke of Taunton, wasted no time, and spared neither effort nor expense, in effecting the recovery of the Mallerstang Estate, including Hellgill, for Hugo Mallerstang and for his heir, also heir to His Grace, the Master of Dilton. Remarkably, he succeeded: a suit at law was actually begun before the National Trust, fearing that the precedent set by a loss should open the floodgates (not least by the Bristols as regards Ickworth), settled. It is rumoured that the undertaking, including a settlement with the Treasury, cost His Grace in the eight figures: which he clearly considers as well worth it as is the sum well affordable.

<p class="western" style="margin-bottom:0in;font-weight:normal">The result, in any event, has been the recovery and restoration to its former best state of Hellgill Hall, Mallerstang Morville cum Swarthfell Vypont, Westmorland (‘Cumbria’); the recovery of its estate; and the purchase of a good deal more land in Westmorland and Cumberland with historic de Clifforde ties (including a grouse moor). The Hall is currently staffed by seconded servants from Woolfdown who have volunteered to train local applicants as a permanent staff. Projects are also in hand to partner with the Settle & Carlisle Railway and the Yorkshire Dales National Park on various schemes: something the Duke regards the National Trust as fools for not having done.