Lord Teviot, hereditary peer who became a Brighton bus driver and debated transport in the House of Lords – obituary

Lord Teviot, who has died aged 88, was once described by the journalist Nicholas Monson (now Lord Monson) as one of the “nouveaux pauvres” – aristocrats who, due to adverse financial circumstances, engaged in occupations not normally associated with nobility; in Lord Teviot’s case, Monson was referring to the seven years he spent on the buses, as conductor and then a driver with the Brighton, Hove and District Bus Company, after education at Eton and National Service in the Army.

He might have added “trainee salesman at Sainsbury’s”, for that is what Charles Kerr was when he inherited the title from his father, the 1st Baron Teviot, in 1968. He had always had to earn his own living, the new Lord Teviot explained to The Daily Telegraph, and the title would make no difference: “There isn’t any money to go with it.”

In the Upper House, where Lord Teviot sat on the Conservative benches, he changed careers once again, to genealogist, explaining in a 1986 letter to the Telegraph that he and his wife had “basically earned our living since 1970 by personally carrying out researches for other people and tracing their families”.

Though he became an active member of the Lords, Teviot concentrated on policy areas in which he had acquired practical expertise. In 1992, when the Evening Standard discovered that the newly enobled Lady Thatcher had a peg next to his, he assured the newspaper that he would not risk upsetting the new girl: “I stick to transport and archives. When you get involved with something you haven’t too much idea about, the result can be rather embarrassing.”

In his unassuming modesty Lord Teviot was a very different character from his father.

Charles John Kerr was born on December 16 1934, the only son of then Lt-Col Charles Kerr, MP, DSO, MC, a great-grandson of the 6th Marquess of Lothian, and his second wife Angela, daughter of Lt-Col Charles Villiers, CBE, DSO, great-grandson of the 4th Earl of Clarendon.

Lt-Col Kerr had entered Parliament in 1932 as Liberal National Party MP for Montrose Burghs. He served as chief whip, then as government whip of the National Government, before serving as Comptroller of the Household of King George VI until 1940, when he was raised to the peerage.  

As chairman of the Liberal National Party (from 1948 known as the National Liberal Party) he was the co-architect of the so-called Woolton-Teviot agreement of 1947 under which the parties formed “a united front against Socialism” by merging at Westminster.

His Telegraph obituary described Teviot as “one of the recognised ‘characters’ of the House of Lords”, with “his own theories about flour milling and baking” which led him to stoneground his own wheat and bake his own bread. He was also famous for his rearguard attempt, after the Lady Chatterley trial, to persuade the government to ban the book as “disgusting, filthy and an affront to the ordinary decencies”, though he admitted that when he had put down his motion he had not read it.

In 1990 his name featured in a list of members of the secretive Right Club, a “stage army of increasingly desperate fascists and pro-Nazis” as one historian put it, founded in 1939 to “oppose and expose the activities of organised Jewry”.

Perhaps it was no accident that Lord Teviot’s son preferred to keep a lower profile. His father was bitterly disappointed in his choice of a career, though his mother was supportive, telling a journalist: “I have never actually seen Charles in his bus conductor’s uniform, but I know he enjoys it immensely. I think most boys have an ambition to become an engine driver or a bus driver. Charles has stuck to that ambition and is doing what he wanted – what more could you ask for out of life than that?”

Known as “Charlie” to his friends on the buses, in 1965 Kerr met and married a “clippie”, Mary Harris, the daughter of a stockbroker who had died when she was 18.

A fine sportswoman, in later years she became involved with her husband in family history and probate research, founding the company Census Searches and serving as president of the Federation of Family History Societies. Her husband became a fellow of the Society of Genealogists, president of the Association of Genealogists and Record Agents and a director at various times of both Debrett’s and Burke’s.

In the House of Lords, he sat on the Ecclesiastical Committee, a dignified if obscure cabal of 15 MPs and 15 peers who consider the merits of draft measures issued by the Church of England’s General Synod and advise on whether or not they should be approved by Parliament.

He pursued his interest in geneaology by campaigning (unsuccessfully) to have the birth, marriage and death registers over 100 years old moved from the General Register Office to the Public Record Office for open inspection.

In 1990 he led an unsuccessful campaign with Lady Saltoun of Abernethy to tighten up the government’s Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill to ensure that children born from donated sperm or egg have the right to be told of their true parentage and would not be entitled to inherit any privileges, including titles and coats of arms, from their “official” father.

He often spoke in transport debates, and in the 1980s was credited with helping the National Bus and Coach Council to get many amendments included in the Transport Bill deregulating the bus industry. In 1989 he worked with the Conservative MP Timothy Kirkhope to steer through a bill providing for the introduction of credit-card parking meters.

In 1993 he admitted to a mild nostalgia for the demise of the wind-up Gibson ticket machine, which had been replaced with a computerised substitute. “They seemed to work at a very fast rate,” he recalled, and the machine yielded unexpected benefits for its users: “My wrists are still quite supple. In fact, I am a dab hand at opening jars.”

Lord Teviot lost his seat in the House of Lords in the 1999 reforms.

He is survived by his wife and by their daughter and a son, Charles Kerr, born in 1971, who succeeds to the title.

Lord Teviot, born December 16 1934, died October 15 2023