Edward Arthur Henry Pakenham, 6th Earl of Longford (29 December 1902 – 5 February 1961) was an Irish peer, politician, and littérateur. Also known as Eamon de Longphort, he was a member of the fifth Seanad Éireann, the upper house of the Irish Parliament, in the 1940s.[1]
Family and education
Edward Pakenham was born at 14, Curzon Street in London on 29 December 1902,[2] the elder son of Thomas Pakenham, 5th Earl of Longford, and his wife Mary, Countess of Longford, née Child-Villiers. He was known as Lord Silchester from birth until 1915, and was the only one of the Pakenham children on whom his mother doted, apparently because he would succeed to the earldom on his father's death and because he was always in delicate health.
As a pupil at Eton College (where he twice received the Wilder Divinity Prize) he succeeded to the earldom when his father was killed in action at the Gallipoli campaign on 21 August 1915.[1]
He became an undergraduate at Christ Church, Oxford, and met his future wife, Christine Patti Trew, an Oxford undergraduate. They were married on 18 July 1925.[1] He died without issue and was succeeded by his younger brother Frank.[1]
Politics and religion
He was an Irish nationalist since his days at Eton, taking inspiration from the Easter Rising in 1916 and the 1917 Russian Revolution. He learned Irish and adopted the name Eamon de Longphort. His political views made him unpopular at both Eton and Christ Church, where he was famously put in "Mercury", the pond containing a statue of Mercury in Tom Quad.
He was a lifelong member of the extremely small and almost non-existent Anglo-Catholic minority within the Church of Ireland.
Lord Longford became Chairman of the Gate Theatre in Dublin in 1930 and continued to work for the theatre until 1936, when he founded the Longford Players.[1]
Lord Longford also had several volumes of poetry published, some at the expense of his mother when he was still at Eton, but he is not considered to have been a very good poet.
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