Born at
Dunecht,
Aberdeenshire, the future Lord Crawford was the eldest son of
The 26th Earl of Crawford and 9th Earl of Balcarres and his wife, Emily Florence, daughter of Colonel Edward Bootle-Wilbraham.
Sir Ronald Lindsay was his younger brother. He was educated at
Eton and
Magdalen College, Oxford. His family had extensive mining interests on the
Lancashire Coalfield at
Haigh near
Wigan where his family had a seat at
Haigh Hall. He was chairman of the
Wigan Coal and Iron Company and its successor the Wigan Coal Corporation. Prior to the
First World War he had held the rank of
Captain in the 1st (Volunteer) Battalion,
Manchester Regiment, from which he resigned in early 1903. During
World War I, in early 1915, at 43 years of age, and having refused an offer of the
Viceroyalty of India, he enlisted as a private in the
Royal Army Medical Corps, which was almost unheard of at that time as hereditary peers and their heirs or university graduates such as himself were generally commissioned as officers. He thus swapped palaces in India and the prospect of a comfortable administrative position for the reality of a front line clearing station's operating theatre. At times up to 1,000 casualties each day passed through the
clearing station at
Hazebrouck, where he was stationed. This was when he developed what were described by his granddaughter, Rose Luce, as 'mixed feelings' about members of the officer classes (his own 'class', of course). In 2013 his diaries of his experiences were published as the memoir ''Private Lord Crawford's Great War Diaries: From Medical Orderly to Cabinet Minister'', edited by his grandson Christopher Arnander. He became a Fellow of the
Society of Antiquaries in 1900 also of the
Royal Society He was a keen book collector, particularly of
Victorian erotica, and bequeathed in his will over 100 volumes to the
British Museum, which were subsequently placed in the
Private Case. ==Political career==