In 1942, he joined the
Royal Navy as an
ordinary seaman, and was commissioned as an officer the following year, serving on
destroyers. He continued as a
lieutenant commander in the
Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve and the
Royal Naval Reserve after the war until 1971. He was awarded the
Volunteer Reserve Decoration in 1959. He was appointed Honorary Captain in the Royal Naval Reserve in 1988. He was a Captain of the
Royal Company of Archers, Lord President of the Council and
Silver Stick for Scotland. He was a member of the
Roxburghe Club.
Parliamentary career After the war, he studied at
Christ Church, Oxford, where he joined the
Bullingdon Club. He briefly worked as a
merchant banker in the
City of London, and then as a director of an insurance company. As Earl of Dalkeith, he was a
Roxburghshire County Councillor from 1958. He contested
Edinburgh East in the
1959 general election, losing to the incumbent Labour MP
George Willis, but was elected as a
Unionist (and latterly
Conservative) Member of Parliament for
Edinburgh North from
a by-election in 1960. He served as
Parliamentary Private Secretary to the
Lord Advocate,
William Rankine Milligan, from 1961 to 1962, then briefly as PPS to the
Secretary of State for Scotland Jack Maclay from January 1962 to July that year. After Maclay was sacked in
Harold Macmillan's
Night of the Long Knives, he was PPS to Maclay's successor,
Michael Noble, from 1962 to 1964. He defeated a young
Robin Cook in the
1970 general election. He and his wife sustained minor injuries in a car accident at
Clumber Park,
Nottinghamshire, on 16 August 1961, but made a full recovery. However, in a hunting accident near
Hawick on 20 March 1971, his horse threw him off as it failed to take a
drystone dyke, and then fell on him. Dalkeith was left paralysed from the chest down with a
fractured spine. He left hospital in early September 1971, and spent the rest of his life in a wheelchair, and became a notable spokesman for disability organisations. He was the first MP after the Second World War to enter the House of Commons chamber in a wheelchair, where he was greeted by
Harold Wilson, who crossed the floor of the chamber to shake his hand, in October 1971. Dalkeith left the House of Commons in October 1973, as he succeeded to the Dukedom upon his father's death. As a result, he stood down as an MP. However, he remained a member of the
House of Lords for the next 25 years, where he spoke particularly on rural, disability and constitutional issues, until the removal of the hereditary peers in the
reforms of 1999. ==Personal life==