Page 86 - They Also Served

legend of the Yeti was born. Returning to the UK, Howard-Bury was awarded the Founder’s Gold Medal of the Royal Geographical Society for his leadership and wrote a best-selling account of the expedition.
By now a very public figure, Howard-Bury was elected MP for Bilston in 1922 and later, in 1926, for Chelmsford, which he held until 1931. Returning to Ireland, he set up home in Belvedere House, Mullingar. Unmarried, he was joined in the late 1940s by a much younger man, Rex Beaumont. The two threw lavish house parties attended by such notables as Princess Grace of Monaco and Charlie
Chaplin, watched over by the (now stuffed) Agu. One author wrote about his final years: ‘Beyond the somewhat hell-raising exterior was a deeply compassionate man whose financial and personal assistance to hospitals and churches was vast, while he helped distressed local families to a point that exceeded the bounds of prudence’. The explorer Wade Davis described his ilk as: ‘So confident in their masculinity that they could collect butterflies and flowers in the dawn, paint watercolours in late morning, discuss poetry in the early afternoon and, at dusk, still be prepared to assault the German trenches or the flanks of the highest mountain in the world’. Charles Howard-Bury died on 20th September 1963 and is considered an LGBT+ icon in Catholic – and still largely conservative – Ireland.
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