Twining was born in 1899 in Westminster to William Henry Greaves Twining, vicar of St Stephen's, Rochester Row, London and his wife, Agatha Georgina, fourth daughter of Lieutenant-Colonel Robert Bourne. His brother Stephan Twining became the managing director of the tea merchants, Twinings. He was a Provost scholar to Lancing before training at the Royal Military College, Sandhurst. He married Helen Mary, daughter of Arthur Edmund Du Buisson, in 1928 and they had two sons.
British Army service
He served in Dublin with the Worcestershire Regiment between 1919 and 1922, inadvertently capturing Éamon de Valera in 1921. He was appointed MBE for his services in Ireland. He then entered the colonial administrative service following two tours of Uganda with the 4th King's African Rifles, returning there in 1929 as an assistant district commissioner. He moved to Mauritius as director of labour in 1939, before becoming administrator in St Lucia in 1943; he was appointed Companion of the Order of St Michael and St George in the same year.
Colonial service: Imperial governor
Twining served as Governor of North Borneo from 2 December 1946. In 1949 he was promoted to KCMG and became Governor of Tanganyika on 16 May, serving there until 1958. He was promoted to GCMG in 1953. This was prompted largely because, as a governor of a colony under the auspices of United Nations supervision, he was more than happy to receive Inspectors to the east African country on biennial missions. In 1952 he had already paved the way for independence in 1961 by trialling an all-communities constitutional arrangement that guaranteed democratic representation for minority populations in the state that would become Tanzania.
House of Lords
Following his retirement, he became a life peer as Baron Twining, of Tanganyika and of Godalming in the County of Surrey, on 22 August 1958. Lord Twining made his maiden speech on 27 July 1959 during the debate on the Colonial Development Corporation. Colonial governors had always had difficulty developing East African countries, given the huge distances between scattered populations, and the tendency of African politics to fragment into tribal loyalties. However, back in London he encouraged development corporations to work closely with governments and business to secure more investment in African territories. Describing himself as a "paternal governor", he called for better organized schemes because they were "rather haphazard". He warned that the Westminster model should not be imposed upon Africa, rather that the local leaders should be allowed to draft their own party political arrangements to articulate independence movements. Like most Liberal Imperialists, he was sympathetic to self-determination, largely because it stimulated progress or debate on the progress of institutional development towards the principles of freedom. After independence, the African states suffered large-scale migration; hundreds of thousands of displaced persons became stateless. Twining was among those peers who asked the Commonwealth Office to donate more money to alleviate the worldrefugee crisis. Twining was among those peers who opposed the second reading of the Misrepresentation Bill, a flagship piece of fraud legislation for the Wilson Government.
