Osborne Beauclerk, 12th Duke of St Albans


Osborne de Vere Beauclerk, 12th Duke of St Albans was a British peer and Army officer. He was styled Lord Osborne Beauclerk from 1874 to 1934.

Biography

Lord Osborne Beauclerk was the son of William Beauclerk, 10th Duke of St Albans; his mother was Grace Bernal-Osborne of Tipperary, Ireland, daughter of Ralph Bernal Osborne, descendant of the politician and actor Ralph Bernal.
Lord Osborne was commissioned as a second lieutenant into the 17th Lancers on 7 December 1895 and promoted to lieutenant on 4 July 1896. He served with his regiment in South Africa during the Second Boer War, during which he was promoted to captain on 1 July 1901, and returned to the United Kingdom in December 1901. Following his return, he resigned from the army in September 1902. In 1911 and 1913 he set off on a trip to British Columbia, Canada where he was involved in a prospective mining investment; part of his time there was spent camping with partners British travelogue writer Warburton Pike and the American mining engineer Marshall Latham Bond.
At the outbreak of World War I, Captain Beauclerk was appointed aide-de-camp to Field Marshal Sir Douglas Haig, serving in France.
On 19 August 1918, he married Beatrix Beresford, Dowager Marchioness of Waterford, GBE, DStJ, and daughter of the 5th Marquess of Lansdowne. He succeeded his half-brother in the family titles in 1934.
In his late eighties, St Albans spent a month travelling throughout America on a Greyhound unlimited travel pass.
His Grace died in 1964, aged 89 without children, when the titles devolved upon his second cousin, Charles St Albans who succeeded as the 13th Duke.

Ancestry