Frederick Fermor-Hesketh, 2nd Baron Hesketh
British peer (1916-1955)
Frederick Fermor-Hesketh, 2nd Baron Hesketh DL (8 April 1916 – 10 June 1955), was a British peer and soldier.
Background and education
Hesketh was the son of Thomas Fermor-Hesketh, 1st Baron Hesketh, and Florence Louise Breckinridge, of Kentucky, daughter of John Witherspoon Breckinridge, and granddaughter of General (CSA) John C. Breckinridge, Vice-President of the United States of America and Secretary of War for the Confederate States of America, in 1909. He was educated from 1926 at Eton and later Magdalene College, Cambridge.
Military service
Hesketh was a major in the Scots Guards. He succeeded in the barony on the death of his father on 20 July 1944. In 1950 he became a Deputy Lieutenant of Northamptonshire.
Family life
On 22 November 1949 he married Christian Mary McEwen (known as Christian Lady Hesketh) (17 July 1929 – 7 April 2006), daughter of Captain Sir John Helias Finnie McEwen and had three children:
Thomas Alexander (known as Alexander), 3rd Baron Hesketh (b. 28 October 1950)
Robert (1 November 1951 – 2 February 1997, car accident)
John (15 March 1953 – 2 November 2008)
Hesketh was a collector of top-end books in the early 1950s. The trustees of his will sold some of his books, manuscripts and letters in 2010 at Sotheby's. The four volumes of John James Audubon's Birds of America were bought by renowned London book dealer Michael Tollemache for a record £7,321,250.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Frederick Fermor-Hesketh, 2nd Baron Hesketh” is british peer (1916-1955). The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Frederick, Fermor-Hesketh and Baron, not as a finished interpretation.
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The phrase “british peer (1916-1955)” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.
The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated May 10, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5497758. VIAF identifies the subject as 45483941. The Library of Congress control number is no2013070687. 2 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1916, 1955, 1909 and 1926.
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This entry incorporates text from “Frederick Fermor-Hesketh, 2nd Baron Hesketh” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.