William Baring du Pré
British politician (1875-1946)
Colonel William Baring du Pré, (5 April 1875 – 23 August 1946) was a British Conservative Party politician. He was a descendant of James Du Pré and likewise lived at Wilton Park, Beaconsfield from 1896 to 1911; the family subsequently moved to Taplow House, Buckinghamshire.
Military and Political career
Du Pré was educated at Winchester College and the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich, and was originally commissioned into the King's Royal Rifle Corps, from which he resigned as a lieutenant. Following the outbreak of the Second Boer War, he re-commissioned as a lieutenant in the 47th Company, Imperial Yeomanry, on 21 February 1900. He was captured in the "Yeomanry Disaster" at Lindley in May 1900 and held at Barberton prisoner of war camp. He later commanded the 2/1st Leicestershire Royal Horse Artillery (Territorials) and served on the Western Front 1915–18.
He was appointed High Sheriff of Buckinghamshire and deputy lieutenant of the county in 1911 (Coronation Medal, 1911) and was a JP for Bucks.
Du Pré was elected as MP for Wycombe at a by-election in 1914, when the Conservative MP Charles Cripps was elevated to the peerage as Baron Parmoor. He was re-elected at the 1918 general election as a Coalition Conservative, but faced a strong challenge at the 1922 general election from the Liberal candidate Lady Terrington. He held his seat with a majority of 4,473, but in December of the following year, at the 1923 general election, Lady Terrington took the seat with a majority of 1,682.
“William Baring du Pré” enters the record as british politician (1875-1946). Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what William, Baring and British can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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This entry incorporates text from “William Baring du Pré” 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.