Leo Blair (senior)

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Leo Charles Lynton Blair (born August 1923 in Filey, Yorkshire, England) is the father of Tony Blair, current Prime Minister of the United Kingdom.

[edit] Biography

Leo was the illegitimate son of two middle class travelling entertainers, Charles Parsons (who took the stage name Jimmy Lynton) and Mary Augusta Ridgway Bridson (stage name Celia Ridgeway) who met whilst on tour in England.

The social stigma of having a child out of wedlock and their hectic lifestyles prompted Leo's parents to give him up. Leo's surname at birth was Parsons, but after being fostered out to (and later adopted by) a working class couple, a Glasgow shipyard worker named James Blair and his wife Mary, Leo took the surname Blair. Leo's adopted mother prevented him from contacting his biological parents, but he did later have a reunion with his half-sister, Pauline Harding.

Leo Blair grew up in a tenement in Golspie Street, Govan, Glasgow, and attended Govan High School. When he left school he worked as a copy boy on the Communist Party newspaper The Daily Worker and was Secretary of the Scottish Young Communist League 1938-1941.

Leo Blair studied law, becoming a barrister, and later, a university law lecturer. He married Hazel Corscadden, from a middle class protestant family in Donegal, Ireland. Their first son Bill Blair is now a QC and domestic and international banking and finance law specialist. Their second son Anthony Charles Lynton (Tony Blair) was born in 1953. They lived for a time in Adelaide, Australia, where Leo lectured in Law at the University of Adelaide. Hazel Blair died in 1975 of thyroid cancer.

Leo and his family later moved to Durham, England, where Leo lectured in Law at Durham University. Despite having been a communist in his youth, Leo became active in the Conservative Party. He had ambitions to stand for Parliament in Durham, plans which were thwarted when he had a stroke when his son, Tony, was 11. Largely because of his father's thwarted political ambitions, Tony Blair successfully stood for election in the County Durham constituency of Sedgefield in 1983.

Tony Blair also named his son Leo after his father.

Leo lives in Shropshire with his second wife Olwen.