Antonella Kerr, Marchioness of Lothian
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Antonella Kerr, Marchioness of Lothian OBE, (22 May 1922 – 6 January 2007) was a journalist. She founded the annual Women of The Year lunches at the Savoy Hotel in 1955. She is perhaps best known as mother of Conservative politician Michael Ancram.
Known as "Tony Lothian", she was born in Rome as Antonella Reuss Newland. She was the only child of Major-General Sir Foster Newland and his wife, Donna Nennella Salazar. Her parents had married in 1918, but were divorced in 1928, after her mother, the daughter of an Italian lieutenant-general, Conte Michele Salazar, left her 66-year-old father for a 27-year-old army officer, William Carr. Her step father later rose to become a Brigadier.
Tony married Peter Kerr, 12th Marquess of Lothian, a distant relative, at the Brompton Oratory on 30 April 1943. He was then serving in the Scots Guards. The couple spent most of their married life at Monteviot House and its surrounding 18,000-acre estate near Jedburgh in the Scottish Borders. They also owned Melbourne Hall in Derbyshire. They later retired to Ferniehirst Castle, near Jedburgh, after passing the other houses to their sons.
The couple had two sons and four daughters. Her husband died in October 2004, succeeded by their elder son, Conservative politician Michael Ancram. The younger son is Lord Ralph Kerr. Their eldest daughter, Lady Mary Kerr, was a folksinger and won a silver medal in skiing at the 1969 Commonwealth Games, and later married Charles Graf von Westenholz. Their second daughter, then Lady Cecil Kerr, was speculatively linked romantically with Prince Charles in the early 1970s, despite her Roman Catholicism; she later married Donald Angus Cameron of Lochiel, younger, now XXVII Chief of the Clan Cameron. The other daughters married the heirs of the Duke of Grafton and the Duke of Buccleuch and Queensberry: Lady Claire Kerr married James FitzRoy, Earl of Euston, and Lady Elizabeth Kerr married Richard Scott, Earl of Dalkeith.
Tony Lothian pursuing her own career as an author, broadcaster and journalist. She was a columnist with the Scottish Daily Express from 1960 to 1975. She became a Fellow of the Institute of Journalists, and won the Templeton Award in 1992.
With Odette Hallowes and Georgina Coleridge, she founded the annual Women of the Year lunches at the Savoy Hotel in 1955, in aid of the Greater London Fund for the Blind and other charities. She was also vice-president of the Royal College of Nursing from 1960 to 1980, and a patron of the National Council of Women of Great Britain and of the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists.
She lost an eye in 1970 as a result of cancer, sporting a black eye patch thereafter. She received the OBE in 1997, for services to women and blind people, and became a Dame of St Gregory in 2002.
