Francis Newdegate

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Sir Francis Alexander Newdigate Newdegate GCMG (13 December 1862–2 January 1936) was Governor of Tasmania from 1917 to 1920, and Governor of Western Australia from 1920 to 1924.

Born in 1862, he was the son of Lieutenant Colonel Francis William Newdigate and his first wife Charlotte Elizabeth Agnes Sophia Woodford, and grandson of Francis Parker Newdigate. He was educated at Eton and Sandhurst and was commissioned into the Grenadier Guards in 1883. He married Elizabeth Sophia Lucia Bagot on 13 October 1888.

He inherited estates at Arbury Hall, near Nuneaton and at Harefield, near Uxbridge on the death of his father in 1893. He assumed the additional surname Newdegate under the terms of the will of his uncle in 1902. In 1911 he erected, at Arbury Hall, a monument to the memory of George Eliot whose father had been employed on the Arbury estate.

He was Member of Parliament for Nuneaton from 1892 to 1906, and for Tamworth from 1909 to 1917. He was appointed Steward of the Manor of Northstead on 14 February 1917.

He was awarded the KCMG in 1917 upon his appointment as Governor of Tasmania (1917 to 1920). He was appointed Governor of Western Australia in 1920 where he served until 1924. On retirement he was promoted GCMG in 1925. The Western Australian town of Newdegate is named after him.

He was appointed High Steward of the Royal Town of Sutton Coldfield in 1925.

On his death in 1936 his estates passed to his daughter Lucia, who in 1919, had married John Maurice Fitzroy, father of the 3rd Viscount Daventry.

[edit] Reference

'Australian Dictionary of Biography' Vol. 11. Melbourne University Press 1988.

[edit] See also

Newdigate family

Government offices
Preceded by Sir William Ellison-Macartney	Governor of Tasmania 1917–1920	Succeeded by Sir William L. Allardyce
	Governor of Western Australia 1920–1924	Succeeded by Sir William Campion