I think I mentioned once or twice about my Dad poaching rabbits from the Duke of Norfolk's estate during the war. Although Dad and my Uncle Jim were spotted by gamekeepers on numerous occasions, there was never any prosecution. The general belief was that the Duke had ordered his family to turn a blind eye to the collier poachers. I have a hazy recollection that the Duke owned the coal mine where my father worked in his early days, prior to it being nationalized after WWII. For reasons obvious in the following, the Duke was regarded with great affection by all those who worked for him or lived in his cottages.

Telegraph

The Duke of Norfolk

(Filed: 26/06/2002)

The 17th Duke of Norfolk, who has died aged 86, rose to the rank of major-general in the Army and was a non-executive director of a City merchant bank before inheriting the titles and duties of England's premier duke and Earl Marshal at the age of 59.

He showed his mettle immediately, cancelling a plan to give the ducal seat, Arundel Castle, to the National Trust, and declaring that the horse racing which had interested his predecessor was "a mug's game". The ease of transition to his new status was all the more impressive for the fact that the inheritance had been no more than a possibility when he was young; the 16th duke (his second cousin once removed) was only seven years his senior, but he produced only daughters.

The new Duke wore his inheritance lightly. No effort was required to inherit the dukedom, he declared; he was proud to have commanded the 1st Division of the British Army of the Rhine, a job for which he had had to work off his own bat. "I have 10 seats in the House of Lords," he told a prep school audience, "and only one bottom to put in them."

Norfolk was also a stalwart, if unsubtle, leader of the Roman Catholic community. A great friend of Basil Hume, the Duke was partly responsible for the relatively unknown schoolmaster becoming Archbishop of Westminster; he also urged the Vatican that Cormac Murphy O'Connor, his own diocesan bishop at Arundel, was the man to succeed Hume.

Norfolk was also ready to support lay Catholics prepared to champion their own principles. When Ann Widdecombe was having trouble with constituents because of her opposition to hunting, he wrote a letter which was placed on the chairs at a critical meeting explaining that he disagreed with her on the issue but they were still fortunate to have her as their MP.

Although generally a supporter of Margaret Thatcher, he differed from most of her awed colleagues in the Commons by speaking out forcibly when he thought she was wrong. He waged a successful campaign to prevent the Tory government introducing charges for children who travelled to school by bus. As the flight from the underlying Christian assumptions of government increased under New Labour, the Duke led the battle in the Upper House against the lowering of the age of homosexual consent, the liberalisation of abortion law and the sanction of embryo research without considering the consequences.

For all his outward appearance as the unassuming model of a retired major-general, Norfolk's piercing blue eyes gave clear evidence of a marked inclination for plain speaking, with a capacity for "putting his foot in it". He upset the Tories by calling for the abolition of the hereditary peers' right to sit in the House of Lords. He also prompted calls for his resignation as chairman of the Catholic Union, which represents his co-religionists' parliamentary interests, by criticising the papal encyclical banning artificial birth control. "How can you ask a married couple to do it by thermometer and what not? My wife and I did that, and it didn't bloody work." The Duke was exasperated when this supposedly private comment, made in a speech to a teachers' conference, was published.

Miles Francis Stapleton Fitzalan-Howard was born on July 21 1915, the eldest son of the 3rd Baron of Howard of Glossop and Baroness Beaumont, a peeress in her own right. He remained the Hon Miles Fitzalan-Howard throughout his military career, though he was unsure what he would be called next. He first succeeded his mother as the 12th Lord Beaumont in 1971, then his father as the 4th Lord Howard of Glossop in 1972, before becoming 17th Duke of Norfolk, Earl of Arundel, Surrey and Norfolk, Baron FitzAlan, Maltravers, Clun, Oswaldestre and Earl Marshal as well as premier Duke, premier Earl and Chief Butler of England in 1975.

Fitzalan-Howard owed much to a happy childhood at Carlton Towers, Yorkshire, where he was one of a close-knit family of four sons and four daughters, all with names beginning "M"; he also gained much from his Benedictine education at Ampleforth. After obtaining a third in History at Christ Church, Oxford, he was commissioned into the 1st Grenadier Guards.

After the declaration of war, he and his brother Michael received the sign of the cross on their foreheads from their mother, then set off with the British Expeditionary Force to France. Commanding an anti-tank platoon, Miles Fitzalan-Howard took part in the defence of Louvain. He was mentioned in despatches at Dunkirk, where he took part in an impressive battalion parade, under fire, on the beaches; General Montgomery was so impressed that he sent Fitzalan-Howard and many of the officers to staff college.

Later, while en route to Scotland as deputy assistant quartermaster general of the Guards Armoured Division, he discovered that his troops had been provided with no rations. He requisitioned Doncaster's station restaurant, and sent the bill to the War Office.

In 1943 Fitzalan-Howard was part of the expedition sent to take Tangier as a substitute for Gibraltar in case Spain entered the war, and then was attached to the Eighth Army in North Africa. From there he was sent to Sicily and southern Italy, where his troops nicknamed him "Bloody Kilometers", a play on his Christian name.

Fitzalan-Howard was awarded an immediate MC for his role in the Battle of the river Sangro. "When the tanks were held up by mines and the operation was halted," read his citation, "Major Howard undertook several recces on foot and showed the greatest energy and coolness in complete disregard for the enemy fire, spreading cheer and optimism wherever he went."

Promoted Brigade Major of 5th Armoured Brigade in Guards Armoured Division, he took part in the D-Day landings and was again mentioned in despatches.

Major Fitzalan-Howard was then sent as British military attache to Washington where he met his future wife Anne Constable-Maxwell, daughter of the First World War flying ace Wing Commander Gerald Constable-Maxwell. They were married at Brompton Oratory in 1949. Fitzalan-Howard was commanding officer of 2nd Battalion, Grenadiers, in the Suez Canal zone in the run up to the war, then became head of the British military mission to the Russian Forces in Germany (BRIXMIS).

He had been appointed to the post as someone who would keep out of trouble after his predecessor had been declared persona non grata; but within weeks he quickly came to relish the mission's unofficial role. This involved crossing the Iron Curtain unarmed, but in uniform, in order to enter forbidden areas to steal parts of Soviet equipment and take photographs. He was stopped at least 10 times though, unlike his junior officers, he was never manhandled. Although surprised that the Soviet troops often seemed to know the British were coming, it was only years later that he realised that the Soviet spy George Blake, as an MI6 agent stationed nearby, had received copies of the mission's tour programme.

From 1961 to 1963, Fitzalan-Howard commanded the 70th Brigade of the King's African Rifles, just before Kenya was granted independence. He threw himself into the job, learning Swahili and creating more than 100 black officers.

After serving as GOC, 1st Division, Rhine Army, Fitzalan-Howard's final post was as director of Service Intelligence at the Ministry of Defence. He had demonstrated a flair for administration which prompted a friend to remark that Fitzalan-Howard might have been born with a logistical spoon in his mouth; but he became so exasperated that he resigned, denouncing Whitehall red tape as "an absolute disgrace".

Nevertheless, the job came back to haunt Fitzalan-Howard years later during the 1982 Irish general election, after he had praised the opposition leader Garret FitzGerald for supporting a Northern Ireland assembly and an amalgamation of southern and northern police forces. Charlie Haughey, a prime minister staring defeat in the face, suggested that FitzGerald had been collaborating with a British spymaster when he had lunched with the Duke.

On retiring from the Army in 1967, Fitzalan-Howard worked two days a week as a non-executive director of the merchant bank Robert Fleming, with which several family members were connected. He enjoyed travelling to the Far East, and continued after coming into the title. He was once surprised, on emerging from a cloakroom cubicle at the bank's offices in Crosby Street during a bomb scare, to find some police officers who could not believe he was the Duke of Norfolk.

At the State Opening of Parliament, the Duke proudly wore robes made for his great-great-grandfather after the Catholic Emancipation Act (1829) permitted Catholics to sit in Parliament for the first time for almost 150 years. Although uncertain about the extent of his wealth, the Duke came into his titles aware that there was a need to make "Yorkshire" economies.

Arundel Castle had been saved from the depredations of death duties by the Arundel Estates Act in the 1950s, but it was still too expensive to live in. The Duke guaranteed its future by forming an independent charitable trust - though one result was that he had to pay £10 a night to stay there. Nevertheless, the arrangement was copied at Chatsworth, Harewood and Wilton. He carried out admirable restoration work at both Arundel and at Carlton Towers, which was his real love.

He restored medieval and Renaissance family tombs, and showed a keen interest in history, arranging a memorable celebration of the quincentenary of the dukedom in 1983. This included an ecumenical service in the Tower of London with the Archbishop of Canterbury and Cardinal Hume. Scholars were also encouraged to research in the family archives, which were sorted and catalogued; the libraries were refurbished, the pictures cleaned. The Duke framed many of the prints himself.

If he represented all that was best in the English hereditary principle it was because his disarming simplicity of manner went with a genuine modesty which would evince itself in surprising ways. After falling off a wall he went into an NHS hospital under the name Mr Miles Norfolk. When Evelyn Waugh's novel A Handful of Dust was filmed at Carlton Towers, he was an extra in the part of a gardener; Kenneth Rose remarked in The Sunday Telegraph that Norfolk lit a bonfire and touched his cap as if "to the cottage born".

He liked to spend much of his time when not in London at a house at Hambledon, Oxfordshire, which he had bought while he was serving in the Army, and which was far smaller than Arundel or Carlton Towers. Even when dealing with fellow members of "the Establishment", he was aware of the limitations; he once rang the chairman of the BBC's governors from a phone box and had to explain that no, he was not calling from a pub.

The blunt manner, which meant an inclination to call a spade "a bloody shovel", could be disconcerting to new acquaintances. He once introduced to an astonished drawing room a very correct dowager, whose name he had momentarily forgotten, "You all know this old tartar, I'm sure."

The Duke was happiest working with his own hands, repairing walls and chopping down trees. House parties tended to become press gangs to clear the underwood in distant plantations. "Grenadiers never stop when it rains," he would boom at flagging guests, as hailstones bounced off frozen hands and evening drew in. "I wish I was thinning trees", he would sometimes confide at a party or dinner.

Above all, he was first and foremost a family man, kind and generous to his many relations; he and his brothers and sisters had 40 children between them. "We're not short of heirs in the Howard family," he would comment.

The Duke was a devout Catholic. It was said that when his suits and military uniforms were being made, he insisted on there being enough room in the inside pocket for a Catholic missal. He was chairman of the trustees of the liberal weekly, the Tablet. His many other public duties included a four-year stint as president of the Building Societies' Association and the prime wardenship of the Fishmongers' Company. He represented the Queen at the St Lucia independence celebrations, also at the funerals of Popes Paul VI and John Paul I as well as at the enthronement of the present Pope, who decorated him with the Order of Pius IX. He was appointed CB in 1960; CBE in 1966; KG in 1983; GCVO in 1986; and received the Royal Victoria Chain in 2000.

He leaves two sons Edward, now the 18th Duke, and Gerald. There are also three daughters: Tessa, married to Roderick Balfour, great-nephew of the prime minister Arthur Balfour; Marcia, the actress Marsha Fitzalan, who was formerly married to the actor Patrick Ryecart; and Carina, married to Sir David Frost, the television personality.

-- Anonymous, June 27, 2002

Answers

If the old tartar didn't get a kick out of that, she had no soul.

-- Anonymous, June 27, 2002

Snort! She would have been apoplectic! Probably never recovered from it.

-- Anonymous, June 27, 2002