From alt.obituaries comes the following:
Lord Kilbracken (Filed: 15/08/2006) Telegraph
The 3rd Lord Kilbracken, who died yesterday aged 85, hit the headlines in 1957 when he succeeded in gatecrashing the Great Red Square parade in Moscow on the 40th anniversary of the October uprising, wearing a pink Leander tie and with his trousers turned inside out.
During the war Kilbracken had served in the Royal Navy Fleet Air Arm as a Swordfish pilot, and had gone on to win a DSC in 1945 while commanding a Wildcat squadron. In 1972, however, he returned his medal and announced that he was renouncing British citizenship in protest at the shooting of 13 demonstrators during the so-called Bloody Sunday massacres in Londonderry.
John Raymond Godley was born in Chester Street, Belgravia, on October 17 1920; he was the son of Hugh Godley, later the 2nd Lord Kilbracken, who would become counsel to the Lord Chairman of Committees of the House of Lords. The peerage had been created in 1909 for his grandfather, Arthur Godley, Gladstone’s private secretary and later an Under-Secretary of State for India.
The Godleys originally hailed from Yorkshire, but had moved to Ireland in the 18th century after inheriting an estate in Co Leitrim, where an ancestor of John Godley’s built Killegar, a fine Georgian house in the classical tradition. John, however, spent his early childhood in England, and did not visit Ireland until he was nine.
At Eton he distinguished himself by rowing in the first VIII, taking flying lessons and setting himself up as the school bookie, thus inaugurating a life-long love of gambling of all kinds. The position earned him a certain amount of kudos with his peers, but was not appreciated by the beaks – or by his parents, who cut off funds for his flying lessons as a punishment.
He decided that the only way out of ignominy and poverty was to win the school’s Hervey verse prize, which came with a handsome cheque for
I don’t normally enjoy reading obits, but that was fun!