The 7th Baron Rossmore 1931-2021

 _.Lord Rossmore, who died 4 May, 2021, aged 90, was the 7th Baron, in the Peerage of the UK.

William Warner Westenra was born 14 February, 1931, son of the 6th Baron Rossmore [1892-1958], and his wife the former Dolores Cecil Wilson [died 1981]; and succeeded to the peerage on his father's death, 17 Oct, 1958.

He married in 1982 (div __) Valerie Marion Tobin [born 1950], daughter of Brian Tobin, by whom he had a son, Benedict William Westenra [born 6 March, 1983], who now inherits the peerage.

Lord Rossmore obituary [Daily Telegraph]

Aristocratic photographer and aesthete who found himself in a high-profile love triangle with Marianne Faithfull and Mick Jagger

On the day the hunger striker Bobby Sands died in the Maze prison at the height of the Troubles in 1981, Paddy Rossmore’s house in Co Monaghan was burnt down by the IRA.

With his baronial title dating back seven generations, Rossmore represented to the Republicans the hated Anglo-Irish nobility whom they accused of having buttressed British oppression of Irish nationalism for centuries. While it may have been true of some of Rossmore’s forebears, who arrived in Ulster from Holland with William of Orange, the seventh baron was cut from cloth of a distinctly more anti-establishment stripe.

...In 1982 he married Valerie (née Tobin). The marriage ended in divorce. He is survived by their son, Benedict William Westenra, a music arranger and piano teacher whose pupils have included Sir Lenny Henry, and by his stepdaughter Charlotte Westenra, a theatre producer.

Paddy Rossmore was born William Warner Westenra in Rossmore Castle, Co Monaghan, in 1931, the son of Dolores (née Wilson) and William Westenra, the 6th Baron Rossmore, who had succeeded to the title a decade earlier. The Westenras were an old Dutch family who came from near the Hague and had inherited the Rossmore title via marriage into the family of Robert Cunninghame, a soldier who was created the first Baron by King George III, and died without a son.

...He succeeded as the 7th Baron Rossmore on the death of his father in 1958. The Gothic castle which had been the family seat since 1827 was abandoned after the Second World War because of dry rot, and the family moved into the dower house within the estate grounds. [which they sold] and in 1962 they took up residency in the gamekeeper’s lodge. Antiques from the original castle were also sold off, causing [...] the Daily Express [to mock] his folly in parting with an 18th-century German marquetry table for £205, which was sold on two months later for £6,000.

The castle was demolished in the mid-1970s after falling into disrepair. Rossmore lived in the lodge on his estate until the IRA burnt it down. After selling the estate he spent his final years living in London.

Lord (Paddy) Rossmore, photographer, was born on February 14, 1931. He died in his sleep on May 4, 2021, aged 90

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