When the Thatcher government set up an inquiry into discipline in schools in 1988, it was responding partly in populist style and partly following complaints from teaching unions about the dangers their members faced from unruly pupils every day – itself a tactic in pursuit of improved pay and conditions. As the then education correspondent of the Daily Mail, scarcely a week went by when I was not writing lurid tales of classroom violence.
The man the government appointed, Rodney Elton, Lord Elton, himself a former minister, could have been used as a caricature of the sort of battered teacher featured in the Mail’s line drawings accompanying my articles.
Elton, who has died aged 93, was an Old Etonian, tall and thin, blinking behind owlish glasses, with a clipped voice and a mane of prematurely grey hair. He did, however, have the advantage of having taught in a Leicestershire grammar and a boys’ comprehensive school in Nottingham and having lectured at a college of education.
He and a team of teachers assiduously toured schools, took evidence and duly came up with a detailed report and 138 recommendations, which proved a sadly moderate damp squib for government and unions.
The Mail’s disappointment was palpable: no return to the cane, no thumbscrews: instead, as its headline said over a story relegated to page 21, it was “a lesson for everyone”: teachers and schools should try harder, parents should sign written undertakings of their children’s behaviour, local authorities should provide better surroundings, detentions could be used and teachers unable to keep order should be eased out.
Disappointingly, from the unions and the Mail’s point of view, they found indiscipline was not generally a problem: “Violence was not as frequent as we supposed when we started.”
Such unshowiness marked Elton’s career in government and during 47 years in the House of Lords. He was the son of a Norwegian mother, Dedi Hartmann, and Godfrey Elton, a Labour-supporting Oxford history don who was a friend of Ramsay MacDonald, rewarded with a hereditary peerage after the formation of the national government and consequent expulsion from the party.
Born in Headington, Oxford, Rodney was educated at Eton and studied history at New College, Oxford. After national service as an officer in Midlands regiments, he became a farmer in Leicestershire and taught history for 10 years. He contested Loughborough twice unsuccessfully as a Conservative in the elections of 1966 and 1970, and succeeded his father as second baron in 1973.
After the 1979 election swept the Conservatives to power, Elton became first a junior Northern Ireland minister in charge of education, provoking predictable unionist outrage when he suggested schools might give pupils the day off for the pope’s visit. There followed a series of brief ministerial appointments: a year at the Department of Health and Social Security, then two years as a junior Home Office minister followed by promotion to minister of state in the same department – he was close to Willie Whitelaw, the home secretary – and finally a year at the Department of the Environment.
There, Elton was given the difficult task of steering the highly contentious legislation abolishing the Greater London council and the Metropolitan boroughs through the Upper House. It was regarded as a mark of his emollience, skill and charm that abolition was passed by their lordships with limited obstruction.
More picturesquely, but in its way equally significant, was Elton’s role in arranging the listing of rare telephone boxes, thwarting British Telecom’s plan to replace them with plate-glass kiosks. Only a few of the K3 boxes, designed by Sir Giles Gilbert Scott in 1929 as a streamlined, concrete, version of his earlier domed red boxes, survived and it was these that were to be saved. One was at London zoo next to the parrot house and Elton duly put in an appearance, with one of the elephants to make – of course – a trunk call. As a stunt it had its shortcomings: the elephant tore his suit and the box was out of order.
Shortly thereafter, Elton stood down as a minister but his life as an active member of the House of Lords did not end until he finally retired in 2020, having for the previous 20 years been elected as one of the chamber’s 92 hereditaries. He took an active part in debates and could be seen sketching his colleagues, or composing limericks about them as they spoke. Painting was a hobby.
He himself saw the Lords’ shortcomings as its membership expanded exponentially and its cost duly increased. In a debate in 2016 he spoke in favour of his bill to reduce the number of peers and hold elections every five years, telling them: “If we do nothing a growing disillusion with not just us – we are expendable – or with the Westminster model, which is amendable, but with parliamentary democracy itself is at risk.” The bill received a second reading but got no further. In 2006, Elton had stood to be speaker of the Lords but was defeated by Lady (Helene) Hayman.
A committed churchman, leader of a prayer group within the House of Lords, Elton could be outspoken in defence of his faith, calling unavailingly for anti-blasphemy legislation to be tightened up after Martin Scorsese’s film The Last Temptation of Christ was shown on Channel 4 in 1995. He also opposed the easing of Sunday trading laws.
Elton was briefly chairman of the newly established Fimbra association, regulating the activities of insurance advisers and brokers, but as an outsider found himself opposed within the industry and forced to stand down early in 1990.
He was married twice, in 1958 to Anne Tilney, with whom he had three daughters, Annabel, Janie and Lucy, and a son, Edward, and after the marriage was dissolved in 1979, he married Susan Gurney, who was a lady of the bedchamber to Queen Elizabeth II.
His wife and four children survive him.
• Rodney Elton, Lord Elton, born 2 March 1930; died 19 August 2023
