Guinness, Walter Edward, first Baron Moyne 1880-1944, statesman and traveller, was born in Dublin 29 March 1880 in the house, 80 St. Stephen's Green, which was afterwards presented to the Irish nation by his brother in 1939 and now contains the Irish Department of External Affairs. He was the third son of Edward Cecil Guinness, later the first Earl of Iveagh [qv.], and like his brothers was educated at Eton where he rowed for three years in the eight and in due course became captain of the boats. Under him as president, the Eton Society was reformed so as to admit intellectual as well as athletic representatives, and its debates were revived. Moreover, at Eton he developed a particular and enduring interest in biology, but instead of pursuing this bent at Oxford, as he had intended, he volunteered for service in the South African war with the Suffolk Yeomanry (Loyal Suffolk Hussars). He was wounded, mentioned in dispatches, and awarded the Queen's medal with four clasps.
     While Walter Guinness was growing up, the family spent an increasing amount of time in England, and in the early 'nineties his father bought a famous sporting estate at Elveden in Suffolk, a circumstance which made it appropriate that Walter Guinness should stand as Conservative candidate for the Stowmarket division. Although defeated at the general election of 1906, he was returned at a by-election in 1907 for Bury St. Edmunds which, as a division of Suffolk, he continued to represent until 1931. He was a member of the London County Council from 1907 to 1910. From the war of 1914-18 Guinness retired as lieutenant-colonel, having served first in Gallipoli and Egypt as a major with the Suffolk Yeomanry and afterwards with the 10th battalion of the London Regiment. He had been three times mentioned in dispatches, and was awarded the D.S.O. in 1917 and a bar in 1918.
     Guinness's high public spirit and wide interests led him to pursue an extremely full life in which politics, scientific travel, and a share in the direction of his father's benefactions in England and Ireland, as well as of the Guinness breweries, were intertwined. His service as a statesman opened with his appointment as under-secretary of state for war in 1922, followed by the financial secretaryship of the Treasury in 1923, and again in 1924-5 under (Sir) Winston Churchill as chancellor of the Exchequer. He was sworn of the Privy Council in 1924 and entered the Cabinet in November 1925 as minister of agriculture. During his tenure of the office, he introduced the system of the national mark for eggs, and it was largely owing to his efforts that the sugar-beet industry was built up. With the defeat of the Conservatives in 1929 he retired from office, and in 1932 he was raised to the peerage as Baron Moyne, of Bury St. Edmunds, in the county of Suffolk.
     Out of office Moyne was able increasingly to combine his public service with that eagerness for travel which he had always displayed. As early as 1902 he had gone on the first of many big-game hunting expeditions—later in life he grew less inclined towards shooting except as necessary for food—and before 1914 he had travelled extensively on map-making expeditions in Asia Minor and become conversant with the plight of the Armenians and other minorities, for whom he then saw hope in Turkish reform rather than in foreign intervention. (It was during one of his absences in Asia Minor that the Outlook, of which he had become the proprietor, published without his knowledge a series of articles on the Marconi affair in 1912. On his return home he gave evidence in support of the editor before the select committee of inquiry.) After being raised to the peerage he not only acted as chairman of the departmental committee on housing in 1933, of the Royal Commission on the university of Durham in 1934, and of the departmental committee on British films in 1936, but he was also financial commissioner to Kenya in 1932 and chairman of the West India Royal Commission in 1938 and 1939, placing his yacht Rosaura at the disposal of the members for residence and for transport. This yacht was a sister-ship to another named Roussalka which was wrecked in 1933 off the west coast of Ireland, and both were used by Moyne to enable him to travel to distant places in search of biological specimens and archaeological material. In 1934 he travelled to the island of Komodo, near New Guinea, and brought back living specimens of Komodo dragons for the gardens of the London Zoological Society. His subsequent journey to New Guinea in 1935 he described in his book Walkabout (1936), and a later journey to Greenland and to the little-known Bay Islands off the coast of Honduras in Atlantic Circle (1938).
     On the outbreak of war in 1939 Moyne undertook to act as chairman of the Polish Relief Fund and lent for its offices part of his London house at 10 and 11 Grosvenor Place. Although he had served as minister of agriculture, he agreed to serve as joint parliamentary secretary to the minister on the formation of the Churchill Government in 1940. The next year Moyne succeeded Lord Lloyd [qv.] as secretary of state for the Colonies and leader of the House of Lords. In August 1942 he was appointed deputy minister of state in Cairo, and in January 1944 he succeeded Mr. Richard Gardiner Casey as minister resident in the Middle East; but on 6 November following he was assassinated in Cairo by terrorists from the Stern gang in Palestine.
     Guinness married in 1903 Lady Evelyn Hilda Stuart Erskine, daughter of the fourteenth Earl of Buchan, a talented lady of great beauty and unusual sensibility; she died in 1939, leaving two sons, of whom the elder, Bryan Walter (born 1905), succeeded his father as second baron, and one daughter who married in 1951 the fourth Marquess of Normanby. A portrait by P. A. de László, painted during the war of 1914-18, is in the possession of the family.

Sources:
     The Times, 7 November 1944
     private information
     personal knowledge.

Contributor: Moyne.

Published: 1959