Name Napier 3rd | Died September 17, 1940 | |
Captain Napier George Henry Sturt, 3rd Baron Alington (1 November 1896 – 17 September 1940) was a British peer, the son of Humphrey Sturt, 2nd Baron Alington.
He was born in November 1896 in St. Marylebone district of London. He succeeded to the Barony on 30 July 1919 on the death of his father. He owned the Crichel House estate in Dorset.
He married Lady Mary Sibell Ashley-Cooper, daughter of Anthony Ashley-Cooper, 9th Earl of Shaftesbury, on 27 November 1928. They had one child: Hon. Mary Anna Sibell Elizabeth Sturt (b. 1929, d. 2010) who later fought the Government and won, leading to the resignation of a Minister, in the Crichel Down Affair.
Alington may well be most notable for having dated Tallulah Bankhead in the 1920s. Alington was described as "well cultivated, bisexual, with sensuous, meaty lips, a distant, antic charm, a history of mysterious disappearances, and a streak of cruelty." His bisexuality was well known. He was a friend of the Polish composer Karol Szymanowski who dedicated his highly sensuous Songs of an infatuated Muezzin Op.42 to the handsome young Englishman, on their publication in 1922.
He had no male heir upon his death, so the title became extinct. The Crichel estate passed to his 11-year-old daughter Mary, who later married Commander George (known as "Toby") Marten.
War service
In the First World War, he was a Captain in the Royal Air Force. In the Second World War, he was commissioned on 2 July 1940 as an officer of the Royal Air Force Volunteer Reserve in the Administrative and Special Duties Branch and was posted to Cairo, possibly serving as a staff officer at HQ Middle East. He died on 16 September 1940 aged 43 in Cairo on active service of a short illness after pneumonia, and is buried in the New British Protestant Cemetery, Cairo, Egypt, plot E.221-222