Family and Early Life
Ramsay was from an aristocratic family (he was a descendant of the Earls of Dalhousie). He attended Eton College and the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, joining the Coldstream Guards in 1913. On the outbreak of World War I he served in France for two years. He later received a severe head injury before being invalided out and transferred to the War Office in London. Here he met and married on 30 April 1917 Lady Ninian Crichton-Stuart, née Hon. Ismay Preston, daughter of Viscount Gormanston and widow of Lord Ninian Crichton-Stuart MP, who had been killed on active service in the war. His wife was already the mother of three surviving children. The couple went on to have four sons together, the eldest of whom died on active service in 1943.
As the war was coming to an end, Ramsay served at the British War Mission in Paris. He retired from the Army with the rank of Captain in 1920. He spent the 1920s as a company director, near Arbroath, Angus, and became active in the Conservative Party. In the 1931 general election, Ramsay was elected as MP for Peebles and Southern Midlothian. He was regarded as a likable and charming man (he was nicknamed 'Jock' among friends), who had a sincere and earnest approach and was an engaging and persuasive public speaker. However, Ramsay was not considered as a potential candidate for high office: the most senior appointment he obtained was as a Government member of the Potato Marketing Board.
Read more about this topic: Archibald Maule Ramsay
Famous quotes containing the words family and, family, early and/or life:
“O God, and the wedding! All her family and her friends
and only a handful of mine all scroungy and bearded
just wait to get at the drinks and food—”
—Gregory Corso (b. 1930)
“Respectable means rich, and decent means poor. I should die if I heard my family called decent.”
—Thomas Love Peacock (1785–1866)
“... goodness is of a modest nature, easily discouraged, and when much elbowed in early life by unabashed vices, is apt to retire into extreme privacy, so that it is more easily believed in by those who construct a selfish old gentleman theoretically, than by those who form the narrower judgments based on his personal acquaintance.”
—George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)
“The authoritarian child-rearing style so often found in working-class families stems in part from the fact that parents see around them so many young people whose lives are touched by the pain and delinquency that so often accompanies a life of poverty. Therefore, these parents live in fear for their children’s future—fear that they’ll lose control, that the children will wind up on the streets or, worse yet, in jail.”
—Lillian Breslow Rubin (20th century)