Lord Hastings

The 22nd Lord Hastings, who has died aged 95, pursued a wide variety of interests, which included politics and charitable work as well as a lifelong love of Italy and ballet.

A safe performer in the House of Lords as a junior member of the Macmillan and Douglas-Home governments, Hastings had a twinkling eye and positive outlook, which made him a highly effective member of committees.

For more than 40 years he was a governor and vice-chairman of the British Institute of Florence . As president of the British-Italian Society, he launched the Italian People's Flood Appeal because he felt that, although many organisations were concerned about the works of art damaged by the severe floods of the mid-1960s, the artisans who had been affected needed more help; his efforts were recognised by his appointment as a Grand Officer of the Italian Order of Merit in 1968.

His passion for dance, which developed after seeing the Ballet Russes at Covent Garden during the 1930s, led him to attend rehearsals at the Ballet Rambert school. When Ninette de Valois set up the Sadler's Wells Ballet Fund she invited him to become a trustee. Later he was a governor of the Royal Ballet for more than 20 years, as well as chairman of the Dance Teachers' Benevolent Fund. A close friend of Margot Fonteyn, Beryl Grey, Frederick Ashton and Constant Lambert, he often went on provincial tours with the company. If artistic temperaments began to overheat he could bristle in the face of intransigence, or employ Italianate gestures to play the peacemaker.

Edward Delaval Henry Astley was born on April 14 1912 , the son of the 21st Baron Hastings and Marguerite Nevill, daughter of the 3rd Marquess of Abergavenny. The barony (the motto of which is Justitiae tenax - "tenacious of justice") goes back to the 1290s, when Sir John Hastings was summoned to Parliament as Lord Hastings. The title became dormant in 1389 after the 5th Lord Hastings, who was also Earl of Pembroke, died of injuries incurred while practising for a tournament. Ten rightful heirs followed during the next century before the title was deemed to have fallen into abeyance. Eventually, in 1841, the House of Lords ruled in favour of Sir Jacob Astley, 6th Bt, being the 16th Lord Hastings.

Young Edward was educated at Eton, and had an impressive 21st birthday party with hundreds of friends and tenants at Melton Constable Hall, Norfolk . His domineering father did not believe that his son was bright enough for Cambridge . Although the 21st baron did not believe in "abroad" either, he agreed that his son should instead go to France and Spain to learn the languages.

At home one of Edward's close friends was Sarah Churchill, who invited him to stay at Chartwell in Kent . There her father one night drew from the young man the suggestion that politicians should retire at 60. "Well, you may be right, but there must be exceptions," said the future prime minister. "I'm in my 60th year, and I'm looking forward to the zenith of my career in the next 10 years."

After his travels on the Continent, Astley tried the City, working for the Gold Coast Selection Trust, and joined the supplementary reserve of the Coldstream Guards, then headed for America to equip himself for a political career. For 14 months he covered 22,000 miles in a Ford V-8, at a cost of three cents a mile, while cultivating an extensive correspondence with a wide variety of Americans, which he later tried to publish as a book.

It took some time to obtain a passage home after war was declared, and he arrived as the Coldstreams were about to return from Dunkirk . After a year he transferred to the Intelligence Corps, which sent him to North Africa and then to Italy .

There, Astley took over a Milan radio station and personally announced over the air in fluent Italian that the war had ended. At Trieste he ran both the local theatre and radio services, which were broadcasting in English, Italian and Serbo-Croat, and gave a job to the conductor Herbert von Karajan, who had been left behind by the Nazis, then sent him off to direct the Vienna Philharmonic. Their friendship cooled, however, when the conductor suspected him of being too friendly with his wife.

On returning home Astley had a spell on the board of the London and Eastern Trade Bank, which got into difficulties, then bought a 5,000-acre farm near Salisbury in Southern Rhodesia, where he introduced progressive production methods for growing Virginia tobacco, as well as maize to support the 100 staff and their families; the enterprise cultivated peanuts and pasture seed as well.

Although he never ran for a seat, Astley was a local branch chairman of the United Party with strong hopes for a multi-racial future, which were dented when the Southern Rhodesian leader Garfield Todd was ousted by his cabinet.

It was while in Salisbury that Astley met the former model Katie Hinton, known as Nicki. After marrying in 1954 the couple honeymooned in Elba , where Astley built a villa for holidays with his three children and his two stepchildren from his wife's earlier marriage.

Taking his seat in the Lords after his father's death in 1956, Hastings made a maiden speech calling for an end to India 's hostility towards the Commonwealth. Four years later he was appointed a Lord-in Waiting (government whip), then made parliamentary secretary to Sir Keith Joseph, Bt, the housing minister.

At the dispatch box he played a straight bat, steering the Clean Air and Water Resources Acts through the upper house, treading nimbly through potentially explosive planning issues and managing to avoid indulging his lively sense of humour. During the bitter winter of 1963 he did, however, venture a remark about the London building scene being frozen, and once attracted wider media attention by declaring that the only people who spent as much time away from their families as local councillors were heavy drinkers.

Following the Tories' defeat in 1964 Hastings was busy on the Opposition front bench harrying the new government, attacking it particularly for setting up the Land Commission - which he thought "the first cousin to land nationalisation". But it was as a trenchant critic of the Wilson government's obfuscations over Rhodesia that he was most outspoken, demanding the lifting of sanctions and disavowing a claim by Todd's daughter, Judith, that law and order had broken down in the rebel colony; throughout the UDI years he continued to visit his Rhodesian farm before finally selling it to the Mugabe government in 1982.

Although he continued to attend the Lords until excluded by the Blair reforms in 1999, Hastings found many other matters calling upon his time. When his second son was born with Down's syndrome, he became patron of the Camphill Villages' Trust for people with learning difficulties, giving over Thornage Hall, Norfolk , along with 50 acres. He also found time to be president of the British Epilepsy Association, the Epilepsy Research Foundation, and the Joint Epilepsy Council.

For 51 years Hastings devoted himself to restoring Seaton Delaval Hall in Northumberland, the fine 17th-century villa by Sir John Vanburgh which had been partially destroyed by fire in 1822 and then used as a PoW camp during the Second World War. He painstakingly repaired the damaged central block, refurbished the west wing, commissioned a parterre and opened the house to the public before he settled there permanently in 1990.

Edward Hastings, who died on April 25, is succeeded in the titles by his son Delaval Astley, born in 1960.

Lady Hastings

A fundraiser with a vision to create a working community for mentally-handicapped people in north Norfolk has died at the age of 87.

The Dowager, Lady Hastings, and her late husband, who died in April last year, gave one of the county's oldest stately homes, the 14th- century Thornage Hall, near Holt, to establish a Camphill Community, in 1987.

Catherine Rosaline, always known as Nicki, died at the family's seat, the 18th-century Seaton Delaval Hall in Northumberland, which is regarded as one of Sir John Vanbrugh's masterpieces.

A former model, she met her future husband, Edward Delaval Henry Astley, who was then farming near Salisbury in Rhodesia . They were married in London in 1954.

Two years later, when her husband succeeded to one of the country's oldest hereditary titles as the 22nd Baron Hastings, they returned to live on the family's estate at Melton Constable.

She was a great supporter of his voluntary and charitable work when his official duties as a junior minister in the MacMillan and Douglas-Home governments permitted.

Lady Hastings, who died on December 28, also shared her husband's love of ballet and dance.

They returned to live in Norfolk at Fulmodeston Hall where they built up a farming operation of more than 5,000 acres under the stewardship of the late Dick Broughton around Melton Constable. The hall, where her husband had been born in 1912, had been sold after the second world war.

Lord Hastings spent more than half a century restoring the west wing of Seaton Delaval hall, where his family has owned estates in Northumberland since the time of the Norman Conquest. Hubert de Laval, a nephew of William the Conqueror, rebuilt the Saxon church, which stands in the grounds and was dedicated in 1102.

Lord Hastings was the first member of the family to live there for more than 150 years since a disastrous fire in 1822. His wife took a keen interest in the evolution of the gardens, which had been laid out after the war.

It was the drive to create a vibrant community at Thornage which inspired Lady Hastings, who was the first chairman of the trust. Her younger son, Justin, who suffers from Down's syndrome, lives at the hall, which was given to the trust with 47 acres of land as a working community for young handicapped adults and their helpers.

A neighbour, the late Ian MacNicol, of Stody, headed a £600,000 appeal to refurbish the hall and in May 1989, the Duchess of Kent, patron of the Camphill Village Trust, unveiled a plaque to mark the official opening.

Lady Hastings leaves three children. Her oldest son, Delaval Astley, 23rd Baron, lives in north Norfolk .

A funeral will take place on Monday at the Church of Our Lady , Seaton Delaval, Northumberland.