Death of George Pease, the 4th Lord Gainford,

Lord Gainford moved when he was nine with his parents from Gainford to Argyllshire, and made a career for himself as an architect and town planner, but he maintained an interest in events in North Yorkshire and south Durham, becoming a member of the Wensleydale railway and also watching the preparations for the 200th anniversary of the Stockton & Darlington Railway.

George Pease, the 4th Lord Gainford, right, in Central Hall, Darlington, with the fellow descendants of railway pioneers Bill Chaytor and Jane Hackworth-Young in 2018. Picture: Chris Lloyd

His grandfather was Joseph Albert ‘Jack’ Pease who came from the Darlington family that was steeped in the railways, coalmines and blast furnaces of County Durham and the Tees Valley. Jack served in Asquith’s government during the First World War and was made the 1st Lord Gainford, of Headlam Hall, in 1917. In 1922, he became the first chairman of the British Broadcasting Company.

Lord Gainford’s mother, Veronica, was the grand-daughter of Sir Andrew Noble, who had been in partnership with William Armstrong in the munition works on Tyneside, where he was a ballistics expert.

Lord Gainford’s father, Joseph, managed Bowden Close Colliery, near Crook, until joining the Lovat Scouts, a British army unit, whom he fought with throughout the First World War. In 1935, he retired from the Pease family businesses, at the age of 46, and moved to Taynish in Argyllshire. He sold the family home of Headlam Hall in 1943.

Lord Gainford's great-great-great-grandfather's statue in the centre of Darlington in 1958

Lord Gainford himself was educated at Eton and trained as an architect in Edinburgh. With his new wife, Daphne, a sculptor, he went to Canada in 1958 to help design a new town for an aluminium ore company. It included a harbour, mine, airstrip, schools, churches and houses.

Two of his four children were born in Quebec, and the family returned to Scotland in 1962, where the other two were born. He was the County Planning Officer for Ross and Cromarty and then a Scottish Office Enquiry Reporter – a leading planning inspector, in English terms – until he retired in 1993.

He inherited his title on the death of his elder brother, Joseph, in 2013, and now the 5th Lord Gainford is his eldest son, Adrian, 62, a Citroen DS specialist in Norfolk.

A Quaker meeting of remembrance is being held in Lord Gainford’s house near Kinross, Perth, on April 6.