Basil Neven-Spence

Sir Basil Hamilton Hebden Neven-Spence (12 June 1888 – 13 September 1974) was a Scottish Unionist Party politician and military physician.

Neven-Spence came from a prominent landowning family in the Shetland Islands. Neven-Spence graduated from Edinburgh University in 1911. He served with the Royal Army Medical Corps, seconded to help the Egyptian Army and government of Sudan, and in the First World War, mainly in the Middle East. He received the Order of the Nile for his role in the Darfur Expedition. and served as Lord Lieutenant of Shetland from 1952 to 1963.

As of 2024, Neven-Spence is the most recent MP for the Orkney and Shetland constituency to not be from either the Liberal Party or the Liberal Democrats. He once lived on the island of Uyea.

Family

He married Margaret Alice MacKenzie (b. 1887) on 31 May 1917 in Paddington, London, and the couple had three children, daughters Margaret Sunniva Neven-Spence (b. 11 November 1920) and Alice Annette Neven-Spence (b. 11 March 1922) and son Basil St. Clair Neven-Spence (b. 28 June 1925). Sir Basil's son, served in the Colonial Office following serving in World War II. He died by suicide from gunshot at the age of 22, after having been assigned to the island of Tanna in the New Hebrides.

His wife Margaret, died from myocardial degeneration on 22 December 1961 at Busta House Hotel, Shetland Islands. Their eldest child, Margaret Sunniva, married Bernard Maxwell Ward in Westminster on 1 June 1948, and died there on 29 January 1962; just five weeks after the death of her mother.

On 16 April 1963, he married Lady Constance Ella Corbet at Chapel Royal, Hampton Court Palace. The union was short lived, and his second wife died on 13 October 1967, aged 72 years.

Sir Basil Neven-Spence died in Edinburgh on 13 September 1974, aged 86 years, survived only by his daughter Alice; having outlived both of his wives and two of his children.