Carlyon Bellairs

Commander Carlyon Wilfroy Bellairs (15 March 1871 – 22 August 1955) was a British Royal Navy officer and politician.

Bellairs was born at Gibraltar, the son of Lieutenant-General Sir William Bellairs, KCMG, and Blanche St. John Bellairs.

He was a Lieutenant of the Royal Navy, and was placed on the retired list 15 March 1902.

In the 1906 general election he was elected to Parliament for King's Lynn as a Liberal, but in October 1909 crossed the floor to sit as a Liberal Unionist. In the January 1910 general election he unsuccessfully stood for election at West Salford and in December 1910 was also defeated at Walthamstow.

In 1911 Bellairs was married to Charlotte, daughter of Colonel H. L. Pierson of Long Island, USA. From 1913 he was a member of the London County Council as Municipal Reform Party member for Lewisham, resigning on 17 April 1915.

He returned to Parliament as Conservative member for Maidstone at a by-election in February 1915, and was re-elected for the Maidstone division of Kent in 1918. He retired from Parliament at the 1931 general election, having declined a baronetcy in 1927.

Charlotte Bellairs died in 1939. Carlyon Bellairs lived at 10 Eaton Place, London and Gore Court, Maidstone, Kent, and was a member of the Carlton Club and the Coefficients dining club of social reformers set up in 1902 by the Fabian campaigners Sidney and Beatrice Webb. He died in Barbados in 1955 aged 84.

Carlyon Bellairs bequeathed his Barbados home, called Seabourne, as a research institute dedicated to the study of marine biology. McGill University in Montreal, Canada, founded Bellairs Research Institute in 1954 on the property. The institute has been expanded since, but the original house can still be seen close to shore and is often used as accommodation for visiting academics.

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