Geoffrey Coleridge, 3rd Baron Coleridge

Geoffrey Duke Coleridge, 3rd Baron Coleridge (23 July 1877 – 27 March 1955) was a British aristocrat and military officer, who was responsible for making the archive of his family member the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge available to researchers for the first time.

Biography The only son of Bernard Coleridge MP, and grandson of John Coleridge, a Lord Chief Justice of England, Coleridge was educated at Eton College in Berkshire, England. He graduated from Trinity College, Oxford in 1900 with a BA.

As a young man he often travelled the law circuits with his father, and went with him to the United States, where he later claimed to have danced down Broadway with Ellen Terry. Coleridge served as a lieutenant in the 3rd Battalion, the Devonshire Regiment until resigning his commission in 1901. He served in World War I in the 4th Battalion of the Devonshire Regiment, and was promoted Acting Captain in April 1917. Coleridge left the Army in 1919. He succeeded to the title of 3rd Baron Coleridge of Ottery St. Mary on 24 September 1927 after the death of his father. In 1949 Coburn was instrumental in negotiating the sale of this Chanter's House archive to the British Museum for £10,200, with a donation from the Pilgrim Trust.

Coleridge held the office of Justice of the Peace for Devon from 1929 to 1952. He married Jessie Alethea Mackarness (1880–1957), daughter of George Evelyn Mackarness, on 14 September 1904 at St. Michael's Church in Sandhurst. They had three sons, the oldest, Richard Duke Coleridge succeeding to the barony on his father's death.