Miles Watson, 2nd Baron Manton

Miles Watson, 2nd Baron Manton (right) with brother R F Watson, Directors of Newmarket Bloodstock Ltd. Company Christmas card portrait circa 1960

Miles Watson, 2nd Baron Manton (1899–1968; born George Miles Watson) of Compton Verney, Warwickshire and Plumpton Place, East Sussex, was an English peer and racehorse breeder.

Origins George Miles Watson was born on 21 June 1899. Watson had three younger brothers, Robert Fraser, Alastair Joseph, and Richard Mark Watson, all born by 1906.

Succeeds father He succeeded as 2nd Baron Manton on the death of his father in 1922. In 1929 he sold the Compton Verney estate to Samuel Lamb, a cotton manufacturer from Manchester. However (with much general disapproval (see reports in The Times newspaper)) before the sale he removed the mediaeval stained glass (with heraldry of the Verney family) from the chapel, which he sold in 1931 in four lots at Christie's. Much went to the US, although some is now in the Burrell Collection in Glasgow and in the Market Hall Museum, Warwick.

Career In the 1920s Manton had been a jockey under National Hunt Rules. having sold his father's briefly-owned seat of Compton Verney, in 1938 he purchased Plumpton Place near Lewes in Sussex, where he established a racehorse stud. Hard Sauce, produced there, sired the winner of the 1958 Derby, Hard Ridden. Secondly on 1 June 1938, he married Leila Joan Reynolds daughter of Major Philip Guy Reynolds, DSO and formerly the wife of Lt.Col. John Dane Player III (1903–1943), who had cited Manton in his own divorce proceedings, starting in 1937. She became after Manton's death Lady Brownlow, having married, as his 3rd wife, Peregrine Cust, 6th Baron Brownlow of Belton House, Grantham, Lincolnshire. On his death, the title passed to his son and only child by his first wife Alethea Langdale, Rupert Watson, 3rd Baron Manton.