Sir Thomas Dyke Acland, 11th Baronet

Sir Thomas Dyke Acland, 11th Baronet, FRS (25 May 1809 – 29 May 1898) was a British educational reformer and a politician who sat in the House of Commons between 1837 and 1886 initially as a Tory and later, after an eighteen-year gap, as a Liberal.

Early life Thomas Dyke Acland (right) with his mother Lydia Elizabeth Hoare (centre) and Arthur Henry Dyke Acland (left). Mezzotint by Samuel Cousins, 1826. Acland was the eldest son of Sir Thomas Dyke Acland, 10th Baronet and his wife Lydia Elizabeth Hoare. Among his siblings was prominent physician, Sir Henry Wentworth Acland, and politician John Acland. In 1839, he was made a Fellow of the Royal Society.

Career In 1837, Acland entered Parliament for Somerset West as a Tory. During the tensions within the Tory party in the 1840s over the Corn Laws, Acland supported Sir Robert Peel's free trade policy. He did not stand for Parliament in the 1847 general election Acland served as a major in the Royal 1st Devonshire Yeomanry Cavalry, and when the 1st Administrative Battalion, Devonshire Rifle Volunteer Corps, was formed at Exeter in August 1860, he became its Lieutenant-Colonel. In 1881, when it became the 3rd Volunteer Battalion, Devonshire Regiment, he was made its Honorary Colonel. He was also a justice of the peace for Devon and Somerset. He voted for the First Home Rule Bill in June 1885 and this led to him being defeated at the 1886 general election.

Apart from his public career Acland was also a patron of art. He was a friend of John Ruskin and an early admirer of John Everett Millais. Mary Lydia Acland (b. 1846), who married the Rev. Richard Hart-Davis in 1872. Sir Arthur Dyke Acland, 13th Baronet (1847–1926), who married Alice Cunningham, a daughter of Rev. Francis Macaulay Cunningham.

He married secondly Mary Erskine, only surviving child of John Erskine, in 1856. This marriage was childless. Lady Acland died in May 1892.

Acland survived her by six years and died in May 1898, aged 89. He was succeeded in the baronetcy by his eldest son Thomas, who was also a politician. Acland's second son Arthur, who succeeded to the baronetcy in 1919, also had a successful political career.