Leo Blair (senior)
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Leo Charles Lynton Blair (born August 1923 in Filey, Yorkshire, England) is the father of Tony Blair, former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom.
[edit] Biography
Born Charles Leonard Augustus Parsons in 1923, he was the illegitimate [1] son of two middle class travelling entertainers: Charles Parsons, whose stage name was Jimmy Lynton, and Mary Augusta Ridgway Wilson (née Bridson in 1886, the daughter of Augustus William Bridson), whose stage name was Celia Ridgeway. The two met on tour in England.
The parents' hectic lifestyles prompted Leo's parents to give him up so he was fostered out to (and later adopted by) a working class couple, a Glasgow shipyard worker named James Blair and his wife Mary, Leo taking their surname, Blair. In 1927 his biological parents legally married and tried to reclaim him but Mary Blair refused to return him. Leo's adopted mother prevented him from contacting his biological parents. Leo later had a reunion with his half-sister, Pauline Harding née Tordiffe.
Leo Blair grew up in a tenement in Golspie Street, Govan, Glasgow, and attended Govan High School. When he left school he worked as a copy boy on the Communist Party newspaper The Daily Worker and was Secretary of the Scottish Young Communist League 1938-1941.
Leo Blair studied law, becoming a barrister, and later, a university law lecturer. He married Hazel Corscadden, from a Protestant family in Donegal, Ireland. Their first son Bill Blair is now a QC and domestic and international banking and finance law specialist. Their second son Anthony Charles Lynton Blair (Tony Blair) was born in 1953 and also became a barrister before achieving fame as a politician and Prime Minister. Tony Blair's middle names of "Charles Lynton" derive from Leo's birth father, being his real first name and his stage surname. Leo and Hazel lived for a time in Adelaide, Australia, where Leo lectured in Law at the University of Adelaide. Hazel Blair died in 1975 of thyroid cancer.
Leo and his family later moved to Durham, England, where Leo lectured in Law at Durham University. He was a member of St Cuthbert's Society, one of the University's collegiate bodies. Despite having been a communist in his youth, Leo became active in the Conservative Party. He had ambitions to stand for Parliament in Durham, plans which were thwarted when he had a stroke when his son, Tony, was 11. Largely because of his father's thwarted political ambitions, Tony Blair successfully stood for election in the County Durham constituency of Sedgefield in 1983.
Leo lives in Shropshire with his second wife Olwen. Cherie and Tony Blair also named their son Leo after his grandfather.
[edit] References
[edit] External links
|
|||||||||||||
