Nicholas William Bethell, 4th Baron Bethell was a British politician.
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33 Facts About Nicholas Bethell
3.
Nicholas Bethell sat in the House of Lords as a Conservative from 1967 to 1999.
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4.
Nicholas Bethell served as an appointed member of the European Assembly from 1975 to 1979, and as an elected Member of the European Parliament from 1979 to 1994, and from 1999 to 2003.
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5.
Nicholas Bethell's mother was the daughter of Lieutenant Colonel Robert Barlow.
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7.
Nicholas Bethell graduated in 1962, and befriended Polish students in Cambridge.
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9.
In 1968, for instance, Nicholas Bethell supplied The Sunday Times with the text of a long, anonymous protest against the invasion of Czechoslovakia which was signed, so he asserted, by "88 of the leading Moscow progressive writers".
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10.
One consequence of this debacle was that Michael Scammell rather than Nicholas Bethell was chosen in 1971 to be director of Writers and Scholars International, the new NGO which founded the quarterly Index on Censorship periodical.
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11.
Nicholas Bethell's father died in 1964, and he inherited the barony on the unexpected early death of his cousin Guy Anthony John Bethell, 3rd Baron Bethell on 2 December 1967.
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12.
Nicholas Bethell sat in the House of Lords as a Conservative until the House of Lords Act 1999 removed most hereditary peers from the chamber.
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13.
Nicholas Bethell was appointed as a Lord in Waiting in June 1970, after the 1970 general election.
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14.
Fluent in Russian and Polish, Nicholas Bethell often translated the works of Russian and Polish writers into English.
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15.
Nicholas Bethell brought a libel suit against Private Eye and resigned as a whip in January 1971 to pursue the litigation.
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16.
Solzhenitsyn reopened the issue after he was deported from the Soviet Union, claiming that he had not authorised a Slovak dissident, Pavel Licko, to give the manuscript to Nicholas Bethell, and that Licko was a Soviet agent.
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17.
Nicholas Bethell rejected these claims, pointing out that Solzhenitsyn had accepted royalties from the publication of the translation over the years.
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18.
Nicholas Bethell was nominated to become a member of the European Parliament from 1975 to 1979, and sat as an elected MEP for London Northwest from 1979 to 1994.
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19.
Nicholas Bethell set up the "Freedom of the Skies" in 1980, campaigning to force airlines to reduce their prices which he believed were artificially inflated by a cartel.
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20.
Nicholas Bethell was awarded the European People's Party's Robert Schuman Medal on his retirement from the European Parliament in October 2003.
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21.
Nicholas Bethell used his European post to campaign for the human rights of dissidents in the Soviet bloc, including Andrei Sakharov and Anatoly Sharansky.
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22.
Nicholas Bethell took a leading role in the foundation of the Sakharov Prize, awarded by the European Parliament since 1988.
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23.
Nicholas Bethell was one of the first people to interview Nelson Mandela at Pollsmoor Prison in 1985.
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24.
Nicholas Bethell became a Commander of the Polish Order of Merit in 1991, and received a Russian Presidential Award in 1992.
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25.
Nicholas Bethell was the president of the Uxbridge Conservative Association from 1995 to 1999.
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28.
Nicholas Bethell married, firstly, Cecilia Mary Lothian Honeyman on 7 April 1964.
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29.
Nicholas Bethell was the daughter of Alexander Honeyman, professor of Oriental Languages at St Andrews University.
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30.
Nicholas Bethell enjoyed playing tennis and poker, and was a member of the Garrick Club and Pratt's.
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31.
Nicholas Bethell suffered from Parkinson's disease in later life, dying at age 69.
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32.
Nicholas Bethell was survived by his second wife, and his three sons.
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33.
Nicholas Bethell was succeeded in the barony by his eldest son, James Bethell, 5th Baron Bethell.
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