17 Facts About Ronald Tree

Arthur Ronald Lambert Field Tree was a British Conservative Party politician, journalist and investor who served as the Member of Parliament for the Harborough constituency in Leicestershire from 1933 to 1945.

Ronald Tree later established the Sandy Lane resort in Barbados.

Ronald Tree's mother, Ethel Field, was a daughter of Marshall Field, a co-founder of Marshall Field's department store in Chicago, Illinois.

Two months after his parents divorced in 1901, Ronald Tree's mother married her lover, Capt.

Ronald Tree's half-siblings were David Beatty, 2nd Earl Beatty, and the Hon Peter Beatty; he had two full siblings, both of whom died in infancy.

Arthur and Kate were never married and while Ronald Tree grew up with them at Ashorne Hill, he would have had little or no contact with a Catholic, half-Irish and illegitimate family after Arthur's death in 1914, when Ronald Tree was already at the cusp of adulthood.

Ronald Tree edited Forum Magazine in New York from 1922, and in 1926 became involved in investment on the New York Stock Exchange, before the Wall Street Crash of 1929.

In November 1933, Ronald Tree was elected Member of Parliament for Harborough in Leicestershire.

Ronald Tree was among a small group who saw the rising Nazi party in Germany as a threat to Britain, and using his home as its base he became friends with the group's leader, Winston Churchill.

In February 1938, after Anthony Eden resigned as foreign secretary from Neville Chamberlain over the conduct of foreign policy, Ronald Tree himself became a follower of Eden, known then as the "Glamour boys," a pejorative term used by the Conservative Party whips' office, headed by David Margesson.

Ronald Tree offered Churchill use of Ditchley, which thanks to its tree coverage and no visible access road made it an ideal site with which Churchill was happy.

Ronald Tree left Parliament when, in the election in 1945 at the end of the war, he was defeated by the Labour candidate at Harborough by 204 votes.

Ronald Tree was elected to the Democratic State Committee in 1954.

Marietta had started an affair with Adlai Stevenson between his two failed presidential campaigns, but her husband was unfazed by this, as the couple's marriage had largely disintegrated to a friendly separation, with Ronald Tree spending much of his time at Heron Bay, his house in Barbados.

Ronald Tree died of a stroke on 14 July 1976 in London, England.

Ronald Tree was, like his grandfather Lambert Tree and his father Arthur, a prominent owner and connoisseur of fine houses, both commissioning, restoring and owning some of the finest houses on both sides of the Atlantic.

Arthur and Ronald Tree lived for a time at a London house in Harrington Gardens designed by the significant Victorian architects of Sir Ernest George and Peto.