Lord Abinger

The Essex landowner James Richard Scarlett, 8th Baron Abinger, who has died aged 87, was a favourite of Tory whips during his half century in the House of Lords. He would turn up for his agreed two or three dozen occasions a session, normally voted the straight party ticket, and kept his mouth shut on all except two or three subjects.

One of the bees in his bonnet was the new breed of amateur archaeologists, equipped with metal detectors, "digging feverishly, unskilfully and roughly" for finds that, in truth, required skilled excavation. In 1979 and 1981, he tried to introduce bills to ensure that diggers reported their finds within 48 hours, to allow qualified archaeologists to continue the work and make the finds available to museums. The bill, drafted by Charles Sparrow QC, legal counsel to the Council for British Archaeology, also restricted the rewards to the owners of the land on which finds were made. More generous legislation was, in fact, passed in 1997.

A hereditary custodian - and cataloguer - of Shelley's letters and manuscripts, Abinger was chairman of the Keats-Shelley Memorial Association. His grandmother had been adopted by Sir Percy Shelley, only son of Mary and Percy Bysshe Shelley.

The Abinger family wealth was based on Jamaican sugar plantations. James was born in Datchet, Berkshire. His mother was the daughter of an Australian cattle rancher. His father, who fought with the Royal Artillery on the western front, unexpectedly inherited the family title and Inverlochy Castle, near Fort William, on the salmon-rich river Lochy, when his son was 12.

James was educated at Eton, Magdalene College, Cambridge, and Sandhurst. Commissioned in the Royal Artillery in 1936, he served in France and Norway, and was in Poona in 1943 when he learned he had become the 8th baron. After the war, he sold Inverlochy, bought the Clees Hall mixed dairy farm on the Suffolk/Essex border, became a Tory councillor, and was deputy lieutenant of Essex from 1968. He leaves his wife, Isla Carolyn, and two sons.

James Richard Scarlett, 8th Baron Abinger, farmer and politician, born September 28 1914; died September 23 2002

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