Titles Nobody Claims.

Kaipara and Waitemata Echo, 25 September 1914, Page 8

Titles Nobody Claims.

ROMANCES OF THE PEERAGE. ; The betrothal of the Duchess of i Fife to her relative, Prince Ar~ ] thur of Connaught, is a reminder ' that the late duke's kinsman, Mr. Dull, who resides in Australia, at St. Kikla, Melbourne, has so far not "troubled to establish his right to the Fife earldom in the Irish peerage. The honour is Ms if he cares to claim it, but realising that there is no property attaching' to' the title, Mr. Dufi' has no desire to be Earl Fife without adequate j means to sustain the dignity. | Though people are so eager to : ' obtain handles to their names, im- \ \ menre sums being contributed to j : the party funds by ambitious mdiii viduals in the hope of getting a i knighthood, baronetcy, or peerage, a j good many titles are awaiting \ claimants. On the death of the seventh Earl of Mil; town, in 1891, the honour became dormant, as no \ heir came forward, but one, it is j alleged, to be f-und in the person of a guard on an Indian railway, who married a native, and has, rumour alleges, a dusky family. Possibly one day, therefore, the House of Lords may possess a dusky peer from India. Through another peerage this potentiality is a likely one. Since the death thirty years ago of the third Lord Gardner, the barony has been dormant, but it is possibly a Gardner whose mother was a native princess of the Delhi family, and whose grandmother was a Begum. The latter was her husband's cousin, and daughter of another native princess by marriage to a Gardner of a previous generation whose parents were Colonel W. L. Gardner, of Gardner's Horse, and a dark but beautiful Princess of Cambay. The ancient barony of the Lords Scrope, who owned historic Bolton Castle in Yorkshire. where the ninth baron had the hapless Mary Queen of Scots in his custody, might be usccessfully claimed by a descendant living in South Africa ; ! a Lord Willoughby of Parham could, ■it is thought, be found in America ; and there, too, are the rightful own--1 ers of two ancient baronetcies— i those of Peyton, of Isloham, Camj hridgeshire, and \ Torwioh, of BrainpI ton, Northants, two ruined families whose representations nought new fortunes across the Atlantic. A Warwickshire squire, the late ! Mr. Marmion Ferrers, of Baddesley j Clinton, was the descendant and | male representative of the Ferrers, I Earls of Derby, and in the opinion iof experts he could have established jto the satisfaction of the Lords a right to the possession of that earldom, which dales from li:$8, and is older in creation by over three centuries than that of the King's host at Kemsley the other weak. These are only a few of many titles which may some day figure in the extant peerage. All these dormant honours are landless, so their possession would j confer no pecuniary benefit, and this is th ■ principal reason why they are not claimed, another being the | great cost of prosecuting a claim, j for the fees of peerage lawyers are | heavy ; so, too, are those of pediI gree hunters, whose charges for searches are by no means light.—"' Tit Bits."