JOHN GODLEY, 3rd Baron Kilbracken, was a Fleet Air Arm pilot, a journalist, an author and an independent-minded Labour peer. Despite having passed top into the Foreign Service, he opted to work for the Daily Mirror after the war, at first as a racing correspondent and feature writer. He then became a roving reporter in the days when newspapers liked to run dispatches from James Bondish toffs with datelines such as “Royalist HQ, Yemen, Tuesday (Message delayed)” .
Kilbracken approached every challenge with a sense of fun and adventure, whether it be escorting Jayne Mansfield on a visit to Britain in 1957, tangling with the Mafia in the search for Nazi loot in the sea off Corsica in 1963, or tracing a forger who had sold a host of dubious paintings to a gullible American millionaire in 1967.
At his seat at Killegar in Co Leitrim, Ireland, he successfully adopted organic farming methods from the 1950s. In the 1960s he spoke in the Lords about the danger from chemicals, when he suggested that all packaged goods should list their ingredients. In 1962, in the wake of the thalidomide disaster, he wrote to the papers about the unforeseen dangers of the introduction of the contraceptive Pill.
John Raymond Godley was born in 1920. He was the grandson of Gladstone’s private secretary, Arthur Godley, who became a peer in 1909 but declined to follow the trend towards taking one’s surname for one’s title, because he thought that “Lord Godley” sounded altogether too messianic.
At Eton Godley had a sideline as a bookmaker with up to a hundred clients, and at Balliol he periodically dreamt horse race winners in advance, to his own enrichment and that of his friends. He later admitted that he had been a compulsive gambler and spoke in the Lords about its destructive effects. But in moving an amendment in 1968 to prohibit the playing of blackjack, he offered to take any member of a Lords committee to a club as his guest to prove that he could make £50 by “ taking the bank in a game of blackjack when no smart Americans are playing”.
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He served in the Fleet Air Arm from 1940 to 1946, winning the DSC in 1945. Commissioned in 1941, he became a lieutenant-commander in 1944 and commanded 835 and 714 Naval Air Squadrons. By the end of the war he had flown on 67 operations, including the Murmansk run, and had made 132 deck landings in all weathers. On one occasion he very nearly drowned. His autobiographical account of those five years, Bring Back My Stringbag (1979), is a moving portrait of the lives of the young men who flew the Swordfish biplanes that were already outdated at the start of the war.
After the war he worked for the Mirror and then as a freelance for British and American papers, mainly as a foreign correspondent, travelling to Cuba, China, Yemen, Angola and Aden. In seven years he visited twenty-nine countries. For the Daily Express he spoke to Khrushchev (interviewed would be an exaggeration), and he wrote exotic pieces on wars, frauds, gambling and the like.
His great-great-grandfather had been the founder of the province of Canterbury, New Zealand, and when Godley was invited to visit for the centenary celebrations in 1950, he elected to drive there. He was accompanied successively by an American girl called Hank, his brother, an English girl who could not drive, an Australian engineer, two businessmen and a Danish photographer. While he was in New Zealand his father died, leaving him the title, the family home with 400 unproductive acres in Ireland and £1,000. Now a peer of the realm, he returned to England and one morning in June 1951 took a bus to the House of Lords to ask for admittance. Uncharacteristically, he lost his nerve, and took another bus home. He was not to speak in the House until 1961, but this did not stop him cashing in. When a manufacturer used the slogan “Our towels have no peer”, he cabled: “Will gladly supply the deficiency”, and was taken on to help with publicity. He joined the Liberal Party in 1960 but transferred to Labour in 1966, stating that Liberalism had become “irrelevant”.
As a resident of the Irish Republic, Kilbracken returned his four war medals to the Queen in 1972 in protest at the policy of internment in Northern Ireland. Around the same time, drawing on his farming knowledge, he spoke up in the House of Lords on behalf of the bull, “a much maligned animal” of which people should not be afraid.
As well as the Irish republicans, Kilbracken supported the Kurdish cause. During the 1960s he reported from Iraq about the Kurds’ struggle against repression, explicitly comparing this to the situation in Ireland, and in the 1970s he chaired a committee for the provision of medical aid to the Kurds.
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As John Godley, the entertaining author, his books included Tell Me the Next One (1950), Living Like a Lord (1955), A Peer Behind the Curtain (1959) and Shamrocks and Unicorns (1962). His first book, a collection of poems, had appeared in 1940.
In 1968 he wrote a study of Han Van Meegeren, the artist whose forged Vermeers sold for large sums despite bearing scarcely any resemblance to the real things. Then in 1982 his book for young birdwatchers, The Easy Way to Bird Recognition, won an award from The Times Educational Supplement. This was followed by two more bestsellers in the series, on trees and wildflowers.
Lord Kilbracken’s first marriage, to Penelope Anne Reyne in 1943, was dissolved in 1949. In 1981 he married Susan Lee Heazlewood. That marriage, however, ended in divorce in 1989.
One son predeceased him. He is survived by a son from each of his marriages and a daughter from an extramarital affair whom he always acknowledged. The Hon Christopher John Godley succeeds to the title.
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Lord Kilbracken, DSC, journalist, author and farmer, was born on October 17, 1920. He died on August 14, 2006 aged 85.