Edward Douglas-Scott-Montagu, 3rd Baron Montagu of Beaulieu

Ten years later, Parliament finally carried out the recommendation, a huge turning point in gay history in Britain, where anal sex, a form of "buggery", had been a criminal offence ever since the Buggery Act 1533.

His mother was his father's second wife, Alice Crake (1895–1996).

He attended St Peter's Court, a prep school at Broadstairs in Kent, then Ridley College in Canada, Eton College and finally New College, Oxford.

He served as a lieutenant in the Grenadier Guards, including service in Palestine before the end of the British Mandate.

On coming of age, Lord Montagu immediately took his seat in the House of Lords and swiftly made his maiden speech on the subject of Palestine.

He read Modern History at Oxford but left without taking a degree after his rooms were smashed up in a fight between members of the Bullingdon Club, of which he was one, and the Oxford University Dramatic Society.

Edward John Barrington Douglas-Scott-Montagu, 3rd Baron Montagu of Beaulieu (20 October 1926 – 31 August 2015) was a British aristocrat and Conservative politician, best known for founding the National Motor Museum, as well as for a pivotal cause célèbre following his 1954 conviction and imprisonment for alleged homosexual activity, a charge he denied.

Montagu was born at his grandparents' house in Thurloe Square, South Kensington, London, and inherited his barony in 1929 at the age of two, when his father John died of pneumonia.

Fiona, Lady Montagu of Beaulieu, was born in about 1943 in Southern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), the daughter of Richard Leonard Deane Herbert, of Clymping, Sussex.

She attended school in Switzerland, and following her education, she worked as film production assistant.

She was a director of Beaulieu Enterprises and a trustee of the Countryside Education Trust.

She served as an international advisor to the World Centre of Compassion for Children, led by Nobel Peace Laureate, Betty Williams, as well as a Trustee of Vision-in-Action, led by Yasuhiko Kimura.

She additionally served on The World Wisdom Council, alongside Mikhail Gorbachev, former head of state of the Soviet Union.

She was appointed the first global ambassador to the Club of Budapest.

Despite keeping his homosexual affairs discreet and out of the public eye, in the mid-1950s, Montagu became "one of the most notorious public figures of his generation," after his conviction and imprisonment for "conspiracy to incite certain male persons to commit serious offences with male persons," a charge which was also used in the Oscar Wilde trials in 1895, which was derived from a law that remained on the statute books until 1967.

In old age, Montagu reminisced about it in these terms:

"In the cold war atmosphere of the 1950s, when witch hunts later called the Lavender Scare were ruining the lives of many gay men and lesbian women in the United States, the parallel political atmosphere in Britain was virulently anti-homosexual. The then Home Secretary, Sir David Maxwell Fyfe, had promised 'a new drive against male vice' that would 'rid England of this plague.' As many as 1,000 men were locked up in Britain's prisons every year amid a widespread police clampdown on homosexual offences. Undercover officers acting as 'agents provocateurs' would pose as gay men soliciting in public places. The prevailing mood was one of barely concealed paranoia."

Lord Montagu gained an interest in motoring from his father – who had commissioned the original "Spirit of Ecstasy" mascot for his Rolls-Royce – and with his family collection of historic cars this led him to open the National Motor Museum in the grounds of his stately home, Beaulieu Palace House, Beaulieu, Hampshire, in 1952.

On two occasions Montagu was charged and committed for trial at Winchester Assizes, firstly in 1953 for having underage sex with a 14-year-old boy scout at his beach hut on the Solent, a charge he always denied.

While supported by his family and innumerable friends, he became "the subject of endless blue jokes and innumerable bawdy songs".

When prosecutors failed to achieve a conviction, in what Montagu has characterised as a "witch hunt", he was arrested again in 1954 and charged with performing "gross offences" with an RAF serviceman during a weekend party at the beach hut on his country estate.

Montagu always maintained he was innocent of this charge as well ("We had some drinks, we danced, we kissed, that's all").

Nevertheless, he was imprisoned for twelve months for "consensual homosexual offences" along with Michael Pitt-Rivers and Peter Wildeblood.

Unlike the other defendants in the trial, Montagu continued to protest his innocence.

From 1956 to 1961 he held the influential Beaulieu Jazz Festival in the grounds of Palace House; this was a leading contribution to the development of festival culture in Britain, as it attracted thousands of young people who, from 1958 on, would camp out and listen and dance to live music.

Montagu founded The Veteran And Vintage Magazine in 1956 and continued to develop the museum, making a name for himself in tourism.

The trial caused a backlash of opinion among some politicians and church leaders that led to the setting up of the Wolfenden Committee, which in its 1957 report recommended the decriminalisation of homosexual activity in private between two adults.

In 1958, Lord Montagu of Beaulieu married Belinda Crossley, a granddaughter of the 1st Baron Somerleyton, by whom he had a son and a daughter before the couple divorced in 1974:

The 1960 festival saw an altercation between modern and trad jazz fans that became known as the Battle of Beaulieu.

He was chairman of the Historic Houses Association from 1973 to 1978, President of the Institute of Traffic Administration from 1973 to 1974 and chairman of English Heritage from 1984 to 1992.

In 1974, he married his second wife, Fiona Margaret Herbert, with whom he had a son:

He held his peerage for the third longest time (86 years and 155 days) anyone has held a British peerage (the others being the 7th Marquess Townshend at 88 years, and the 13th Lord Sinclair at 87 years).

Whilst there he appointed Jennifer Page (later of the Millennium Dome) as Chief Executive in 1989.

In the 1999 reform of the House of Lords, Montagu was one of 92 hereditary peers who remained in Parliament.

In a 2000 interview he stated, "My attraction to both sexes neither changed nor diminished at university and it was comforting to find that I was not the only person faced with such a predicament. I agonised less than my contemporaries, for I was reconciled to my bisexuality, but I was still nervous about being exposed."

In an interview in 2000, coinciding with the publication of his autobiography, Montagu was reduced to tears at the suggestion that he would chiefly be remembered for his role in the decriminalisation of homosexuality.

In 2007, he was Vice-Commodore of the House of Lords Yacht Club.

In a 2007 interview, when the issue was again raised, Montagu said, "I am slightly proud that the law has been changed to the benefit of so many people. I would like to think that I would get some credit for that. Maybe I'm being very boastful about it but I think because of the way we behaved and conducted our lives afterwards, because we didn't sell our stories, we just returned quietly to our lives, I think that had a big effect on public opinion."

He gave a notice of his intention to retire from the House of Lords on 17 September 2015, but he died before that.

Montagu knew from an early stage of life that he was bisexual, and while attending Oxford was relieved to find others with similar feelings.