Ronald Tree

Arthur Ronald Lambert Field Tree (26 September 1897 – 14 July 1976) was a British Conservative Party politician, journalist and investor who served as the Member of Parliament (MP) for the Harborough constituency in Leicestershire from 1933 to 1945. He later established the Sandy Lane resort in Barbados.

Tree's American-born father, Arthur Tree, was an English gentleman of leisure, self-identifying as a 'horse breeder and farmer' and son of Lambert Tree, a former U.S. minister to Russia. His mother, Ethel Field, was a daughter of Marshall Field, a co-founder of Marshall Field's department store in Chicago, Illinois. Born in Eastbourne, he was educated at Winchester College in England. Both sides of the family had great wealth and even though his parents divorced, Ronald and his father continued to enjoy a life of great luxury, not least Arthur's yacht The Adventuress.

Two months after his parents divorced in 1901, Tree's mother married her lover, Capt. David Beatty, the future 1st Earl Beatty and First Sea Lord. His half-siblings were David Beatty, 2nd Earl Beatty, and the Hon Peter Beatty; he also had two full siblings, both of whom died in infancy. After the divorce, he remained with his father at Ashorne Hill House, Warwickshire, as the court had given Arthur custody of Ronald. There he was tutored by a convent girl from Cork in Ireland, his governess Kate Walsh, who was also Arthur's partner, the mother of six further half-siblings of Ronald; Dennis (1898–1969), Kathleen (1901–1975), Patrick (1905–1991), James, Gerald and Elizabeth Waring (1914–1991). Arthur and Kate were never married and while Ronald 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 was already at the cusp of adulthood. Dennis, Kathleen and Patrick all had issue including notable architect, Michael Blower.

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.

Tree returned to England with his wife, the former Nancy Keene Perkins (the widow of his cousin Henry Marshall Field) in 1927, where they had two sons, artist, Michael Lambert Tree and racehorse trainer, Jeremy Tree, and a daughter, who died at birth. At first the couple took a 10-year repairing lease on Kelmarsh Hall in Northamptonshire (near Market Harborough) which Nancy redecorated with help from Mrs Guy Bethell of Elden Ltd.

In November 1933, Ronald was elected Member of Parliament (MP) for Harborough in Leicestershire. In the same year, the couple bought Ditchley House and Park near Charlbury, Oxfordshire as their home, and it was the decoration of this house which earned Nancy the reputation of having "the finest taste of almost anyone in the world." She worked on it with Lady Colefax and the French decorator Stéphane Boudin of the Paris firm Jansen.

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. Churchill and his wife Clementine dined at Ditchley on numerous occasions from 1937.

In February 1938, after Anthony Eden resigned as foreign secretary from Neville Chamberlain over the conduct of foreign policy, 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.