Three draw telescope by Ross. Captain Napier Sturt, 3rd Baron Alington.

Three draw telescope by Ross. Captain Napier Sturt, 3rd Baron Alington.

£290

Circa

1865

Maker

Ross

Country of manufacture

UK and Ireland

Categories: Telescopes, Telescopes - Refracting

Description

A good 3 draw brass, taper barrelled telescope measuring 10.25″ when closed and pulling out to an extended length of 29.75″. It has a main lens of 5.5 cms and is signed on the first draw, ‘Ross, London’ and also the owners name, ‘Napier Sturt’.
The telescope gives a fine clear image when viewed through. The lenses are all original and damage free.
It has a dark tan leather covered barrel, sun visor, lens cap and eye piece shutter. It is a typical telescope with the design running for around 100 years from c 1860 – 1960 and was common with the soldiers of the 1st and 2nd World Wars.
The maker, Andrew Ross, started numbering all his telescopes from around 1870 so this telescope predates this, most likely to around 1865.
 
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Captain Napier George Henry Sturt, 3rd Baron Alington (1 November 1896 – 17 September 1940) was a British peer, the son of Humphrey Sturt, 2nd Baron Alington.

He was born in November 1896 in St. Marylebone district of London. He succeeded to the Barony on 30 July 1919 on the death of his father. He owned the Crichel House estate in Dorset.

He married Lady Mary Sibell Ashley-Cooper, daughter of Anthony Ashley-Cooper, 9th Earl of Shaftesbury, on 27 November 1928. They had one child: Hon. Mary Anna Sibell Elizabeth Sturt (b. 1929, d. 2010) who later fought the Government and won, leading to the resignation of a Minister, in the Crichel Down Affair.

Alington may well be most notable for having dated Tallulah Bankhead in the 1920s. Alington was described as “well cultivated, bisexual, with sensuous, meaty lips, a distant, antic charm, a history of mysterious disappearances, and a streak of cruelty.” His  bisexuality was well known. He was a friend of the Polish composer Karol Szymanowski who dedicated his highly sensuous Songs of an infatuated Muezzin Op.42 to the handsome young Englishman, on their publication in 1922.

He had no male heir upon his death, so the title became extinct. The Crichel estate passed to his 11-year-old daughter Mary, who later married Commander George (known as “Toby”) Marten.

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