BRITISH EARL.

Auckland Star, Volume LVI, Issue 285, 2 December 1925, Page 8

BRITISH EARL.

RANCHING IN U.S.A. <From Our Own Correspondent.) SAN FRANCISCO, November 4. Oliver Henry Wallop, the Wyoming (U.S.A.) rancher, wlm> has become Earl of Portsmouth,- has been paying a business visit to Winnipeg, and when asked if he would retain the title or his United States citizenship he replied: "I could not renounce the title. lam the Earl of Portsmouth, no matter what I say. The title cannot change hands." The picturesque Yankeo rancher succeeded to the British title by the death in England of his brother, John Felloes Wallop, seventh Earl of Portsmouth. • "I intend to live in Wyoming," he continued. "Yet the title remains mine and cannot be taken away. It will succeed to my son." Mr. Wallop became a United States citizen on Novombcr 5, 1904, Court recofdi show, renouncing allegiance to any foreign prince or potentate. He also took oath that he "bore no titld and had never been of any degree of nobility." No formal renunciation of the title is on record. Immigration officials in Denver and Washington are quoted as saying they do not believe the new earl can legally assume his title in England without renouncing his United States citizenship. They point also to tho existiug immigration law requiring an alien applying for citizenship to renounce all hereditary rights. This law, however, was enacted in 1906, after Mr. Wallop had become an American citizen. The new earl said he would visit his native England, be invested with the title, and return to his cattle ranch near Sheridan, Wyoming. The Earl of Portsmouth will have a background of United States legislative experience should he sit in the House of Lords, for he served in the Wyoming House of Representatives from 1909 to 1911.

The new earl, although he still retains his British accent, look's the part of a Western randier—tall, lean, grey and bronzed. He does not look his 63 years. He has been dairyman and rancher for more than forty years. During the autumn of 1893 he left his home in England to proceed to Canada on a hunting expedition. From there he wandered to Wyoming to visit a colony of Englishmen near Sheridan. He liked it and bought a small ranch. Later he bought the 3000-acre ranch at Little Goose Creek, Big Horn, Sheridan County, where he has since raised thoroughbred cattle. In 1897 he married Miss Marguerite Walker, daughter of the late S. J. Walker, of Chicago, and they had two children, Gerard Vernon Wallop, now living in England, who, by his father's succession to the earldom, gains the title of Lord Lymington. and Oliver H. Wallop, jun., who is living on his father's ranch. Gerard was an officer in the British Army during the World War.