Lord Snowdon gives up post

Press, 20 February 1987, Page 14

Lord Snowdon gives up post

NZPA AP London The Earl of Snowdon, former husband of Princess Margaret, has resigned from his honorary post as adviser to the Design Council after a row over a magazine article he wrote. Lord Snowdon, in an article in the fashion magazine, “Vogue,” said the council’s new chairman, Simon Hornby, had decried the council’s showroom -in London’s Haymarket as "a secondrate souvenir shop" and its magazine design as unreadable.

Hornby denounced the article — headlined “The

Design Council: Dead as a Dodo?” — as a travesty of what he had told Lord Snowdon in an interview. Lord Snowdon, aged 56, a professional photographer and journalist who had been adviser to the council for 25 years, said he resigned from the post “with sadness” after the council’s director, Keith Grant, told him his services were “considered inappropriate to continue.”

The council is funded partly by Government grant and partly by its own earned revenues.

It aims to improve the design of British products by advising companies on the latest engineering and industrial design and through the annual Design Council Awards. Awardwinning products • carry the council’s triangular labels.

Antony ArmstrongJones was made Earl of Snowdon when he married Princess Margaret in 1960. The couple, who have a son born in 1961 and a daughter born in 1964, were divorced in 1978. Lord Snowdon has remarried, but the Princess has remained on her own.