Edward Charles Pelham-Clinton, 10th Duke of Newcastle-under-Lyne (18 August 1920 – 25 December 1988), was an English lepidopterist and military officer as well as Duke of Newcastle for less than two months at the end of his life, inheriting the titles from a third cousin. He was thus briefly a member of the House of Lords.

Education and career

Pelham-Clinton was the son of Guy Edward Pelham-Clinton, an army officer and a grandson of Lord Charles Clinton, who was a younger son of Henry Pelham-Clinton, 4th Duke of Newcastle. He was educated at Eton,^[1] and Trinity College, Oxford, and during the Second World War served as an officer in the Royal Artillery, rising to the rank of captain^[2] and being mentioned in dispatches. His younger brother, Alastair Pelham-Clinton, was a Royal Air Force Flying Officer and died in 1943 aged twenty.

Pelham-Clinton was interested in lepidopterology from a young age and specialized in entomology at Cambridge.^[3] An expert in the subject, from 1960 to 1980 he was Deputy Keeper of the Royal Scottish Museum, in Edinburgh.^[1] He acted as an associate editor of six volumes of the series The Moths and Butterflies of Great Britain and Ireland, in which he wrote articles about Tineidae, Choreutidae, and Glyphipterigidae, and was working on Elachistidae at the time of his death.^[3] A building in Dinton Pastures Country Park was named after him by the British Entomological and Natural History Society, of which he had been a member.^[4]

Succession to peerages

Pelham-Clinton succeeded a third cousin in the earldom and dukedom in November 1988.^[1] He died one month and 21 days later, aged 68, unmarried. As all other heirs male from the second duke's line had died, the dukedom became extinct, but the peerage of Earl of Lincoln was inherited by a distant kinsman in Australia. He left an estate valued for probate at £2,222,203, equivalent to £6,300,000 in 2021, and his stated usual abode was Furzeleigh House, Axminster.^[5]

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