Sir Simon Towneley died on 11 November, aged 100. He was the first Catholic to be Lord Lieutenant of Lancashire, in which office he served for 20 years from 1976 to 1996; he was involved in many local causes, and also served as High Sheriff and a Justice of the Peace. Towneley’s background combined an unusually wide range of Catholic, landed, aristocratic, public-service, military, banking, musical, and artistic strands, which were continued and manifested in his own life and interests. He was appointed KCVO in 1994, and was also a Knight of St Gregory the Great.
The Towneleys were loyal and determined Catholics, deemed by Lord Burghley in the reign of Elizabeth I to be recusants of unusual perversity and recalcitrance; they suffered later for the Royalist and Jacobite causes. Colonel Francis Towneley was executed for his part in the ’45 and the Bonnie Prince’s ill-fated March to Derby. After exposition on a spike on London Bridge, his head was kept in a hatbox at Drummonds Bank until finally interred at Burnley in the 1940s. Towneley’s great-grandmother Caroline was the daughter of Colonel Charles Towneley of Towneley Hall, Burnley; she married Montagu Bertie, 7th Earl of Abingdon, of the Oxford-convert Bertie dynasty.
In the late eighteenth century the loss of three male heirs in three years resulted in the division of the Towneley estates amongst seven co-heiresses. Towneley Hall was later sold to the Burnley Corporation and is now a museum and art gallery; the family settled at Dyneley, formerly the agent’s house, instead. The Worsthorne portion of the estate came to Caroline’s daughter, Lady Alice Bertie, who after the death of her first husband married Colonel Robert Reyntiens, ADC to King Leopold of the Belgians.
Priscilla, their only child, married Colonel Alexander Koch de Gooreynd (of another Anglo-Belgian family), who took the name Worsthorne – a village on the estate – when he unsuccessfully stood for parliament. She later married the 1st Lord Norman, an influential Governor of the Bank of England. It was thus through the female line that Simon inherited the Worsthorne portion of the Lancashire property, where he lived for the rest of his life.
Simon Peter Edmund Cosmo William Towneley Worsthorne was born in Belgrave Square, London, in 1921. He and his younger brother Peregrine Worsthorne, the journalist and sometime editor of the Sunday Telegraph, were brought up in their stepfather’s house in Campden Hill, London. They saw almost nothing of their father; their mother, too, had other priorities. She was an active member of the London County Council and also became heavily involved with mental-health and hospital charities. Christmases were spent time at Cumberland Lodge in Windsor Great Park with Towneley’s great-aunt Mary (Bertie), wife of Viscount Fitzalan (the younger brother of the 15th Duke of Norfolk), who was Deputy Earl Marshal of England, and last – and only Catholic – Lord Lieutenant of Ireland.
Towneley was educated at Stowe and Worcester College, Oxford, where he returned after war service as a Second Lieutenant in the King’s Royal Rifle Corps to write a doctoral thesis on music. His research flourished into his seminal book on seventeenth-century Venetian opera, published in 1954. It remains the standard work on the subject, and played a key role in encouraging the revival of Venetian opera in the late-twentieth-century repertory.
Having been born Koch de Gooreynd, then become Worsthorne, then Towneley Worsthorne, he simplified his name to Towneley when he settled at Dyneley and married his second cousin Mary Fitzherbert. Lady Towneley, who died of cancer in 2001, aged 65, was a keen rider and was instrumental in opening many bridleways. The “Mary Towneley Loop”, which forms part of Pennine Bridleway National Trail, is named in her honour. They had seven children: among their 6 daughters are the writer Katharine Grant and Cosima Towneley, the current Mayor of Burnley; their son, Peregrine, succeeds to his father’s estate.
At Dyneley Towneley employed the Yorkshire church architect George Pace to extend the Victorian house in a striking style that channelled Basil Spence, with a beautiful drawing room and little oratory with stained glass by his cousin Patrick Reyntiens – who also designed, among other projects, the superb scheme for Liverpool Metropolitan Cathedral. A dedicated gardener, Towneley was also responsible for laying out a new garden, and planted many trees on the estate. He was also a keen bibliophile and a member of the Roxburghe Club, to which he presented a scholarly facsimile of the Towneley Lectionary: a sumptuous illuminated Renaissance liturgical book from the Sistine Chapel, which had belonged to his ancestor Peregrine Towneley and is now in New York Public Library.
Towneley remained remarkably active, both physically and mentally, to the end of his life; he celebrated his hundredth birthday in December 2021 surrounded by all his children and many of his grandchildren and great-grandchildren. He died peacefully with his family around him at Dyneley, as they had gathered for the annual November requiem mass for their Towneley ancestors. It was celebrated in the family chapel the next morning, by when its intention included Towneley himself.
Sir Simon Towneley, 1921-2022
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