ABSTRACT
Francis Leslie Pym was born in Penpergwm, near Abergavenny, in Wales on 13 February 1922, the son of a landowner who became Conservative MP for Monmouth in 1942. Leslie Ruthven Pym became a whip, but his period in the House of Commons was brief: he was defeated in the Labour landslide of 1945. Francis was educated at Eton and Magdalene College, Cambridge. During the Second World War, he was awarded the Military Cross, having served in north Africa and Italy as a captain in the 9th Lancers. After the war, he became general manager for Lewis’s in Birmingham and Liverpool, before taking over the running of a small business in Hereford, where he became a councillor in 1958. Having unsuccessfully contested the Labour stronghold of Rhondda West in 1959, he was elected member of Parliament for Cambridgeshire in March 1961, where he served until 1983, when his seat, as a result of boundary changes, became Cambridgeshire South-East. In 1987, Pym retired from the House of Commons, and was subsequently elevated to the peerage as Baron Pym in the County of Bedfordshire.
