of three months, with his maternal grandmother in Ireland. His father was killed in action at Tripoli in 1942, while attached to the then-new SAS, at which point Gowrie became his paternal grandfather's heir apparent; his grandparents played an active role in his upbringing thereafter. On his mother's return to Ireland in early 1942 while pregnant with his brother, they lived for a period in what she described as a dreary house in Greystones, County Wicklow. Hore-Ruthven was educated at Eton, where he contributed poetry, fiction and prose to school magazine Parade; he was later elected to the elite Eton Society, more commonly known as Pop. When his grandfather, who had been the Governor-General of Australia, was created Earl of Gowrie in January 1945, reviving a title suppressed in 1600, Grey became known by the courtesy title Viscount Ruthven of Canberra. His family moved for a time to a tower at Windsor Castle, where the 1st Earl was deputy constable, and then returned to Ireland, living in Dublin and Kilcullen, County Kildare. His mother remarried in 1952, to her partner Major Derek Cooper, and the family moved to a Regency lodge on a 4,000-acre country estate at Dunlewey, a village at the edge of the Poisoned Glen in Gweedore, County Donegal. Titles and university The young Lord Ruthven of Canberra succeeded to the Earldom of Gowrie, named for the old Scottish area of Gowrie around Perth, on the death of his grandfather on 2 May 1955; at the same time he succeeded as the 2nd Viscount Ruthven of Canberra, and as the 2nd Baron Gowrie of Canberra and of Dirleton (in East Lothian). On 16 April 1956, he further succeeded his great-uncle (his grandfather's elder brother), the 2nd Baron Ruthven of Gowrie and 10th Lord Ruthven of Freeland, as the 3rd Baron Ruthven of Gowrie. The Scottish lordship of Ruthven of Freeland did not descend to him, passing instead through the female line. He matriculated his coat of arms with the Lord Lyon King of Arms in 1959. After Eton, Gowrie attended Balliol College, Oxford, and while there he succeeded Paul Foot as editor of The Isis Magazine. In 1962 he was given charge of the arts budget for the junior common room of his college, and he purchased an early work by David Hockney, who was still in art college. Entitled The Most Beautiful Boy in the World, it