Ernest William Beckett, 2nd Baron Grimthorpe (born Ernest William Beckett-Denison; 25 November 1856 – 9 May 1917), was a British banker and Conservative politician who sat in the House of Commons from 1885 until 1905 when he inherited the Grimthorpe peerage. Early life Beckett was the eldest son of William Beckett, younger son of Sir Edmund Beckett, 4th Baronet, and Hon. Helen Duncombe, daughter of William Duncombe, 2nd Baron Feversham. He was the nephew of Edmund Beckett, 1st Baron Grimthorpe, and great nephew of Sir John Beckett, 2nd Baronet. Beckett was educated at Eton College and Trinity College, Cambridge, though he failed to complete his first year at university and dropped out to travel abroad. He later became a partner in the banking firm of Beckett & Co, of Leeds, owned by his father. Career He was a major in the Yorkshire Hussars Yeomanry Cavalry, was commissioned as an Assistant Adjutant general in the Imperial Yeomanry on 28 February 1900, during the Second Boer War, and returned to the Yorkshire Hussars when he resigned from active duty in July 1902. In 1885, Beckett was elected Member of Parliament for Whitby, a seat he held until 1905, though he is rarely mentioned in Hansard. In 1886, he resumed the name Beckett in place of Denison. In 1905, he succeeded his uncle Lord Grimthorpe as 2nd Baron according to a special remainder in the letters patent, as well as in the family baronetcy. However, he squandered much of his inherited family wealth and in 1905 he was also sacked as a senior partner in the family bank by his two brothers because of his expensive tastes and personal debts. He had once commissioned a bronze bust of his then fiancée Eve Fairfax from the famous sculptor Auguste Rodin. In a 2010 biographical study, Michael Holroyd described Beckett as 'a man of swiftly changing enthusiasms ... a dilettante, philanderer, gambler and opportunist. He changed his career, his interests and his mistresses quite regularly.' Italy In 1904, Beckett bought a ruined farmhouse outside Ravello, on the Amalfi Coast in southern Italy. He transformed it into a fortified palace with towers, battlements and a mixture of Arabic, Venetian and Gothic details, and called it Villa Cimbrone. Between the house and the cliff edge, he built a garden, high above the Gulf of Salerno. The garden is an eccentric mixture of formal, English rose beds, Moorish