 Having been appointed a Knight Commander of the Order of the Bath in 1975, he was created a life peer as Baron Henderson of Brompton, of Brompton in the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea and of Brough in the County of Cumbria on 1 February 1984, a nod to the holiday cottage in Brough, Cumbria he owned for more than four decades.Henderson was a crusader for civil rights in the House of Lords.He fought for legal abortion and defended embryology research and in vitro fertilisation