Lord Thurlow - Telegraph At the same time the twins remained devout Christians. Together with their elder brother Harry, they had been confirmed in the chapel of Farnham Castle by their cousin Theodore Woods, the last Bishop of Winchester to reside at the castle. Strong idealists, they quickly came to the conclusion that Marxism and Christianity were incompatible, and that Stalin's Soviet Union was less spotless than they had at first supposed. They resigned from the Party. It says much for Francis Cumming-Bruce's transparently honest character and integrity that this undergraduate episode had no serious effect on his career at a time when former Cambridge communists were highly suspect in Whitehall. It did, though, prevent his selection as Principal Private Secretary to the Prime Minister, an appointment for which he was considered in 1955. On leaving Cambridge - where he and Roualeyn had studied Economic Analysis under JM Keynes - Francis Cumming-Bruce passed the Civil Service examination and joined the Dominions Office, where he was assistant private secretary to the Secretary of State, Sir Thomas Inskip (later Viscount Caldecote), in 1939. When Roualeyn, by then at the Bar, took Francis's place at the Dominions Office for a day, Inskip did not notice the difference. Francis Cumming-Bruce was then for five years, until 1944, on the staff of the British High Commissioner in New Zealand, before moving to Ottawa. Returning to Europe in 1946, he attended the Commonwealth Prime Ministers" meeting in London, the Paris Peace Conference and the UN General Assembly, and also became Principal Private Secretary to the Secretary of State. After a year as an Assistant Secretary in the Commonwealth Relations Office, Cumming-Bruce went on to overseas postings in Delhi and Accra, becoming Deputy High Commissioner in Ghana in 1957. The next year he was appointed Deputy High Commissioner in Ottawa, and in 1959 High Commissioner in New Zealand, a country for which he formed a deep affection. Cumming-Bruce's wide experience of the British Commonwealth, his easy, unassuming manner and his complete lack of self-importance, were combined with an eager interest in the arts, culture and customs of all the countries in which he served. He invariably gave the impression of being entirely genuine, which he was: vanity, conceit and pettiness were foreign to his nature. In 1963 he was moved from New Zealand to be High Commissioner in Nigeria. He had been there little more than two years when there was a coup d"état, which involved the murder of the Federal Prime Minister, Sir Abubakar Balewa, known as "The Golden Voice of Africa." President Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana had been jealous of Balewa, and Ghanaian involvement in the coup was suspected. The Ibos appeared also to have had a hand in the affair, and it was one of their generals, Ironse, who succeeded Balewa as prime minister. It was a sorry time for Nigeria, leading to civil war, and it was a difficult time for Cumming-Bruce. He was replaced in Lagos in 1967 and, after a spell in London, was given the pleasant, largely ceremonial, post of Governor and Commander-in-Chief of the Bahamas, where he remained for three years. He succeeded to the peerage on the death of his elder brother Harry, Major-General Lord Thurlow, in 1971. On retiring from the Bahamas in 1972, the Thurlows settled in the Old Vicarage at Mapledurham, on the Thames near Reading. As a widower, Francis Thurlow divided his time between a flat in London and a cottage in North Devon. He took his duty as a peer seriously and well into his eighties played a full part, as a Cross-Bencher, in the deliberations of the House of Lords, his special interests being foreign affairs and mental health. He did not seek to remain a member of the Lords when the majority of hereditary peers were deprived of their seats in 1999, but he remained vigorous, active and alert far into his nineties. He was for some time chairman of the Institute for Comparative Studies of History, Philosophy and the Sciences. In later life he was a practitioner of the Chinese spiritual discipline Falun Dafa (or Falun Gong). He was appointed CMG in 1957 and KCMG in 1961. He married, in 1949, Yvonne Wilson, who died in 1990. They had two sons, the elder of whom survives him, and two daughters. The surviving son, Roualeyn Hovell-Thurlow-Cumming-Bruce, who was born in 1952, succeeds to the peerage. The 8th Lord Thurlow, born March 9 1912, died March 24 2013