Arthur Charles Wellesley, 5th Duke of Wellington

Arthur Charles Wellesley, the son of Charles Wellesley and his wife, Kathleen Bulkeley Williams on 9th June 1876. His father inherited the ducal title and vast Wellington estates upon his elder brother's death in 1900, and became the 4th Duke of Wellington.

Wellesley was educated at Eton College (1890-1895) before attending Trinity College. After leaving Cambridge University he was commissioned as a lieutenant in the Lincolnshire Regiment. After the outbreak of the Second Boer War in 1899, he joined the regular army as a second lieutenant in the Grenadier Guards and was part of a detachment sent to South Africa.

Wellesley resigned his commission in 1903. He returned to active service as a second lieutenant in 1915, during the First World War. Wellesley resigned from the British Army in 1919.

On the death of his father in 1934 he became the 5th Duke of Wellington. He held extreme right-wing opinions and was sympathetic to the Nazi Party and in 1935 he joined the Anglo-German Fellowship. He also served as President of the Nordic League, which was a leading anti-semitic organisation.

In May 1939 Archibald Ramsay founded a secret society called the Right Club. This was an attempt to unify all the different right-wing groups in Britain. Or in the leader's words of "co-ordinating the work of all the patriotic societies". In his autobiography, The Nameless War, Ramsay argued: "The main object of the Right Club was to oppose and expose the activities of Organized Jewry, in the light of the evidence which came into my possession in 1938. Our first objective was to clear the Conservative Party of Jewish influence, and the character of our membership and meetings were strictly in keeping with this objective."

Members of the Right Club included the Duke of Wellington, William Joyce, Anna Wolkoff, Joan Miller, A. K. Chesterton, Francis Yeats-Brown, Lord Redesdale, 5th Duke of Wellington, Duke of Westminster, E. H. Cole, John Stourton, Thomas Hunter, Aubrey Lees, Ernest Bennett, Charles Kerr, Samuel Chapman, John MacKie, James Edmondson, Mavis Tate, Marquess of Graham, Margaret Bothamley, Randolph Stewart, 12th Earl of Galloway and Cecil Serocold Skeels.

Arthur Charles Wellesley, 5th Duke of Wellington, died on 11th December, 1941.