Lord Avebury: Liberal Democrat peer who pursued human-rights causes and won a famous 1962 by-election

He was before his time when as a member of the Select Committee on Members' Interests he proposed a minority report calling for tougher rules on the declaration of interests

The Liberal by-election victory at Orpington in 1962 was a cataclysmic political event. It was not so much that the Liberals won – it was the size of the Liberal majority.

Eric Lubbock, later Lord Avebury, gained 22,846 votes, 52.9 per cent of the poll, against the 14,991 votes won by Peter Goldman for the Conservatives and a lost deposit for Labour with 5,350 votes. The previous incumbent, Colonel Sir Donald Sumner KC, whose resignation on his appointment as a county court judge had precipitated the by-election in the first place, had in 1959 gained 56.6 per cent of the vote, giving a Conservative majority of 14,760. Moreover, Goldman was a heavyweight candidate.

Lubbock's victory changed the political zeitgeist, albeit that it was not the Liberals but rather Labour who were the beneficiaries, through a series of by-election victories by Bill Rodgers in Stockton, Dick Taverne in Lincoln and Jeremy Bray in Middlesbrough. The coup de grâce was the Conservative lost deposit in West Lothian in June 1962, which led Harold Macmillan to the “Night of the Long Knives”, described as the occasion on which the Prime Minister sacked half his Cabinet – “the wrong half”.

Eric Reginald Lubbock was born in 1928, the son of the Hon Maurice Fox Pitt Lubbock, a director of Lloyds Bank. His paternal grandfather, Sir John Lubbock, had been the Liberal Member of Parliament for Maidstone in Kent from 1870 to 1880; his maternal grandfather (later the fifth Baron Stanley of Alderley) was also a Liberal MP, representing Eddisbury in Cheshire between 1906 and 1910.

At the beginning of the Second World War, the Lubbocks thought that they would be especially targeted by German invaders (probably correctly) and packed Eric off to Upper Canada College in Toronto. He always said that his Canadian education had reinforced his natural irreverence – which showed up in his time at Harrow.

However tumultuous his three years there, he gained entry to his family college, Balliol, to read engineering. One of his achievements at Oxford was a boxing Blue. “Pugnacious” would be a suitable adjective to apply to Lubbock, since he was never happier than when picking a fight, sometimes to his disadvantage.

On leaving Oxford, he did his National Service as a guardsman in the Welsh Guards, being promoted as a second lieutenant, and then joined Rolls-Royce as a graduate apprentice in 1951. He was posted to the firm's export sales department and then became a technical assistant to the foundry manager. I shall never forget, as his parliamentary colleague on the first Science and Technology Select Committee under the chairmanship of the electrical engineer Arthur Palmer, Lubbock flaunting his Rolls-Royce experience in a rather cheeky way when our witness was Sir Denning Pearson, then the distinguished chairman of the company.

In his eight years in the House of Commons, Lubbock was an extremely useful Member. And he certainly added to the work of the place: I assert that, apart from the most senior members of the Government, in the four years between 1962 and 1966 (when he defended his seat for the second time against Norris McWhirter, beating him by 1,622 votes) he filled more column inches of Hansard than any other Member of Parliament. And in the four years before 1970, when he lost to Ivor Stanbrook QC by 1,322 votes, he was even lengthier in his contributions.

But there was a redeeming feature. Lubbock was never trivial and always detailed.

Lubbock's first election in Orpington had been in 1961, when he gained a seat on the urban district council. This was not only the springboard for his spectacular victory in an area that a decade before had been represented in Parliament by the caricature Tory Sir Waldron Smithers, a man who insisted on singing the National Anthem at the beginning and end of every political meeting that he addressed, but also gave him a day-to-day understanding of local issues.

His maiden speech on 27 March 1962 ignored the convention of first-time speakers not to address anything too controversial – bringing up, instead, the poor state of nurses' pay, a subject he felt very passionately about.

Lubbock told Parliament how a state-enrolled nurse at the top of the scale received £11 13s 3d for a basic week, two pay slips having been shown to him by a constituent, a nurse of 25 years' service in the Orpington Hospital. He launched into detail, of which I give the briefest example since it encapsulates the style of Lubbock's parliamentary contributions:

“The nurse indeed has five weeks' holiday. But if my arithmetic is correct he or she is working 47 weeks at 44 hours a week. Multiply these and the total is 2,068 hours. The ward orderly works 50 weeks of 42 hours but he gets five bank holidays each of eight hours so that his total comes to 2,060 hours. In fact, there is hardly any difference in spite of the fact that on the face of it nurses get longer holidays.”

So it was on other topics. On 2 December 1963 Lubbock made an extensively briefed and detailed contribution to the Air Corporations Bill. When he was much criticised for the length at which he droned on he said to me with a chuckle: “What unites you and me is that neither of us is afraid to be a bore in a good cause!”

In 1967 Lubbock stood against his parliamentary colleagues Jeremy Thorpe and Emlyn Hooson in a leadership contest to succeed Jo Grimond. This was to be the last such contest in which only Members of Parliament had votes. Lubbock, who had become Liberal chief whip in 1963, was backed by Richard Wainwright and Michael Winstanley. Hooson also had two supporters, but Thorpe won with five.

Lubbock was the only Liberal on the Speaker's Conference on Electoral Reform from 1963 to 1965. He tried to reduce the voting age to 18 and also tried to introduce the single transferable votes system. He was before his time when as a member of the Select Committee on Members' Interests he proposed a minority report calling for tougher rules on the declaration of interests.

In 1971, a year after Lubbock lost his seat, his cousin the third Baron Avebury died, leaving a daughter but no sons. Lubbock was faced with either becoming the fourth baron or keeping his options open by remaining a member of the House of Commons. After much agonising he accepted the option of a peerage rather than risk not being re-elected to the Commons.

For a third of a century after he lost his Commons seat, Avebury continued to play a prominent part in public life. In 1973 he stood as a candidate for the Greater London Council in Deptford when he was the active president of the London Liberal Party. Four years later, he chose to stand in Southall, where his object was not so much to win as to recruit ethnic minority activists as long-term members of the Liberal Party. He succeeded.

At the request of his leader, Thorpe, Avebury led the Liberal general election campaign in February 1974. He was Liberal spokesman on immigration and race relations until 1982. He was active in the Parliamentary Civil Rights Group of which he had been secretary in 1964 and latterly chairman.

Just after Avebury became a member of the House of Lords, Peter Hain, a high-profile Young Liberal and now Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, faced a private prosecution and four charges of criminal conspiracy arising from his espousing the cause of opposition to pro-apartheid cricketers and rugby players visiting Britain. It was Avebury who set up a fund that raised £5,000 towards Hain's defence. In 1973 Avebury established and endowed the Silbury fund as a charity dedicated to civil liberties and race relations. He became a Buddhist convert and patron of the Buddhist Prison Chaplaincy, whose business it was to give advice on problems that arise when dealing with the Home Office.

In 1987 he made headlines when he tried without success to leave his body to the Battersea Dogs Home. He told us that he was not mad, but believed that all biodegradable products should be used and was therefore bequeathing his body to the kitchens there. The much-quoted response from Bill Wadman-Taylor, manager of the home in south London, was: “I am sure there is a lot of nutritional value in the noble Lord and the dogs are not fussy, but we just couldn't do it.”

Avebury continued to contribute to political life – and in July 2014, he urged the House of Lords to support controversial assisted-dying legislation. He had to declare a medical interest: Avebury himself had been suffering during the last years of his life with myelofibrosis, an incurable form of blood cancer.

Eric Reginald Lubbock, engineer and politician: born Orpington, Greater London 29 September 1928; MP (Liberal) for Orpington 1962-70; succeeded 1971 as fourth Baron Avebury; elected Member, House of Lords 1999; married 1953 Kina Maria O'Kelly de Gallagh (two sons, one daughter; marriage dissolved 1983); 1985 Lindsay Stewart (one son); died London 14 February 2016.