Arnold Keppel, 8th Earl of Albemarle (1858–1942)

Amateur sculptor, soldier and Conservative politician, Arnold Allan Cecil Keppel was educated at Eton College and succeeded to the title of 8th Earl of Albemarle in 1894. In 1900 he fought in the Second Boer War, holding the rank of lieutenant-colonel of the City of London Imperial Volunteers; he was mentioned in despatches, was awarded the Queen’s South Africa Medal with four clasps, and appointed Companion of the Order of the Bath for his services in the war. In 1904 he was a member of the executive committee responsible for the commissioning of the Norwich Boer War memorial. He served as aide-de-camp to Edward VII and George V and, between 1922 and 1924, in the Conservative administrations of Andrew Bonar Law and Stanley Baldwin was a lord-in-waiting (government whip in the House of Lords). The family home was at Quidenham Hall, Norfolk. In 1980, Diana Keppel, widow of the 9th Earl of Albemarle (1882–1979), presented one of her father-in-law’s sculptures to Suffolk Coastal District Council to be erected as a memorial to her recently deceased husband. The work, which the 8th Earl had modelled in c.1901 and paid to have cast in bronze by A.B. Burton of Thames Ditton, was a sculptural representation of a scene from Rudyard Kipling’s 1889 story, ‘The Drums of the Fore and Aft’, in which two drummer boys turn the tide of a battle by marching out in front of their retreating regiment and playing ‘The British Grenadiers’ on drum and fife. The 8th Earl’s The Drums of the Fore and Aft was erected outside the council offices in Woodbridge, Suffolk, in 1988.

Bibliography: W. Bennett, Absent-minded Beggars; Yeomanry and Volunteers in the Boer War, Barnsley, 1999; R. Cocke, Public Sculpture of Norfolk and Suffolk, Liverpool, 2013, pp. xiv, 6, 254–55; Kelly’s Directory of Norfolk, 1912, pp. 416–417; Who Was Who (online edn, 2007); Wikipedia: ‘Arnold Keppel, 8th Earl of Albemarle’.

Richard Cocke, 2013; revised, Terry Cavanagh, April 2025