Leo Blair (barrister)

Leo Charles Lynton Blair (born Charles Leonard Augustus Parsons; 4 August 1923 – 16 November 2012) was a British barrister and law lecturer at Durham University. He was the author of the book The Commonwealth Public Service. He was the father of Tony Blair, the former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, and of Sir William Blair, a High Court judge.

Born as Charles Leonard Augustus Parsons in Filey, Yorkshire, England, he was the illegitimate son of two middle class travelling entertainers. His father Charles Parsons (16 July 1887 – 19 January 1970) had the stage name Jimmy Lynton while his mother Mary Augusta Ridgway Bridson (1886–1969) was known as Celia Ridgway and was a daughter of Augustus William Bridson (1849–1933) and Maria Emily Montford (1864–1944). The couple met on tour in England. Their hectic lifestyles prompted them to give up baby Leo, who was fostered out to (and later adopted by) a working class couple, a Glasgow shipyard worker named James Blair and his wife Mary, taking their surname. On 2 June 1927 his biological parents married and tried to reclaim him, but Mary Blair refused to return him and later prevented him from contacting his biological parents. (Leo later had a reunion with his half-sister, Pauline Harding, née Tordiffe.)

Blair grew up in a tenement in Golspie Street, Govan, Glasgow, and attended Govan High School. When he left school he worked as a copy boy on the Communist Party newspaper The Daily Worker and was Secretary of the Scottish Young Communist League 1938-41. He studied law at the University of Edinburgh, becoming a barrister and later, a university law lecturer.

...
Wikipedia