Lord Richard Cecil

Lord Richard Valentine Gascoyne-Cecil (26 January 1948 – 20 April 1978) was a British soldier, Conservative politician and freelance journalist who was killed in Rhodesia while covering that country's Bush War. The second son of the 6th Marquess of Salisbury, Lord Richard was in Rhodesia with a freelance film-maker, Nick Downie, recording material for a television documentary about the war. Carrying a rifle and wearing a Rhodesian Army uniform, he was shot dead at close range by a member of the Zimbabwe African National Liberation Army. The Rhodesian government reported that Lord Richard had been "killed in action"; his body was returned to England for burial.

The Cecil family had long-standing connections with Rhodesia. The death of Lord Richard was one of a number of events during 1978 that brought Rhodesia's Unilateral Declaration of Independence (UDI) to an abrupt end; it was the identity of the deceased, and the nature of his loss, that affected UDI's supporters.

Lord Richard was the son of Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 6th Marquess of Salisbury. His mother was Marjorie (Mollie) Olein Wyndham-Quin, granddaughter of the Earl of Dunraven and Mount-Earl, who had married his father in 1945.

The Cecil family had well established links with Rhodesia, the capital city of which was named Salisbury after the third Marquess (it was renamed Harare in 1982). The family had extensive land holdings in the country and the fifth Marquess (Lord Richard's grandfather) was a leading British supporter of the white minority UDI government that ran Rhodesia from 1965 to 1979.

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