Melville Portal

Melville Portal JP, DL (31 July 1819 – 24 January 1904) was a British Conservative Party politician from Hampshire.

Portal was educated at Christ Church, Oxford, graduating B.A. in 1842, and M.A. in 1844. In 1841 he was treasurer and in 1842 President of the Oxford Union.

He was elected as a Member of Parliament (MP) for North Hampshire at a by-election in April 1849, following the resignation of the Conservative MP Sir William Heathcote. He was re-elected unopposed in 1852 at a sparsely attended hustings in Winchester, and retired from the House of Commons at the 1857 general election.

Portal was appointed in December 1852 as a Deputy Lieutenant of Hampshire, and by 1863 he was also a Justice of the Peace (JP) for the county. He was nominated as High Sheriff of Hampshire in 1861 and in 1862, and was appointed to the office in 1863, when his address was given as Laverstoke House, Mitcheldever Station.

According to John Bateman's The Great Landowners of Great Britain and Ireland, 1883, Melville Portal of Laverstoke, Overton, Hampshire, educated at Harrow and Christ Church, Oxford, and a member of the Carlton Club, had 10,966 acres in Hampshire worth 10,922 per annum.

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