Falle, Bertram, 1st Baron Portsea (1859 -1948)

Bertram Falle was born on Jersey in the Channel Islands, the son of Joshua George Falle (1820–1903), Constable of Saint Helier and later Jurat of the Royal Court of Jersey, and Mary Elizabeth (née Godfray; died 1917). He was educated at Victoria College, Jersey, and graduated in 1886 from Pembroke College, Cambridge with a Master of Laws (LL.M.) degree, having been called to the bar, Inner Temple, in 1885. In 1901 he graduated from the University of Paris with a Bachelor en droit degree Falle was a Judge of the Native Court in Egypt from 1901 to 1903. Standing as a Liberal Unionist, he was elected as one of the two members of parliament for the Portsmouth constituency in Hampshire at the January 1910 general election. He joined the Conservative Party when the two parties formally merged in 1912. During the First World War he served in the Royal Field Artillery, gaining the rank of Major Re-elected as a Conservative in 1922, he held the seat of Portsmouth until his elevation to the peerage in 1934. He was created Baronet, of Plaisance in the Island of Jersey, on 7 July 1916. In 1934 he was raised to the peerage as Baron Portsea, of Portsmouth in the County of Southampton. The title was apparently purchased for £50,000 by his wife, Mary, daughter of Russell Sturgis and widow of Leopold Richard Seymour, whom he had married in 1906. Mary died in 1942. There were no children, and the baronetcy and barony became extinct on Falle's death in 1948.