Geoffrey Duke Coleridge, 3rd Baron Coleridge was responsible for making the archive of his family member the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge available to researchers for the first time.
Background
The only son of Bernard Coleridge Member of Parliament, and grandson of John Coleridge, a Lord Chief Justice of England, Coleridge was educated at Eton College in Berkshire, England. As a young man he often travelled the law circuits with his father, and went with him to the United States, where he later claimed to have danced down Broadway with Ellen Terry.
Education
He graduated from Trinity College, Oxford in 1900 with a Bachelor.
Career
Coleridge served as a Lieutenant in the 3rd Battalion, the Devonshire Regiment until resigning his commission in 1901. He served in World War I in the 4th Battalion of the Devonshire Regiment, and was promoted Acting Captain in April 1917. Coleridge left the Army in 1919.
He succeeded to the title of 3rd Baron Coleridge of Ottery Saint Mary on 24 September 1927 after the death of his father.
The Coleridges mistakenly thought Coburn was interested in the house and its furniture. She later wrote,
Realising that her intentions were serious, he gave her unlimited access to the Coleridge family archive, which he allowed her to have photographed and the copies placed in the British Museum, and granted her permission to edit and publish the Notebooks.
In 1949 Coburn was instrumental in negotiating the sale of this Chanter"s House archive to the British Museum for £10,200, with a donation from the Pilgrim Trust. The collection was eventually deposited with the British Museum in May 1951.
Coleridge held the office of Justice of the Peace for Devon from 1929 to 1952.
They had three sons, the oldest, Richard Duke Coleridge succeeding to the barony on his father"s death. Coleridge died of a heart attack at the family home, The Chanter"s House in Ottery Street Mary in 1955, aged 77.