Politician. Wagon Philipps, as the oldest of four sons, succeeded to his father's peerage as 2nd Baron Milford in 1962, becoming the only Communist to sit in Great Britain's House of Lords, serving for thirty years. He joined the Communist Party of Great Britain in 1937. Born into wealthy British nobility, he attended Eton and Oxford University for two years before sent by his father to work with Forestry Commission in India. After being diagnosed with Malaria, he was sent back to England. At that point, he first followed in his father's insurance business and then the shipping business until he turned left with his politics after the 1926 General Strike, dropping out of the family's business by 1930. After studying with the artists in the Bloomsbury circle, he became a painter, having his first solo showing in 1931 with little success. During the Spanish Civil War, he went to Spain for 18 months as an ambulance driver, was injured on May 7, 1936 and sent back to England. With his knowledge of the shipping business, he helped at least 2,000 refugees escape to Mexico in March of 1939. During World War II, he volunteered for the merchant Navy but was claimed "unfit," thus helped with England's agricultural needs. He became the editor of the Communist Party's "Country Standard" and one of the party's agricultural experts. More than once, his father had become disillusioned with his political reasonings, lack of work ethic, and marriages, thus discontinued his allowance and threatened to disinherit him. He married three times: He married Rosamond Lehmann, a novelist, and the couple had a son and a daughter, then divorced in 1944 after being separated for three years. The same year, he married Cristin Philipps, Countess of Huntingdon, who died in 1953. During this marriage, the couple ran a farm. The next year, he married Russian-born, Tamara Kravetz Rust, who was the widow of William Rust, editor of the Communist newspaper, the "Daily Worker." His daughter died in 1958 of polio while visiting Bali in Indonesia. In 1950, he was a Communist Party candidate for the House of Commons but received only 473 votes. He returned to painting in the 1980s having other solo shows with little success. Posthumously, his widow organized a memorial exhibition of his paintings in London in 1995. He was the great-nephew of John Hanning Speke, the English explorer of Africa.