Ian Montagu Fraser was an regular army officer in the Indian army, who lost a leg as a prisoner of war in Italy, and after a business career, became a Conservative politician.
He was born on 14 October 1916, the son of Colonel Herbert Cecil Fraser DSO OBE TD and his wife Sybil Mary Slatter. He was educated at Shrewsbury and Christ Church Oxford where he took first class honours in Moderations 1937 and in Literae Humaniores 1939. He joined the Indian Army as an officer in the Frontier Force Rifles and after service on the north-west frontier, took part in operations in Iraq, Syrian and the Western Desert. Taken prisoner, he had the ill fortune to lose a leg when his prisoner of war camp was bombed in Italy. He was twice mentioned in despatches and awarded the MC in 1945. In the same year he married Mary Stanley. They had a son and a daughter.
Fraser left the army in 1948, although he remained with the officer reserve as a member of the Rifle Brigade, and he became an executive with Guthrie & Co Ltd. In 1956 he became the General Secretary of the John Lewis Partnership, but stood down on becoming an MP. He remained a consultant with them until 1964.
After contesting Tottenham unsuccessfully for the Conservative Party in the 1955 general election, he sought a safer seat and was narrowly beaten by Margaret Thatcher in the selection for Finchley. He was adopted for Plymouth Sutton, which he won after an energetic campaign in October 1959. His maiden speech was made in the debate on the Radcliffe Report and he defended the policies pursued by the Conservative Government in 1957, arguing that there was nothing in the report that suggested there was any better alternative. He was therefore putting himself in the camp of those who continued to support the line taken by Peter Thorneycroft and no doubt subscribed to the arguments used by Seldon and Thorneycroft when they wrote a rebuttal, Not Unanimous. Although he did not drive himself during his election campaigning, he was a skilful motorist and a strong supporter of the Government’s pledge, honoured in 1960, to equip war pensioners with a suitably modified car. He vigorously defended the decision to give them priority. Another speech in February 1961 was made in defence of Enoch Powell’s National Health Service bill, which raised the charges on dentures and spectacles, but he was more critical of the failure of the NHS to update their models of artificial limbs. Not that he was too critical of the leg that he had been given in 1946. It had enabled him to climb mountains in Baluchistan, endured the heat of the desert, had carried him not only on ceremonial duties, but also on a horse from which he had been thrown and it had enabled him to drive hundreds of thousands of miles. About the only thing he could not do, as he told the Commons amidst loud laughter, was to dance a highland fling.
He was made PPS to the Secretary of State for the Colonies in 1962 and the became an Assistant Government Whip 1962-4. In 1964 he managed to retain his seat by a small margin. Tragically he lost his wife Mary in 1964. He remained in the whips’ office when the party went into opposition, but in March 1966 went down to defeat at the hands of a locally born Labour candidate, Dr David Owen, later Foreign Secretary in the Callaghan Government.
Fraser never returned to the House, although he spent a year with the Conservative Research Department. In 1967 he became Executive Director of the GUS Export Corporation, remaining with them until 1970. He had remarried In 1967 and his wife, Angela Meston, bore him two sons.
In 1971 he became deputy Secretary to the Buttle Trust and from 1978 until 1986 served as its Secretary.
Fraser was a highly intelligent man with a good sense of humour and a very pleasant manner. He was well liked in the constituency and the House. He was a keen sailor and even after he left Plymouth retained his connections with the Royal Western Yacht Club. He was also a keen fly fisherman.
He died on 8 November 1987.