Lord Colwyn, Tory peer, dentist and lively jazz trumpeter

The 3rd Baron Colwyn was a practising dentist for 40 years, and an active member of the House of Lords for 55, but an exuberant jazz musician for even longer.
He stumbled on the joys of jazz when, as a teenage trumpeter, he heard the legendary Humphrey Lyttelton play. He teamed up with Jim Beach, a fellow pupil at Cheltenham College who later became manager of the rock group Queen, to form a band called the Autocrats.
The band survived Beach’s departure for Cambridge University and that of Colwyn, then known as Anthony Hamilton-Smith, to London to study dentistry. Indeed, Colwyn became an honorary member of the Cambridge Footlights thanks to Beach, and performed at the Edinburgh festival with John Cleese and Eric Idle, the future stars of Monty Python.
The Autocrats — later renamed the 3B Band (for 3rd Baron) and the Lord Colwyn Band — became a leading society danceband in the 1960s and 1970s, playing at weddings, debs’ dances and hunt balls across the country. They performed at Ronnie Scott’s and the Royal Albert Hall, and in 1987 at the ruby wedding party of Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip.
Colwyn was just as happy playing gigs in country pubs for the sheer fun of it, his repertoire including traditional jazz, calypso and the Jungle Book songs I Wanna Be Like You and The Bare Necessities. He enjoyed imitating Louis Armstrong until he contracted whooping cough and found he could no longer replicate Armstrong’s celebrated growl.
He was not the greatest musician, said Nigel Tully, a luminary in the world of jazz, but he was “a fun-loving, joyous bandleader, delighting audiences and fellow band members with his trumpet playing, witty announcements and general air of bonhomie which somehow communicated itself to the entire dancefloor”.
He also used his dentistry and seat in the Lords to promote the great passion of his life. According to Tully, “Anthony the Dentist” had a “very sympathetic attitude to fees” when it came to treating his fellow musicians. In the Lords he spoke regularly about the importance of live music, and chaired the all-party jazz parliamentary appreciation group.
For good measure, he was almost certainly the only hereditary peer to belong to a trade union — in his case the Musicians’ Union.
Ian Anthony Hamilton-Smith was born in Cheltenham on New Year’s Day 1942, the son of the 2nd Baron Colwyn, an officer in the Gordon Highlanders who later became a stockbroker, and his wife, Miriam (née Ferguson). His parents divorced when he was a child after his father was cashiered for gross indecency.
He was educated at Cheltenham College, and intended to study medicine at St Bartholomew’s Hospital in London until he realised that medicine would interfere with weekends of jazz and rugby. He switched to dentistry, graduating in 1966, and inherited his father’s title that same year.
By then he was married to Sonia Morgan, a member of the sports car family, with whom he had a son, Craig, who will inherit his title, and daughter, Jackie, now wife of the actor Sean Pertwee. They divorced in 1976 and the following year he married Nicky Tyers, an events organiser, with whom he had two more daughters; Kirsten, a trainee nutritional therapist, and Tanya, who runs a marketing company.
As a dentist he practised first in Cheltenham, and later in Wimpole Street, London, when his political career became more demanding. He championed the use of light sedation for nervous patients, fluoride in the water supply, and better access to dentistry, particularly for children. He also chaired a professional support organisation called Dental Protection from 1995 to 2001, and served as president of the Natural Medicines Society, the Huntington’s Disease Association and the Arterial Health Foundation.
As a Conservative peer he was appointed CBE for political services in 1989, and was sufficiently active in the Lords to survive the Blair government’s cull of hereditary peers in 1999, being one of 92 elected to stay on.
He served as a deputy speaker for many years, sat on the science and technology select committee and spoke regularly on health issues as well as musical ones — the relaxation of restrictions on live music in pubs being a cause close to his heart. He was narrowly defeated by Baroness D’Souza when he sought to become lord speaker in 2011, and retired from the Lords in 2022.
He cycled furiously between his many engagements, and needed to. Politics and dentistry apart, he founded Jazz FM with Dave Lee and John Dankworth, helped to launch the Parliamentary Jazz Awards in 2005, and kept playing jazz in pubs throughout his life — revealing a joyful, carefree side of his character very different to his more solemn official persona.
Lord Colwyn CBE, dentist and politician, was born on January 1, 1942. He died of complications related to Covid on August 4, 2024, aged 82