The Earl of Balfour

This knack of forecasting

the future included an earlier

call for the metering of telephones so that owners could judge the size of their bills. In 1997, the Burrell Collection came under his scrutiny when

as one of four parliamentary commissioners, he adjudicated in the dispute between the

Burrell Trustees and Julian Spalding, then director of museums with Glasgow City Council. Spalding wanted to be able

to exchange items from the

Collection, but the trustees feared that breaking terms of

the bequest would put off potential future donors. In the event, the ban was lifted - though

not without criticism that Balfour's commission was made up entirely of ''hereditaries''.

As a young man - and bearing a beard and the courtesy title Viscount Traprain - ''Gerry'' Balfour sailed before the mast in the Merchant Navy. His nautical pedigree included rounding Cape Horn, and in later life he took pride in being president of the International Association of Cape Horners, an organisation initially open only to those who like him had served as ordinary seamen on sailing ships.

The sea ran in his blood. His father Robert had aimed for a career in the Royal Navy, but dyslexia barred him. Thus in 1941 at 16, Gerald left Eton for cadet entrance to HMS Conway, the training vessel moored in the Menai Straits that had been laid down in 1826 as a

92-gun wooden sailing ship, and a recognised training ground for Merchant Navy deck officers with potential.

During wartime in North Wales the teenage Balfour

landed at Glyn Garth at Menai Bridge for games and ''shilling teas'' afterwards at Smith's Cafe. He joined in at sports both at the ground of Bangor City Football Club on the mainland, and on Beaumaris Common on Anglesey (where the home goal was used as the changing room).

Gaining his first posting in the latter stages of the Second World War, he was torpedoed on his first voyage by the Japanese, spending a week in an open boat in the Indian Ocean before being rescued.

In 1947 and by now a member of the New Zealand seamen's union, he signed on as a deckhand aboard the German-built four-masted steel sailing barque Pamir. Carrying wool and tallow, the vessel voyaged from Wellington, New Zealand, to The Lizard in 78 days, arriving a few days later on December 22 in Victoria Dock, London. A decade later, the Pamir was lost in a

hurricane off the Azores.

Balfour, born and died in Haddington, was the eldest

son of the 3rd Earl, the peerage having been created in 1922

for Arthur Balfour, the one-

time Tory prime minister.

Gerald's lineage had long been connected with Whitting-

hame in East Lothian, his Haddington home for many years, and among his ancestors he could count three marquesses, five earls, a baronet,

a barber and an Aberdeen-

shire laird. He was nephew

to Lady Evelyn Balfour, honorary life vice-president of

the Soil Association and noted organic polemicist.

He took delight and pride in service, both in the Lords and in East Lothian. For 15 years from 1960, he was a member of East Lothian County Council until reorganisation of local government in 1975 abolished his beloved home county; for a short time was a director of Bruntons, the Musselburgh steel wire producer.

A clever peer and like, his father, dyslexic, his disability caused him to examine draft legislation rather more studiously than his fellows.

Thus he developed a reputation as a bane of parliamentary draughtsmen, both on policy grounds and for love of good grammar; not for him misspellings, misrelated participles and transposed sentences.

He married, in 1956, Natasha (Natalia), daughter of Captain Georgiy Anton, in Archangel, Russia, whose family had emigrated to the west during the First World War. She predeceased in 1994. They had no children, and the heir to the earldom is his kinsman Roderick Balfour, son-in-law of the 17th Duke of Norfolk.

Gerald Arthur James Balfour, 4th Earl of Balfour JP, born December 23, 1925, died

June 27, 2003.