Colonel Claude Granville Lancaster (30 August 1899 – 25 July 1977) was a British Army officer, coal industry director, and Conservative Party politician.

He passed out of Sandhurst in 1918 and was commissioned into the Royal Horse Guards ('Blues') on 21 August that year, too late to see active service in the First World War.

[3] In 1924 Captain Lancaster inherited Kelmarsh Hall[1] and the family mining interests, becoming a director of Bestwood Coal & Iron Co Ltd in Nottinghamshire.

Just before the outbreak of the Second World War, Lancaster was appointed as a Reserve officer to command the 9th Battalion the Sherwood Foresters, a duplicate Territorial Army unit being formed at Bulwell near Nottingham.

[2][13] Lancaster had maintained his coal industry links while serving in the army: in 1943 he was instrumental in a mission being sent to the United States to prepare for American power loading machinery being introduced into British mines.

[2] In 1948 Lancaster married Nancy Keene Perkins (1897–1994), an American interior designer and gardener whose previous (second) husband had been Ronald Tree, MP for Harborough.