[2] Prior to the First World War he had held the rank of Captain in the 1st (Volunteer) Battalion, Manchester Regiment, from which he resigned in early 1903.

[3] During World War I, in early 1915, at 43 years of age, and having refused an offer of the Viceroyalty of India, he enlisted as a private in the Royal Army Medical Corps, which was almost unheard of at that time as hereditary peers and their heirs or university graduates such as himself were generally commissioned as officers.

He thus swapped palaces in India and the prospect of a comfortable administrative position for the reality of a front line clearing station's operating theatre.

[6] He was a keen book collector, particularly of Victorian erotica, and bequeathed in his will over 100 volumes to the British Museum, which were subsequently placed in the Private Case.

The latter year he succeeded his father in the earldom and took his seat in the House of Lords (in virtue of his junior title of Baron Wigan, which was in the Peerage of the United Kingdom).

In July 1916 Crawford was admitted to the Privy Council[8] and appointed President of the Board of Agriculture, with a seat in the cabinet, in the coalition government of H. H.