He was educated at Eton,[1] and Trinity College, Oxford, and during the Second World War served as an officer in the Royal Artillery, rising to the rank of captain[2] and being mentioned in dispatches.
His younger brother, Alastair Pelham-Clinton, was a Royal Air Force Flying Officer and died in 1943 aged twenty.
[1] He acted as an associate editor of six volumes of the series The Moths and Butterflies of Great Britain and Ireland, in which he wrote articles about Tineidae, Choreutidae, and Glyphipterigidae, and was working on Elachistidae at the time of his death.
[3] A building in Dinton Pastures Country Park was named after him by the British Entomological and Natural History Society, of which he had been a member.
As all other heirs male from the second duke's line had died, the dukedom became extinct, but the peerage of Earl of Lincoln was inherited by a distant kinsman in Australia.