John Erle-Drax

On 13 August 1828, his wife's brother Richard Erle-Drax-Grosvenor died unmarried, and he succeeded to her family estates, including Charborough House, assuming the surname of Erle-Drax.

[2] He was a captain in the East Kent Militia, and raised a troop of the Dorsetshire Yeomanry in 1830 to deal with the Disturbances or Swing Riots of that year;[3][4] he held the patronage of five church livings, and was a deputy-lieutenant of Dorset in the late 1850s.

[8] Wareham was a pocket borough with just 342 electors, controlled jointly by Erle-Drax and John Hales Calcraft, who arranged for one or the other of them to be returned at each election.

[10] During the 2010 United Kingdom general election campaign period, the Daily Mirror reported that Richard Drax's family had earned their fortune through slavery.

In 2013, the BBC noted that his ancestor John Erle-Drax, who had an estate in Barbados,[11] was recorded in a database created by University College London as having received £4,293 12s 6d in compensation for 189 slaves when slavery was abolished.