Researching Richard Stanbury

Before his appointment to the Senate on the advice of Lester Pearson in February 1968, Stanbury was a lawyer and organizer for the Presbyterian Church in Canada. He became active in Liberal politics and was the riding association president in York Centre in the early 1960s and later became president of the Toronto and York Liberal Association, served on the National Liberal Campaign Committee and chaired the National Policy Committee of the Liberal Party. Shortly after being summoned to the Senate, Stanbury was elected president of the Liberal Party at the same convention that selected Pierre Trudeau as party leader.

During his tenure as president, Stanbury successfully argued that the party join the Liberal International.

Stanbury's brother was Liberal MP and lawyer Robert Stanbury.

Educated at Shrewsbury School, Stanbury was an undergraduate at Magdalene College, Cambridge when selected for his first match for Somerset against Cambridge University. A right-handed lower order batsman and wicketkeeper, he took two catches (Paul Gibb in both Cambridge innings) and scored 6 and 21. The following year he played in a single match against Essex without success.

He graduated from Cambridge in 1937 with a first-class honours degree in Classics, and joined the Sudan Political Service, the colonial administration in Sudan that oversaw local government: he was a district commissioner there for 13 years. Invalided out of Sudan in 1950, he was posted to Cairo in the transition to the Egyptian republic, where his fluency in Arabic and use of appropriate expletives saved him from lynching at the hands of a mob. He also played cricket for the Gezira Cricket Club and top-scored with 13 when a 15-strong team played against the Pakistani cricket team on its way to England for its first tour in 1954. He was later posted to Bahrain and his final diplomatic post was in the British embassy in Buenos Aires, where one of his roles was to liaise with other Latin American countries over the UK's attitude towards the Peronist government of Argentina.

Stanbury retired from the UK diplomatic service to become a fruit farmer in Portugal in the 1970s, and retired from that to East Sussex where he and his wife ran a business that imported Portuguese pottery.

He met his wife, Geraldine, in Cairo; they married in 1953, and he was survived by her, by a daughter and a son, and by five grandchildren.