Ludlow's winning Streak became poultry pioneer

He was Lieutenant Colonel Uvedale Corbett, who had the nickname "Streak" and had been the youngest regular officer in the British Army on the continent to be given command of a field regiment in an armoured division.

Mr Wood said: "I read with interest your article and thought you might be interested in what he achieved after he was MP.

"He was one of the early modern poultry pioneers - he was one of the first poultry suppliers to our family firm, J P Wood of Craven Arms.

"He was chairman of West Midland Broiler Growers, the group that supplied J P Wood and went on to found Sun Valley Poultry in Hereford, now Cargill, which now employs over 2,000 people.

"In his time he was president of the National Poultry Federation.

"He was a great friend of my father Charlie Wood and when he was MP he gave my father first prize for the best window display at the family shop in Craven Arms.

"I met him a number of times and went to his funeral at Shobdon some years ago.

"He was awarded the DSO in the war and a CBE for services to the poultry industry."

As for where the nickname Streak came from, Mr Wood was not sure, but said he was very tall and thought it came from his Army days, which indeed appears to be the case, as from other sources the story goes that this was acquired when his fellow officers described him as a "long streak of misery" when a horse on which he had had a flutter was pipped at the post.

Corbett's home when he became an MP was at Stableford, near Bridgnorth, although he had not spent much time there since joining the Army. He served in the Royal Artillery and was a war hero, having been awarded a Distinguished Service Order in August 1944 in Normandy during the capture and defence of the Orne bridgehead.

Disregarding enemy shelling, he had climbed on top of his vehicle in the open to direct artillery fire during repeated attacks by an SS Panzer Division.

His wife Veronica Marian Corbett, whom he married in 1935, was the daughter of the late L.D. Whitehead, founder of Whitehead's Iron and Steel Works. She went into farming, and at the time of the election managed 200 head of Hereford cattle at Ox Farm, Shobdon.

Corbett was re-elected in 1950, but the following year told Ludlow Conservative Association that he was stepping down to spend more time on his farm.

However, there may have been something more to it than that, as according to another account he told the chairman that he was about to be divorced and did not wish to continue as Ludlow's MP - these were days in which divorce was taken more seriously in political life.

There was, so the account goes, then a jockeying of position by two rival groups, one advocating as his successor Sir Phillip Magnus, and the other Jasper More, which became so bitter that Conservative Central Office was asked to intervene, with the upshot that the new candidate, and subsequent Ludlow MP, was Christopher Holland Martin, whose wife Anne was sister-in-law to Lady Dorothy Macmillan, wife of Harold Macmillan, who later became Prime Minister.

Corbett remarried, in Leeds, on January 6, 1953, his bride being Mrs Patricia Jane Walker. After her death in 1985 he married a third time, in 1987, Peggy Roberts.

Among his various public roles in later life was becoming president of the Three Counties Show in 1988. He died on September 1, 2005, just 11 days before his 96th birthday.