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Politics & Mangel-Wurzels. Rab was born Dec. 9, 1902, in the mud-walled village of Attock Serai in northwest India (now Pakistan). The Butlers were a famous family in India. Rab's father, the late Sir Montagu S. D. Butler, became a governor of the Central Provinces, and was knighted for his services before going home to become a master of Cambridge's Pembroke College. His uncle, a close friend of Nehru's father, became governor of Burma. His Scottish mother was related to the great liberal economist Adam Smith. The eldest of four children, young Rab left Attock at the age of eight for boarding schools in England's west country. There, and later at Marlborough, one of the top public schools, Rab acquired,an early self-reliance, a retiring manner, and a reputation for scholarship. His athletic prowess was limited by a badly set wrist, broken in a fall from a pony. To amplify the family's modest resources, he spent summers picking mangel-wurzels at 8¢ an hour.
At Cambridge, where Butlers have held distinguished places as professors and masters and fellows since 1790, Rab quickly set about a political career. He plunged into the debates of the famed Cambridge Union, where a promising young man is duly noted by the powers in Whitehall and ticketed for future office. Nervous, witty and aloof, Rab debated energetically, was elected president at the age of 21. One summer he led a debating team to the U.S., bringing back a report that "we found the earnest, logical Yankees easy to flummox, except for the Vassar girls, who ran circles round us." Once Stanley Baldwin came to argue against the motion: "That this House has the highest regard for rhetoric." (He lost, with Rab casting the deciding vote against him.) Rab escorted Baldwin to the station next morning, where the old man bought him a thriller "and told me that intellectualism was a sin, and would lead a young man to a fate worse than death." To this day the effort of concealing the fact that he is brighter than most men he meets gives Rab a remote air.
Rab took a double first in modern languages and history, then was elected a fellow of Corpus Christi. A fellow student was Sydney Courtauld, only daughter of the late textile millionaire and art collector Samuel Courtauld. Dark, handsome, intensely -interested in politics, she was attracted by Rab's intelligence and drive. In 1926 they were married. His wife brought Rab wealth, entree into the famous Tory homes of Mayfair, and, eventually, a constituency—Saffron Walden in Essex County, where Courtauld had a country house in which the Butlers now live. From there, in 1929, Rab was elected to Parliament.