Clarence Napier Bruce, 3rd Baron Aberdare (2 August 1885 – 4 October 1957), styled The Honourable Clarence Bruce from 1895 to 1929, was a British military officer, cricketer, tennis player, and golfer who worked as a sports administrator. He was killed in an automobile accident in 1957 after attending an International Olympic Committee meeting in the Balkans.
Early life and education
Bruce was born at 29 Eaton Place, Westminster, the second son of Henry Bruce, 2nd Baron Aberdare and Constance Mary Beckett.
Bruce received his education at Twyford School, Winchester College and at New College, Oxford, and was admitted as a barrister of the Inner Temple; however, when World War I broke out, he decided to enter the British Army. His elder brother was killed in action in 1914, making him heir apparent to his father's barony. Bruce was U.S.A. Amateur Champion in 1930 and of the British Isles in 1932 and 1938. He played eighteen times for Great Britain in the Bathurst Cup and six times won the Coupe de Paris. He carried off the M.C.C. Gold Prize on five occasions and nine times won the Silver Prize. He was a key player in the decision to send British athletes to Hitler's 1936 Summer Olympics in Berlin, asserting that "neither nor his colleagues 'had yet heard of a genuine case of an Olympic athlete being boycotted or impeded because of his non-Aryan origin'", this despite Nazi Germany's overtly stated anti-semitism. He served in many physical education and sportsmen's clubs, and was also a member of the New College Society. married in 1952 Robert McCheyne Andrew
Lady Aberdare died on 8 February 1950. On 4 October 1957, their car left the road near Risan (now Montenegro) and fell into the Bay of Kotor. Aberdare, aged 72, drowned and his wife, aged 56, was injured.