John Egerton, 6th Duke of Sutherland

The sixth duke kept a very local profile. In 1984 he sold four masterpieces to fund improving his 20-acre (0.081 km) garden for opening to the public. In 1994 he disagreed when the National Gallery of Scotland sought to rehouse some of his paintings in a new gallery in Glasgow, preferring them to be dispersed around Scotland.

In 1963, George Sutherland-Leveson-Gower, 5th Duke of Sutherland, his distant cousin "Geordie", died, leaving no immediate male heir. Egerton succeeded to the dukedom, but did not inherit the Sutherland estates or Dunrobin Castle, which went to Elizabeth Janson, Geordie's niece, who became the Countess of Sutherland.

A Conservative, he took his seat in the Lords in 1945, but eschewed his right to vote or speak for more than half a century. He did find his political voice as a Berwickshire county councillor.

The son of John Egerton, 4th Earl of Ellesmere, and Lady Violet Lambton, he was educated at Eton and Trinity College, Cambridge. He travelled to France with the British Expeditionary Force and was captured at St Valery in 1940. He spent four years in a prisoner of war camp. Upon his return in 1944, he succeeded his father as Earl of Ellesmere.

Sutherland married Lady Diana Percy (23 November 1917 – 16 June 1978), daughter of Alan Percy, 8th Duke of Northumberland, on 29 April 1939. Following the death of his first wife, on 16 August 1979 he married Evelyn Moubray, a former interior decorator who shared his love of fishing. There were no children from either marriage.

John Sutherland Egerton, 6th Duke of Sutherland, TD, DL (10 May 1915 – 21 September 2000) was a British peer from the Egerton family. He was styled Viscount Brackley until 1944, when he became the 5th Earl of Ellesmere on inheriting his father's substantive title. He inherited his ducal title in 1963 from a distant cousin.