 Thatcher won the election, and she created him a life peer as Baron Marsh, "of Mannington in the County of Wiltshire" on 15 July 1981.He then sat in the House of Lords as a Crossbench peer.In 1975 Marsh's second wife Caroline died in a road accident in Spain in which the wife of broadcaster David Jacobs also lost her life; Marsh and Jacobs both survived the crash.