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- Herausgeber: Biteback Publishing
- Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018
When Gerald Grosvenor, sixth Duke of Westminster, died in August 2016 he was one of the world's richest men, his fortune estimated at just under £10 billion. Yet he hated his wealth and spent long periods suffering from severe depression, much of it brought on by a feeling that his whole life had been a failure and that his money had destroyed any chance of happiness. At the same time, he could be ruthless in running the business while often feeling he was only a mascot. Gerald Grosvenor came into the line of succession by mere chance – or 'rotten bad luck' as he put it. The third Duke was childless and the title passed to a cousin, who became fourth Duke in 1963 and then, when he died four years later, to his younger brother, Gerald's father, Robert Grosvenor, who lived on an island in Lough Erne where Gerald grew up. Tom Quinn interviewed the sixth Duke on a number of occasions as well as people who knew the duke socially or had at various times worked with or for him. He discovered a complex man tortured by what he saw as his failures. He was a man who longed to return to his idyllic rural childhood yet was only really happy as an adult in the company of call girls. The book looks at the long and often eccentric history of the Grosvenor family and its wealth and the complex means by which that wealth has been shielded from the taxman, as well as the bizarre life of a man who was that strangest of things: The Reluctant Billionaire.
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‘The man who dies rich … dies disgraced.’
ANDREW CARNEGIE
‘He lived for the pleasure of getting money, which he had not the heart to enjoy…’
THE TIMES, 1855, ON THE 2ND MARQUESS OF WESTMINSTER
CONTENTS
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Writing about the recently dead is always fraught with difficulty. Gerald Grosvenor, the 6th Duke of Westminster and the subject of this book, died in August 2016, not long after a widely publicised scandal that, in the words of one of the duke’s friends, made ‘a highly sensitive man a laughing stock’ and may indeed have hastened his death.
The duke’s family and friends are understandably sensitive to any further media scrutiny, but I was surprised by the Grosvenor Group and the Duchess of Westminster’s reaction to my request for an interview, given that I was offering them the chance to put more of the 6th Duke’s good qualities on record than might otherwise have been possible.
I wrote to the duchess requesting an interview and did not receive a reply. She passed my letter – without acknowledgement and without notifying me – to her staff in the Grosvenor Group’s communications department. It was a reaction that perhaps typifies the Grosvenor family’s relations with ordinary people over the centuries. The Grosvenor Group’s reaction was similar. After some time I was sent a curt email that simply stated that the group wanted ‘nothing to do with this project’. One sensed the sheer terror that the world of the British aristocracy feels at the prospect of public scrutiny.
Other people who were close to the duke reacted in a similar fashion. It was as if there was a general fear among them that some awful secret might be disclosed if anyone spoke to me. And of course there was at least one awful secret – as readers of this book will discover.
Luckily, long before I began the book, I had already spoken to many people who had worked for or with the duke in one capacity or another, or who were casual acquaintances who had met him several times but did not know him intimately (note that I say ‘worked for’ rather than ‘were friends with’). His friends were more or less from the same background and it is easy to imagine them huddled in White’s or Boodle’s complaining that some dreadful lower-decks type was trying to find things out about Gerald.
The only response I received from those few of his fellow aristocrats who replied to my letters was that I should write about the late duke’s love of the countryside. It struck me as a very curious thing that when the duke was alive, this, with few exceptions, was just about the only thing anyone would say about him. It was pretty much the only thing he would say about himself. I became so irritated (but also intrigued) by this automatic response to any and every query about the duke that I began to reply by saying, ‘If I hear any more about the duke’s love of the countryside, I will throw myself in the river,’ and I have to admit I received several replies suggesting it might be better for everyone if I did just that.
It was all rather mysterious, and it made piecing together a real sense of the duke’s life even more of a challenge. What some of his friends forgot, of course, was that Gerald Grosvenor also happened to have numerous acquaintances who knew him well, who often felt enormous sympathy with his predicament, but did not rate him highly. These people were far from reluctant to share their memories with me. Others who were not part of the duke’s aristocratic circle but counted themselves as friends, knew him well from the charitable dinner circuit or through business connections, were keen to share their memories of what one called a ‘deeply divided man’.
This book is not about a man of action; it is not about a great public figure or statesman; it is not about a man who was a philanthropist in the manner of Bill Gates or Andrew Carnegie. It is, if you like, the story of a man who wanted to hide, but was dragged into an unsympathetic public role that inspired envy in others but no pleasure in the man destined to endure it. He was not a great man, as he would have been the first to admit; he played no part in any of the momentous events of his lifetime, so the details of his business and professional life, such as it was, are of less interest than his inner world. It is this inner world that I have tried to capture here through my own conversations with the duke and through the memories of those who knew him but were not exclusively part of the aristocratic circle in which, at times, he felt imprisoned.
One aristocratic landowner who knew Gerald Grosvenor well suggested that in an earlier epoch I would have been horse-whipped for writing this book, and this is very typical of one part of the world that surrounded the duke. It is a world where people vote Conservative because they believe the Conservatives will reduce the number of people on benefits, at the same time choosing to forget that British landowners are the recipients of the biggest state handouts of all, thanks to the European Union system of subsidies. And big landowners, unlike single parents, have absolutely no need of the money.
Some ancient families have embraced the modern world and realised that the power of the old aristocracy is not what it once was. But the modern world seems in many ways to have bypassed the Grosvenor family, and the old code of silence descended rapidly when the Westminsters and their circle discovered that someone wished to write about one of their own but would not take their advice to write only about his ‘love of the countryside’.
The truth, then, is that like most immensely wealthy families whose gilded lives depend on inherited wealth, the Grosvenors would much rather be left entirely alone. That was true before the sexual scandal that dogged the 6th Duke’s final years and perhaps hastened his death, but even more so in the years since. Again, this is entirely understandable. But scrutiny is perhaps a small price to pay for a dukedom and a role as head of a global business empire that – like any other business – seeks entirely legitimately to maximise its profits and minimise its tax bill.
As Chris Bryant puts it in his 2017 book, Entitled: A Critical History of the British Aristocracy:
The primary means of squirrelling away substantial assets so as to preserve them intact and deliver a healthy income for aristocratic descendants without bothering the taxman is the trust. Countless peers with landholdings and stately homes have put all their assets into discretionary trusts, thereby avoiding both public scrutiny and inheritance tax. This is what the Duke of Westminster has done with the Grosvenor estates whose trustees, chaired by the duke, dole out benefits and payments to the family while keeping the assets separate from any individual’s estate.
* * *
The 6th Duke of Westminster’s life is fascinating because it embodies the truth of the old cliché: money doesn’t make you happy. By temperament, intellectual ability and personality, Gerald Grosvenor was entirely unsuited to the wealth and position he inherited. Money and position, as I hope this book will show, actually made him profoundly unhappy and almost certainly led him into sexual escapades that probably contributed to his early death.
Much of this book relies on a number of interviews I was able to conduct with the duke himself during the 1980s and 1990s. He very rarely gave interviews but agreed to see me as I think he felt I was at least nominally part of the small world within which he felt safe. The duke loved shooting – shooting birds and animals, that is – and I had initially written to him asking for an interview for a very old-fashioned and deeply eccentric weekly countryside magazine that covered everything from what sort of fly to use for trout during a thunderstorm to the various merits of sidelock and boxlock shotguns.
The magazine’s ethos was deeply (and sometimes embarrassingly) deferential to landowners and the aristocracy – it was as if the attitudes and values of the nineteenth century had somehow survived in the small corner of Windsor where the magazine was based.
The duke knew the magazine well and also knew that the interview would therefore only cover subjects – the countryside, farming and landowning as well as shooting – with which he felt comfortable. Our conversation on that occasion and the subsequent interviews I conducted with him for other countryside magazines always followed a similar trajectory. He was never obviously warm or friendly but seemed distant and formal, certainly not at his ease; seemingly nervous but always scrupulously polite.
I was struck during my first interview with the duke by the contrast between him and an elderly farmworker I had interviewed a week earlier. I had spoken with the old man – he was in his mid-nineties – in his cramped, ancient cottage about his memories of working with horses on the land. Despite age and infirmity, the first thing he did was to offer me a cup of tea; he asked me about my journey and what it was like to work on the magazine that had commissioned me to write for them. No similar conversation (or offer of tea!) was forthcoming from the Duke of Westminster.
It was a trivial difference between the two men but it gave me a clue about the duke’s true personality; here was a man absolutely sealed inside the values and attitudes of his class, and I sensed that he knew he was imprisoned and did not like it. His old-fashioned, aristocratic upbringing had given him the attitudes and values of his Victorian (and perhaps even more distant) ancestors. But he had retained those attitudes and values in an age in which they were no longer admired and were of no practical use. It is sometimes said of a particular aristocrat, ‘Yes, he has the common touch’, or that so-and-so is able to talk happily ‘to anyone from any walk of life’. This was certainly not true of the 6th Duke of Westminster – despite claims to the contrary by some of his friends. With people from what might best be called ‘ordinary backgrounds’ the duke always seemed slightly baffled and uncomfortable, as if he were constantly terrified someone might ask him for a loan. Certainly, it would never have occurred to him to engage in small talk, let alone offer to make a visitor a cup of tea.
Throughout the duke’s life, what might best be described as his archaic world view meant that he only ever really felt comfortable with other aristocrats or with people, such as countryside journalists and his tenants and farm workers, who implicitly (or maybe even explicitly) acknowledged his status or shared his interests and accepted his values. This is why he regularly gave interviews to magazines – especially country magazines – which would be sure to print only praise. In one particularly obsequious article published in 1988, a well-known country magazine described him as the ‘ultimate countryman’.
This sort of sycophancy seemed to the duke the natural order of things and he found it upsetting and incomprehensible that other publications did not make the same basic assumptions about him. Indeed, he was so sensitive to criticism – even the risk of criticism – that he told me he disliked ever talking to general newspapers and publications and lived in dread that they would mention him at all. It seemed that this aversion stemmed from an almost pathological shyness, but also from the risk that, for example, his role at the head of the Grosvenor Group might be questioned. How, exactly, was an old Harrovian with just two O levels qualified for the job? Or there might be impertinent queries about the enormous subsidies paid to the Grosvenors and other billionaire landowning families through the Common Agricultural Policy. A robust defence of these and other matters might have been possible but the duke was not the man to do it.
The duke’s nineteenth-century attitudes and values did not mean that he looked down on lesser mortals, whether journalists or farm workers; he simply felt that they should know their place and accept it. His world view was the result of what it is now fashionable to call ‘a sense of entitlement’ combined with the almost overwhelming reticence he had imbibed in childhood. The 6th Duke was exceptionally old-fashioned – even for a duke – which is why I have spent much of my early chapters looking at the lives of those of his ancestors with whom he seems to have had a remarkable amount in common. It is their attitudes and values – which often make life not easier but more difficult in the modern world – that the duke seems to have absorbed to a painfully large degree.
Many of the duke’s ancestors also seem to have been aware that somehow their great wealth should have led to great things in other spheres; certainly the duke’s ancestors had been minor politicians and soldiers, but, as many commentators have pointed out over the centuries, they never achieved high office or made major contributions in any sphere except the accumulation of money. Even as philanthropists they have always seemed rather penny-pinching.
The Grosvenors have not produced a Churchill or a Duke of Wellington, a Palmerston or a Gladstone. One duke did make a stir in the wider world but unfortunately that did not bring lustre to the family name: it involved the playboy 2nd Duke persecuting his bisexual brother-in-law. The persecution reached such a pitch that Lord Beauchamp had to leave Britain and live abroad. The duke’s motive appears to have been simple: his brother-in-law was a public figure of some renown while the duke was widely perceived as a spoiled child who had never grown up.
* * *
My interviews with the 6th Duke always began with his enthusiasm for shooting, farming and the countryside, but having started to discuss subjects with which he felt comfortable it wasn’t difficult to move cautiously into other areas – with a sympathetic listener he was remarkably forthcoming at times and would frequently say, ‘I wouldn’t want that mentioned until I’m long gone.’
This book is based on those interviews and conversations I had with the duke at the time as well as those I had over the years with people who worked for the duke in London and on his estates. I have also interviewed people who saw him occasionally at London high society events. Almost everyone asked not to be named – in spite of the laws protecting workers’ rights, it is well known that speaking out of turn may mean the loss of a job, and that is especially true if you work on a big estate out in the shires. With legal advice, plausible reasons for redundancy that meet the requirements of the law can always be found – though there is no suggestion the Grosvenor Group itself would indulge in this kind of thing – so I will respect the confidences of those who talked to me. But I would like to thank them anyway, for without them I could not have written this book.
INTRODUCTION
‘What is’t to us if taxes rise or fall? Thanks to our fortune, we pay none at all.’
CHARLES CHURCHILL, 1731–64
Anyone who noticed the photographs of the 6th Duke of Westminster that appeared occasionally over the years in the press and elsewhere will have been struck by the deep, engraved lines of unhappiness that seemed to grow worse as time passed. Compare these pictures, especially those taken when he was unaware that a camera was nearby, with the photograph still held by the duke’s old school, Harrow, and one sees the same look: an ingrained, almost fathomless strain of melancholy.
In later life, the duke insisted that being plucked from relative obscurity to head the family business was the chief cause of his depression, and there is no doubt much truth in this, but there is something else, which I believe he inherited from his ancestors. I don’t mean inherited through his genes, but rather through the consciousness that for all their exalted status as knights, marquesses and finally dukes, the Grosvenors were failures. Their tragedy, as I argue in this book, is that they were really only good at one thing: making and keeping money.
Even during the heyday of aristocratic power and prestige – when to be a large landowner created a generally accepted assumption that one was a superior being in every way – the Dukes of Westminster had to face the uncomfortable fact that they had never really succeeded as soldiers or politicians, academics, writers or artists. Other rich, landed families had produced writers and intellectuals (Bertrand Russell was the grandson of Prime Minister Lord John Russell, for example) or, more commonly, politicians. Various Grosvenors had several times been elected to Parliament, but only during periods of history when standing and position counted for a great deal among the electorate, and they had never attained ministerial rank. Worse, they had achieved nothing notable during the long centuries when to be an aristocrat meant success was always within reach since the mere fact of being an aristocrat created an assumption that one would be a brilliant soldier or statesman. At its best, this produced the likes of Winston Churchill; at its worst, it produced a long line of incompetents. Service to the state or the arts or sciences might have helped justify unearned privilege, but the Grosvenors never quite made the grade.
As the political power of the aristocracy declined, it became far more important that the family should at least occasionally produce someone who had ability. Why else should great landowners automatically have the right – a right ninety-two peers retain to this day – to sit in the House of Lords and influence the legislation that governs all our lives?
As twentieth-century customs and values began to change, aristocratic landowners found it increasingly difficult to justify the fact that for centuries they had benefited from a system largely devised by them, for their own benefit. The historic scandal of enclosure is a good example: for centuries the poor had exercised their ancient right to collect firewood and graze their animals on the vast areas of common land that stretched across much of England. Sensing that greater profits could be made if the poor were deprived of these rights, the big landowners began to enclose – or steal – land, and as the pace of enclosure increased, tens of thousands of cottagers were dispossessed without compensation. A whole class of beggars was created by enclosure and these people were then defined as the feckless, dangerous, threatening poor by the same authorities who had dispossessed them. Something similar was happening in Scotland as late as the mid-nineteenth century: landowners such as the Duke of Sutherland decided that more money could be made from sheep than from the rents received from thousands of crofters, so the crofters were evicted. In Ireland, while largely absentee aristocratic English landlords exported surplus food during the 1840s and 1850s, their rent-racked tenants were allowed to starve in their millions when potato blight destroyed the staple diet of the poor.
The squalid history of Britain’s big aristocratic landowners has been admirably described in Chris Bryant’s book, Entitled, and there is no need for anything further to be said here on the subject.
The Grosvenors, and especially Gerald Grosvenor, were not particularly bad landlords. In fact, it was probably the one thing they were really good at. But the 6th Duke was keenly aware that being a landlord was no longer enough; much more was expected of him than of his ancestors. From one point of view, of course, he did not have much to live up to, as the Grosvenors had shown they were really only good at making money, but rather than putting the 6th Duke at his ease, this sense of past family failure made him feel deeply uncomfortable. The great weight of his own family’s history bore down on him and whispered, ‘Where are the great deeds and service to the state that justify your dukedom?’
Faced with this question Gerald Grosvenor could only lament the fact that fate had once more created a Duke of Westminster whose main attribute was keeping the family fortune intact – and nothing else. As we will see, what the 6th Duke really wanted was to be rich and anonymous so he could simply have fun – so he could be as flamboyant a playboy as his ancestor the 2nd Duke had been.
For much of the latter part of his life, the 6th Duke was also a sex addict who paid for escort girls to visit his small, discreetly situated house just off London’s Oxford Street. Away from the dynastic necessity of sitting at the top of a business he had never wanted to run, and away from his crippling sense of duty, the 6th Duke of Westminster just wanted to have fun – and sex – with beautiful women who had nothing to do with the stultifying attitudes and values of the English aristocracy.
CHAPTER ONE
REINVENTING THE PAST
‘In 1861, 421 men owned nearly 23 million acres of the British Isles.’
ANTHONY SAMPSON,ANATOMY OF BRITAIN
The deference paid to dukes is an extraordinary thing, but then the British have always been obsessed with the aristocracy and dukes have an added interest since, compared to most other titles, they are comparatively rare. Genealogists pay great attention to the fact that there are five peerages (English, United Kingdom, Great Britain, Scotland and Ireland) and English dukes take precedence over the others.
Dukedoms also have an ancient lineage – the first duke was created more than 600 years ago when Edward III made his eldest son a duke, but there have been fewer than 500 dukes and duchesses in the ensuing 600 years. Compared to knighthoods, which today are given to almost anyone with enough money and influence, dukedoms would appear to be genuinely special, but scratch beneath the surface and the reality is very different. For example, a monarch can make dukes of as many of his or her friends and relatives as he or she chooses.
Charles II created twenty-six dukes, including six given to his bastard sons on the grounds that they were… well… his sons.
It took a long time for the Grosvenors to reach the dizzy heights of a dukedom. Indeed, their dukedom is the youngest and most recent non-royal dukedom in existence. For centuries they were much further down the list of nobility and only reached ducal status in the nineteenth century – even then for no other good reason than that they were extraordinarily rich.
It’s important to look in detail at Gerald Grosvenor’s ancestors, for here we will find the seeds of his own character. Despite few of his ancestors achieving much outside the privileges of their positions of wealth Gerald Grosvenor felt the huge weight of his own family history – and it was a weight he found at times unbearable.
There had been moderate achievers among his ancestors – the 2nd Duke, known as Bendor after his grandfather’s favourite racehorse, was a decorated soldier, for example – but there was a darker side to the past: the 3rd Duke appears to have been so psychologically damaged that he became a recluse living in retirement by the seaside, obsessed solely with breeding ducks. He took no part in running the family business and was allowed only a small allowance throughout his life. One or two ancestors, perhaps especially Bendor, were promiscuous reactionaries who felt that the lower orders should always know their place. Several ancestors were addicted to buying sex – something that echoes the 6th Duke’s own fascination with escort girls.
According to family legend, the Grosvenor history really begins in 1066 with the arrival of William the Conqueror. But does it really? Deferential nineteenth-century historians – and the Grosvenors themselves – liked to repeat the story that the first Grosvenor was Hugh Lupus, who they claimed was a nephew of William. Lupus’s nickname was ‘gros veneur’. The Grosvenors claimed that ‘gros veneur’ meant Lupus was the ‘King’s chief huntsman’, or ‘grand master of the royal hounds’. In fact, the name Grosvenor and the surviving records give no indication of status – gros veneur simply meant ‘fat huntsman’ in Norman French, a designation heartily disliked by more recent Grosvenors.
Someone called Lupus certainly helped with the invasion of England – his father contributed sixty ships to the fleet – and he was rewarded by being made Earl of Chester. He was also a thoroughly unpleasant character. When the 1st Duke of Westminster was rebuilding Eaton Hall in the 1870s, he decided to commission a statue of his putative ancestor Hugh Lupus – until a little research revealed that Lupus was a greedy, vindictive sensualist who fathered more than a dozen bastard children. The statue went ahead but the duke admitted he had almost cancelled the whole project.
Others have questioned the veracity of the whole Lupus story. One anonymous source explained that early in the nineteenth century, as their wealth and prestige increased, the Grosvenors became desperate for what might best be called a magnificent creation myth. Certainly the Lupus story seems to have sprung into vigorous existence in the early nineteenth century (1802, to be precise) when the 2nd Earl Grosvenor decided the family needed publicly to advertise its ancient lineage.
The highly regarded Survey of London, founded by Charles Ashbee in 1894 and first published in 1900, had no reason to adopt the usual deferential attitude to noble families, since the survey was intended merely to record London’s architectural monuments at a time when they were being demolished at a shocking rate.
The survey introduces the Grosvenor family, London’s biggest landlords, in a more matter-of-fact, perhaps even sceptical, manner:
‘The Grosvenors were an ancient Cheshire family claiming a somewhat tenuous descent from Hugh Lupus, first Earl of Chester, one of William the Conqueror’s foremost knights and possibly his nephew.’ (Survey of London Vol XXXIX).
Alternatively, we are told that William the Conqueror’s huntsman, Gilbert le Gros Veneur, was a nephew of Hugh Lupus, who in turn was a nephew of William.
Despite the confusions and tall tales surrounding this much-disputed heritage, we do know that by 1160 Robert Le Grosvenor – who seems to have been a great-nephew of Lupus – had settled on land in Cheshire that had been taken from the native British a century earlier by the Conqueror. That land is still held by the Grosvenor family today.
But the desire to make people think the first Grosvenor was much more than a tubby hunt servant suggests an unease about position that has afflicted many members of the family since, and none more so than Gerald Grosvenor, the 6th Duke.
In 1879, the Political Tract Society issued a pamphlet, Our Old Nobility, soon after the Grosvenors had been offered a dukedom, which brutally skewered the family’s pretensions to noble titles:
To give a fair start in life to a royal bastard, to reward a successful general, to gratify the ambition of a statesman, to add new lustre to a great historic house that has rendered eminent service to the country – these are reasons we can at any rate understand, but to elevate a man to a dukedom because he happens to be the biggest landlord in London is an action one cannot admire.
The 1st Duke of Westminster was apparently furious at these criticisms, but there was little he could do about it as they were true.
For centuries the family had become ever richer, but where were the noble acts that should accompany noble titles? Where were the great statesmen and legislators? They were conspicuous only by their absence – an absence that was to prey horribly on the mind of the 6th Duke. Money was the root of their success and also the root of this nagging sense of failure.
CHAPTER TWO
MARRIAGE A-LA-MODE
‘The tragedy of his life was that the only thing he could make was money.’
PRIVATE EYE OBITUARY
After Robert Le Grosvenor took possession of that gift of land in Cheshire there followed a line of undistinguished but harmless Grosvenors, mostly Roberts and Hughs. All lived quietly on their northern estates, only stirring themselves when it was time to find a wife – with money – for a son and heir. Almost all their early marriages were financially astute. The Robert Grosvenor who died in 1396, for example, had married the wealthy widow of one Thomas Belgrave – a family connection that survives today in the name of the Belgravia region of London, one of the Grosvenors’ greatest assets. A little over half a century later, in 1453, Raufe Grosvenor married Joan Eaton, whose dowry included a castle and lands just outside Chester.
Even after the most financially spectacular marriage of all – the mid-seventeenth-century union of Sir Thomas Grosvenor and Mary Davies – the Grosvenors were still usually at the front of the queue when a wealthy young woman was in the offing. As one Eaton Estate worker complained, ‘Those fucking Grosvenors can smell money ten miles away.’
