The Dukes (72 page)

Ridley and the Duke determined to arrest this process. They undertook to plant 2500 acres with pine, spruce and larch, to buy the redundant sea-fishing business at Kinlochbervie, re-develop the harbour and establish a transport system which would enable fish landed one evening to be marketed the following morning. All this was in 1951. Almost immediately, the scheme proved a glorious success. By 1965, the fish landed on the Reay estate was the most highly valued, and the quantity made this once abandoned port the second busiest in Scotland. The area has become happy and pros­perous, and is continually growing. A whole subdivision of the Grosvenor estates is employed in its management. A school was built, and given to the local council for a symbolic rental. The capital expenditure involved in this development has been enormous, and the return, or "profit", non-existent. It has been a perfect example of the nineteenth-century ethic which governed some, if not all, ducal estates, according to which the duke in residence has a deep- rooted obligation, by virtue of his birth, towards people who live on land which he owns, and a responsibility to use his wealth for their benefit as much as for his own.

This is not the place to list all the multifarious interests of the Grosvenor estates, but a few instances serve to illustrate why they have been so successful. A combination of wisdom and adventure has informed their actions.

After World War II, the Eaton Square property could no longer support large family houses; nobody was left who could afford them. The Grosvenor estates undertook, at vast expense, to convert the whole area into flats (there was, of course, profit in
this
scheme). The centre of Chester has been developed as a modern shopping area. Annacis Island, in the Fraser river in Canada, was bought in 1950, and a huge scheme of conversion into an industrial estate undertaken. Millions of tons of sand had to be dredged from the river and piled on to the 1700-acre island, to raise it above the level of flood risk. Eventually, over forty factories were established on the island, providing employment for thousands. This project was developed in partnership with John Laing & Son.

The Grosvenor Estates is no longer run personally by the Duke of Westminster, though it is still a settled estate, and his word is still ultimately law. There is now a board of trustees, under J. N. C. James, who trained with the Grosvenor branch in Canada, and an advisory panel of bankers and outside businessmen. They hope to avoid mistakes of the past. There was no real need for Grosvenor House to be pulled down in 1924 and replaced by an hotel; it was a beautiful house and should have been preserved. Similarly, finan­cial motives alone permitted the southern face of Grosvenor Square to be demolished and replaced with a pseudo-Georgian facade behind which hides the Britannia Hotel. Other sales have been more mysterious. It is not clear why the Pimlico estate was sold in its entirety in 1950, nor why half the Eaton Hall estate in Ghesire went in 1919; the family could certainly have afforded to keep them. It can only have been to release funds which could be used elsewhere. The revenue from the Pimlico sale was doubtless used to develop the Reay estate; Douglas Sutherland has said: "It is hard to imagine any modern bricks and mortar tycoon spending surplus profits or investing capital in the way that the Grosvenor Estates have in the north of Scotland, with no thought of ultimate gain." Nor can one imagine one of our tycoons
giving
land to Westminster City Council and Westminster Housing Association, as the 2nd Duke did, so that workpeople could be housed at reasonable rents near to their place of work. During the agricultural depression of thethirties, he handed back to his tenants fifty per cent of their rents.
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It is surprising that such a Well-known family should be so secretive, and that they should have managed so well to retain their privacy. Little of any detail is known about the dukes of Westminster. Bend Or is perhaps the most familiar, as his reputation for womanising kept him in the public eye, and led him four times to the marriage register. His name, incidentally, derives initially from his grand­father's horse Bend Or, who won the Derby in the year in which the 2nd Duke was born - 1879. To discover why the racehorse had such a curious name, one must go beyond 1879 by nearly 500 years. Between 1386 and 1390 there was a bitter dispute between Sir Robert Grosvenor and Sir Richard Scrope as to which of the two families had the right to bear arms "azure, a bend or". Grosvenor had borne such arms since the time of Hugh Lupus, but Scrope challenged the right, and eventually won the day, with a decision of the King's in his favour. Grosvenor thereupon changed his arms to "azure, a garb or", which his descendant the Duke of Westminster keeps to this day, although the original "bend or" arms have not been forgotten; hence the Derby winner and the 2nd Duke's nickname.

According to a recent account Bend Or was trapped into his first marriage with Constance Cornwallis-West in 1901 by the mischievous character of the Prince of Wales, who told him that he could not avoid the honourable course of marriage, as he had been spied alone with the lady in the garden.
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They were divorced in 1919. The fol­lowing year he married Violet Nelson, divorcing her in 1926, and the Hon. Loelia Ponsonby in 1930. Of this marriage we have some record. They were divorced in 1947, when the Duke took his last bride, Anne Sullivan.

The picture of Bend Or's private character, as portrayed by his third wife, is not particularly endearing, but it rings true, as it accords with what little information we have as the character of his ancestors. Loelia Ponsonby was the grand-daughter of Grey, Queen Victoria's Private Secretary for the last twenty-five years of her life. Conse­quently, she had been brought up in a grace and favour apartment in St James's Palace, heavily protected by governesses and hardly allowed to be seen until she "came out". She had no preparation whatever for marriage to a difficult man like Bend Or.

He proposed in flamboyant fashion, indicating nonetheless a secret shyness. He sent Loelia a letter with a message to expect a present by special courier, and asking her to reply by the same courier. The present was a sapphire engagement ring. Thereafter he was constantly placing diamond necklaces under her pillow, in her handbag, by her breakfast plate. Only later did she realise that these gifts were as nothing when proffered by a man with "a most treacherous nature, filled with jealousy to a quite impossible degree". His jealousy hinged upon a terrible fear that Loelia would enjoy herself more with almost anyone else than with him; she was to him like a possession. He even told her that she must stop seeing her own mother, and must choose between them. He had been used to having his own way, selfishness had become the rule of his life. Accordingly, he would change plans, obey whims and fancies, with no one else to consider but himself. He was not prepared to amend these habits for his wife. On the other hand, he appears to have been surrounded by the most miserable kind of sycophants, who were thrilled to be near a man with so much money, and would never gainsay him. "He only liked what he called 'genuine people', and his only criterion for selecting these people seemed to be that they were complete nonentities."
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The Duke took their side against his wife on many occasions, permitting them to treat her as an interloper in the marital home. Such a situation could not long continue. The 12th Duke of Bedford, Hastings the Pacifist, was similarly governed by selfishness and subservience to flattery, and his marriage suffered in like fashion.

The day that he died, Chips Channon wrote: "So Bend Or the great Duke of Westminster is dead at last; magnificent, courteous, a mixture of Henry VIII and Lorenzo il Magnifico, he lived for pleasure - and women - for seventy-four years. His wealth was incal­culable; his charm overwhelming; but he was restless, spoilt, irritable, and rather splendid in a very English way. He was fair, handsome, lavish; yet his life was an empty failure; he did few kindnesses, leaves no monument."
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His life was not a failure if you count the achievements of the estate, but it was if you consider that he found it impossible to know anyone or have anyone know him in any really intimate way. If he did few kindnesses, it was because he didn't know how to; he hadn't the knack. Just as the Churchills and the Russells have been strangers to each other from one generation to the next, have made no effort to understand each other, with the result that they have been imprisoned and scared, locked up in their own personality. A different view is given by the Duke of Manchester, who found Bend Or "one of the most generous, kind-hearted fellows in the world
...
he has been a disappointed man".
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But Manchester had not the equipment to understand him properly - he was obeying an instinct for solidarity.The 1st Duke, Bend Or's grandfather, was uncommunicative in precisely the same way. His own mother described him as "pinched and dry", or "Mr Poker", and one entry in her diary tells us that he was "more amiable than usual which does not mean much".
^lv
His sons found him awesome, stern and distant, and of them he had no good opinion. He thought them a bunch of weak dissipated charac­ters, unworthy of the name they carried, and he did not try to know them better. If we go back a further generation, we find that the 1st Duke was, in his turn, harshly criticised and rebuked throughout his boyhood and youth by
his
father, the 2nd Marquess of Westminster, who held him in no great esteem or affection.
¹⁴
The Marquess suffered from precisely the same hereditary problems of being closed and cold, a perpetual solitary mystery, priggish and unapproachable, and totally humourless. His wife wrote to her mother, "I sometimes tell him he is not
demonstrative
enough and nobody would know if he is pleased or not."
¹⁵

Another thread of personality which runs throughout the Grosvenor family is a passionate obsession with horses and horse-racing. The 1st Earl Grosvenor could not even spare the time to receive his title, so devoted was he to the turf: "yesterday when he should have kissed hands, he was gone to Newmarket to see the trial of a race horse".
¹⁶
He seems to have spent far too much time, and money by the turf altogether; his debts amounted to £180,000, which his heirs had to settle,
¹⁷
bearing in mind perhaps that it was worth it, for he had been the greatest breeder of racing-stock in his day. Racehorses were a passion to every subsequent generation, and the 1st Duke was the proud owner of four Derby winners.

It should not be forgotten, also, that they have uniformly been courageous, if a trifle unconventional, in wartime. Bend Or was mentioned in despatches in the Great War, and received the Legion d'Honneur and the D.S.O. for bravery.

When he died in 1953, the Grosvenor Estates were faced with an unprecedented bill for death duties, amounting to £20 million and requiring a whole sub-department of the Inland Revenue to be established to deal with it. As the 3rd Duke, Bend Or's cousin, was a permanent invalid unable to deal with the matter, all decisions were taken by George Ridley and the Trustees, including the plan to launch into a world-wide expansion which was so successful that it more than recovered the £20 million lost to the Exchequer. The 2nd Duke made provision before his death that no such disaster should occur again on such an extravagant scale. His two successors in the title were both elderly men, both childless, and both likely to bring upon the estate further intolerable tax bills in quick succession.
Even
the resilient Grosvenor Estate could not easily have survived three such debts. The terms of Bend Or's will divided the family assets into a twenty-part trust fund, limiting as far as possible the amount of wealth which could be assigned to any one member of the family. The arrangement whereby the Duke was in sole posses­sion of all assets, and had a personal income of £1 a minute, no longer applies, although the present Duke did very well out of the scheme; he had three parts of the trust by the terms of the will, to which another three parts were added on the death of the 3rd Duke, and a fur­ther three when the 4th Duke died. When only the heir, he owned nine- twentieths of the Grosvenor family assets, which in 1975 amounted to something over £70 million.

The 5th Duke of Westminster (born 1910) succeeded his brother in 1967. He was born plain Mr Grosvenor, the junior member of a junior branch of the family, thrust into prominence by the barren­ness of his predecessors. While still a commoner, he pursued a political career with some assiduity, as M.P. for Fermanagh and South Tyrone from 1955 to 1964, and then as Senator for Northern Ireland, which he had long considered home; his mother was born in Ireland. For two years he was Parliamentary Private Secretary to the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, Selwyn Lloyd; was a Freeman of the City of London and the City of Chester, and a frequent spokesman on Northern Ireland affairs, where he was a cautious sup­porter of reform, but by degrees and within the United Kingdom. "In this country you have to hurry very slowly," he once said.
¹⁸

The 5th Duke, generally known as "Pud", undertook a funda­mental reorganisation of the estate management almost as soon as he inherited. The cosy system of ducal head and chief agent, assisted by family trustees, could no longer cope with an empire of such size. He established a committee of four executive managers, each the head of his own department, and with his own staff. One was responsible for the London estate alone, another for the agricultural and forestry estates, a third was concerned with urban developments, and a fourth with various offshoot companies. Some superfluous properties were sold, such as the Bridgwater estate in Shropshire, bought in 1950 and sold for £2 million in 1972. A smaller concrete house was built at Eaton, with a sensible number of bedrooms. The Duke kept his house in Ireland, and naturally used a flat in his own Eaton Square when in London.In 1946 Pud married the Hon. Viola Lyttelton, daughter of Lord Cobham and a Cavendish. They had two daughters, one of whom, Leonora, married the photographer Earl of Lichfield in 1975, and the other married the Duke of Roxburghe in 1977. Their son is the present Duke, born in 1951. On this young man alone rests the future of the coronet, for he is the last male descendant of the 1st Duke. Although the 1st Duke had seven sons by his first wife, and two more by his second, the heirs male of the body have dwindled by a series of misfortunes to one. The 1st Duke's heir, who was passionately fond of engineering (like the Duke of Richmond) and was often to be found in the railway workshops at Crewe, died at the age of thirty. He was an epileptic. Bend Or was his son, and Bend Or's son and heir died at the age of five in 1909. The title then swept over to a mysterious man, son of the 1st Duke's third son, whose history is kept very much secret. The 3rd Duke is variously described as "an invalid",
¹⁹
or as a man who "lived in retirement".
²⁰
The Times
obituary-covers only three lines, less than has generally been accorded even to a footballer. Elsewhere he earns a reference as "a solitary old man who used to breed heavy-laying ducks".
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