OBITUARY - Gerald Grosvenor, The Duke of Westminster

Gerald Grosvenor, The 6th Duke of Westminster

The 6th Duke of Westminster, who has died aged 64, was Britain’s richest aristocrat, with a fortune estimated at more than £8 billion , based on an inheritance of 300 acres of Mayfair and Belgravia.

The Duke owned the freehold of much of London’s most expensive real estate, including Grosvenor, Belgrave and Eaton Squares and such landmarks as the Connaught and Lanesborough hotels and the American embassy – which paid him a rent of one peppercorn a year.

Under his leadership the Grosvenor Estate imposed rigid rules on tenants to preserve the cream stucco uniformity of Belgravia and the Georgian brick terraces of Mayfair. It was also notably businesslike – verging on the ruthless, according to critics – when it came to setting rents. The Duke voiced strong opposition to the Major government’s 1993 leasehold reforms, which gave leaseholders (including those in the most valuable homes which had been excluded from earlier legislation) the right to buy their freeholds.

The idea that he should be compelled to sell pieces of his estate on unfavourable terms was, he declared “utterly against the principles of a land-owning democracy”, noting that a large number of Tory MPs stood to benefit from the legislation as Grosvenor tenants. He resigned from the Conservative Party in protest.

Besides its London holdings, the Grosvenor empire included shopping centres throughout Britain – in recent years he transformed the centre of Liverpool (and the city’s fortunes) by pouring millions into developing the shopping complex known as Liverpool One. The development is said to attract 28 million shoppers annually.

There were also commercial properties in the United States, Canada and Australia, and a variety of other investments in Europe and the Far East. The empire’s total value was the subject of annual guesswork by the compilers of lists of Britain’s richest residents, among whom the Duke rarely dropped out of the top five.

It was not a calculation which much troubled him, however. “It would drive me bonkers if I thought too deeply about it – woke up during the night thinking, say, £100 million had been wiped off our value,” he told an interviewer in 1993. “I sleep well.”

Though he undertook some 200 public engagements a year for charity, he preferred a quiet family life at Eaton Hall, his Cheshire seat.

His most satisfying escape from ducal responsibilities came as a long-serving Territorial Army officer. He spent at least one weekend a month on exercise among down-to-earth soldiers from the North of England who treated him, to his relief, as they would any other officer.

Fond of Churchill’s remark that “the only time the Grosvenors were any good was when they were at war”, he rose to command the Queen’s Own Yeomanry, and in 2000 he was promoted to brigadier.

In 2004 he  was appointed to the new post of Assistant Chief of the Defence Staff (Reserves and Cadets), with promotion to major-general. He stepped down from this role in 2007 and in 2011 was appointed Deputy Commander Land Forces (Reserves) before retiring after 42 years’ service in 2012.

Gerald Cavendish Grosvenor was born on December 22 1951. He was the only son of Lt-Col Robert Grosvenor, Ulster Unionist MP for Fermanagh and County Tyrone (Britain’s westernmost constituency) and one-time parliamentary private secretary to Edward Heath. His mother was Viola Lyttleton, daughter of the 9th Viscount Cobham. The family home was a farm on the island of Ely on Lough Erne, near Enniskillen.

Gerald enjoyed what he once called a “Swallows and Amazons childhood” with his two sisters (who became in due course the Countess of Lichfield and the Duchess of Roxburghe, though both were divorced) and in later life lamented the fact that the accident of inheritance had taken him away from the placid life of an Ulster beef farmer like his father.

Having failed to gain a place at Eton he was despatched to Harrow, which he hated, leaving with only two O-levels. His talent was for sport, but a suggestion from George Cohen, manager of Fulham FC, that he should have a trial to join the club was vetoed by Col Grosvenor on the grounds of too much kissing on the pitch.

Gerald’s real ambition was to join the 9th/12th Lancers – the 4th Duke’s regiment – but he was already under pressure to take the reins of his inheritance. After a brief spell of freedom travelling in Canada and Australia, he assumed responsibility at the age of 19 for the management of the family’s vast estates and business interests.

The estates dated in origin from shortly after the Conquest, when William I granted lands in Cheshire to Hugh Lupus, “le gros veneur” or chief huntsman, with instructions to keep the troublesome Welsh borderers under control.

The duke’s direct line of descent traced from Robert le Grosvenor, who was granted the manor of Budworth in Cheshire in the 1170s. The Eaton estate was acquired by marriage in the mid-15th century, and Richard Grosvenor – the first MP in the family – was created a baronet in 1622.

It was in 1677 that Richard’s 21-year-old great-grandson Thomas married 12-year-old Mary Davies, sole heiress to the manor of Ebury, 430 acres of marshy farmland covering the area which now lies between Knightsbridge and the Thames and between Park Lane, Oxford Street and Bond Street.

The estate had been bequeathed by Hugh Audley, a City lawyer, to his nephew, Alexander Davies, a clerk who died in the plague of 1665; Davies’s widow set out to sell their child Mary’s hand in marriage to the highest bidder, gaining £5,000 for herself from Grosvenor.

Though the land was still largely open fields, its potential was apparent; once the building of Mayfair began in 1720 – Belgravia and Pimlico were 19th-century developments – the Grosvenor fortune began to multiply. By the 1890s, the annual rent roll of Mayfair alone amounted to £135,000, and the family was one of the richest in Europe.

As its wealth increased, so did its status: the barony of Grosvenor was created in 1761, the earldom in 1784 and the marquessate of Westminster in 1831. Finally, in 1874, the 3rd Marquess – a Knight of the Garter and former Liberal MP for Chester – was created the 1st Duke. It was the last non-royal dukedom to be created.

The 2nd Duke (grandson of the 1st) was the legendary “Bend Or”, an arrogant grandee, lover of Coco Chanel and tireless womaniser, four times married, who represented the apotheosis of flamboyant ducal style during the inter-war years.

But his only son died in childhood and in 1953 the dukedom passed to another grandson of the 1st Duke – William Grosvenor, a bachelor of diminished mind who lived in a bungalow at Whitstable and bred poultry.

This brought into the line as 4th Duke yet another grandson (by the 1st Duke’s second marriage), Colonel Gerald Hugh Grosvenor, who had no children, and as the 5th, in 1967, his brother Colonel Robert Grosvenor.

Provision had been made in the 2nd Duke’s will for the likelihood that young Gerald would eventually inherit. The Pimlico portion of the estate having been sold to pay death duties, the bulk of the remaining fortune was placed in trusts entailed to him, bypassing his three predecessors.

The weight of his future responsibilities did not sink in until he was 15, when his uncle the 4th Duke died and “everyone started to treat me differently”.

By 1970 his father had become ill, and it was apparent that Gerald would have to take complete control. The property crash of 1973 provided his first test, and instilled in him the need for tough management and long-term strategy.

When he inherited the dukedom in 1979, the estate was in debt and liable for another heavy tranche of death duties. But shrewd investment by the young duke and his advisers at home and overseas combined with lower tax rates and the property booms of the 1980s (and early 2000s) to turn it into a treasure chest.

Business was, however, always a lower priority for the Duke than his military and charitable duties and most of all, his family life. Fast cars (he had a notorious driving record) and a private aircraft enabled him to spend as much time as he could at home at Eaton Hall, set in 11,000 acres just outside Chester, where he sent his children to local day schools.

The landscape of the estate was meticulously managed (an entire golf course was removed by the duke for aesthetic reasons) but the house itself was a startling sight. The 1st Duke had commissioned a neo-Gothic palace by Alfred Waterhouse (architect of the Natural History Museum at South Kensington) which required a household staff of 300.

During the Second World War it had been used by the Army for officer training, and afterwards it was too dilapidated and impractical to maintain. The house was demolished, all except its clock tower, chapel and stable yard, and was replaced in 1973 by a modern, flat-roofed structure in concrete and marble – compared by critics to a county ambulance headquarters and dubbed the “Inn on the Park” by the Prince of Wales (who also observed that the Duke “employs more butlers than I do”).

Rather than rebuild Eaton Hall again, the Duke eventually added a pitched roof and sandstone cladding: “The overall effect,” noted Burke’s Peerage, “is curiously Germanic, as if a Schloss had been designed by Rennie Mackintosh.”

The Duke’s land holdings also included a 22,000-acre sporting estate at Abbeystead in Lancashire – where, in contrast to his unflamboyant way of life at Eaton Hall, he held shooting parties on the grandest Edwardian scale – and a vast tract of the Reay Forest in Sutherland. It was in Lancashire that he was taken ill.

His many charitable interests ranged from the NSPCC and the Drug and Alcohol Foundation to the Royal London Hospital, where he raised funds to build a new Children’s Unit, and the presidency of the Manchester 2000 Olympic Bid Committee.

Deeply concerned about land conservation and other rural issues, he rescued the Soil Association from financial difficulties and was a major backer of the Countryside Movement and the 1998 Countryside March.

In 2009 he began privately raising the funds for a £300 million purpose-built Defence and National Rehabilitation Centre for the treatment of injured members of the Armed Forces, at Stanford Hall, near Loughborough, to replace the facility at Headley Court in Surrey in 2018.

The Duke was appointed OBE (1995), KG (2003), CB (2008) and CVO (2012).

He married, in 1978, Natalia, daughter of Lt-Col Harold “Bunny” Phillips and a grand-daughter of Maj-Gen Sir Harold and Lady Zia Wernher, of Luton Hoo in Bedfordshire; Lady Zia was in turn the daughter of Grand Duke Michael of Russia.

The Duke and his Duchess had four children. ***Their daughters are: firstly, Lady Tamara Grosvenor born in 1979, who is married to Edward van Cutsem; secondly,  Lady Edwina Grosvenor born in 1981, who is married to Daniel Snow and  thirdly,  Lady Viola Grosvenor born in 1992. Their son Hugh, styled by courtesy Earl Grosvenor, was born in 1991 now succeeds to the dukedom and the other peerages. 

***Since The Telegraph neglected to include the names of the three daughters, I took the professional liberty of doing so.***

The 6th Duke of Westminster, born December 22 1951, died August 9 2016. 

Retrieved from The Telegraph by JuicyChitChats on Thursday August 11th 2016.

SOURCE - telegraph.co.uk

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