The Dukes

by Brian Masters

  As visible proof that she was an heiress to be taken seriously, Mary was able to ride out in her own private coach, drawn by six horses, when she was still a child, and roughly contemporary with that other child heiress, Lady Elizabeth Percy, the last of the Percys, who took her estate into the Seymour family, whence some of it passed to the Smithsons. Little Mary Davies had nothing to compare with such an inheritance. There were problems from the beginning. The estate of Alexander Davies, her father, was weighed down in debt. An Act of Parliament was passed in 1675 to enable some of the estate to be sold on Mary's behalf to settle these debts. The part chosen for selling was Goring House and its grounds. This went to the Earl of Arlington, who left it to his daughter, the Duchess of Grafton, who sold it to the Duke of Buckingham, who demolished it and built a new house on the site in 1702, calling it Buckingham House, and then sold it to George III. It is now Buckingham Palace and has been Crown property ever since. In the grounds of the palace is a mulberry tree which traditionally dates from the time when this land belonged to Mary Davies.4

  Mary was known as the "Maid of Ebury" because she was a mere twelve years old when she married Sir Thomas Grosvenor at St Clement Dane's, her grandfather the Reverend Richard Dukeson officiating. From this nickname has sprung the erroneous story that Grosvenor married a milkmaid. She bore Sir Thomas five sons and three daughters, before she showed the first signs of losing her sanity. He died in 1700, at the age of forty-four, unable to make adequate provision for her protec­tion in time. After her husband's death, Mary Davies nearly lost the entire Ebury property to an unscrupulous pair of brothers called Fenwick, who, had they succeeded, would have cast the Grosvenors forever into obscurity. One Lodowick Fenwick, a Jesuit priest, took advantage of her fragility of mind to gain control of her movements and her decisions. She had become absurdly religious and quite unpredictably crazy, locking people in cupboards and wearing feathers on her sleeves to help her fly. In this condition, she became a virtual prisoner of Fenwick when they went to the continent. The priest's brother, Edward Fenwick, later claimed that he had married Mary in France, and that consequently he was the legal owner of her property. He gave notice to all the Grosvenor tenants that rents should henceforth be paid to him. Mary's cause was taken up by her guardian, Charles Gholmondeley, and the resulting trial was a constant source of interest in the capital. Mary's defence rested on six points:

  (1) that she had been disturbed in her mind since 1696

  (2) that Father Fenwick had acquired complete mastery over her,

  on occasion by force

  (3) that he sent home from France all her personal staff, and

  replaced them with his own relatives or appointees

  (4) that she had been weakened by drugs and bleeding

  (5) that she had no knowledge of any marriage with Edward

  Fenwick

  (6) that if such a ceremony had taken place, it would be null and

  void in the eyes of the law

  Amongst the body of evidence given as to her being drugged, there was testimony that opium had been placed in her poached eggs, and that she would throw hysterical scenes, hurling food at Fenwick and screaming that she was being poisoned.

  In spite of all this, and allowing for the fact that the Fenwicks were unprincipled rogues, the jury of the Queen's Bench found that the marriage, though forced, was valid, and they declared in favour of Fenwick.

  If we do not now refer to the Fenwick estates in Belgravia and Mayfair, it is because the matter was subsequently placed before the Court of Delegates of Sergeants Inn, who overturned the verdict. They found in favour of Lady Grosvenor, on the grounds that she was not compos mentis at the time of the alleged marriage, and imposed silence on Edward Fenwick for ever more. The Grosvenors were secure.5Mary lived until 1730, a complete lunatic for the last few years. Exactly one year later her grandson was born, Richard Grosvenor, the first in the family to be raised to the peerage, on the recommendation of Pitt, as Earl Grosvenor (1731-1802). He and his descendants continued to add to the family property buying the manor of Eccleston and the hamlet of Belgrave, and to maintain their close connec­tions with Chester, as mayors and Members of Parliament. His son, Robert Grosvenor (1767-1845), turned his attentions to the dreary tract of land inherited from Mary Davies, an area still unprepossess­ing, where clothes were hung out, bulls were baited, and dog-fights encouraged. Then, nearby Buckingham House was rebuilt as a royal palace in 1825, and Grosvenor saw his chance. To investigate what could be done to develop the site, he employed Thomas Cubitt who discovered that beneath the soggy clay was a stratum of gravel of some depth, which would support building. Grosvenor obtained an Act of Parliament in 1826 to permit him to drain the land and remove the topsoil of clay, which was burned into bricks, and Cubitt planned his elegant suburb to be built on the substratum of gravel. Five years later, "Belgravia" came into existence, while beneath its handsome exterior at high water in spring tides, the River Thames still flowed only a few feet below. Grosvenor was advanced one step further in the peerage as Marquess of Westminster.

  The wealth of the Grosvenors was now approaching vast propor­tions. Grosvenor's son had married Lady Elizabeth Leveson-Gower in 1819; a dynastic merging without precedent, for the bride was the daughter of the Duke of Sutherland and the Duchess-Countess of Sutherland, reputed to be the richest couple in Europe. (Lady Elizabeth, by the way, lived to the age of ninety-four, almost elbow­ing her way into the twentieth century.) It was their son, Hugh Lupus Grosvenor (1825-1899), who was made 1st Duke of West­minster in 1874, having become so rich that he could not be ignored. He consolidated his status by marrying his daughter Mar­garet to Prince Adolphus of Teck, the future Queen Mary's brother. Queen Victoria, with her keen eye for a bargain, wrote, "It is a vy good connection - ... & she will doubtless be well off.'"

  The Duke further consolidated his wealth, by taking as his first wife his own cousin, a daughter of the 2nd Duke of Sutherland. His second wife, Catherine Cavendish, lived until 1941. We are brought closer to the modern age by the 2nd Duke, his grandson, who lived from 1879 to 1953, and was always known as "Bend Or". He presided over the diversification of the Grosvenor estates and its growth into an international business, with interests on four conti­nents, superbly well managed, and large enough to compete with many a public corporation. "Bend Or" used to send back his shirts and linen from all over the world to his private laundry at Eaton Hall.7 The Duke's hydra-headed business was still a private family concern, the various companies subordinate, in the end, to the efficient running of his personal estate.

  Of course, the jewel in the crown is those 300 acres in London, 100 in Mayfair, and 200 in Belgravia. This was all Bend Or's per­sonal property, with which he could do as he pleased. One other man was involved in policy decisions, the agent, Mr George Ridley. It was a nineteenth-century system operating in the middle of the twentieth, but it worked because Ridley's vision and sound good sense inspired it. He had been with the family virtually all his life, his only qualifications for his huge responsibilities being those of experience and loyalty. Under Ridley's guidance, the Duke turned his attention to the Reay estate in the extreme north-west of Scot­land. This, which had been adjacent to the Sutherland property and had been absorbed by the Duke of Sutherland, was bought from him by the Duke of Westminster in 1870 (at the same time as he bought Cliveden from the same man). Since then, the Grosvenors had kept the estate together, supported it and maintained it, but done little to change the prospects of the 100,000 acres. Consequently, the area was gradually being deserted by its inhabitants, searching farther afield for fruitful employment and abandoning their unproductive land.

  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 immediatel
y, 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.8

  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.9 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."10 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."11

  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".12 But Manchester had not the equipment to understand him properly - he was obeying an instinct for solidarity.The 1st Duke, Bend Or's grandfath
er, 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.