Westminster follies
Auberon Waugh
For twenty-five years since the death of the second duke in 1953, the dukedom of Westminster has been effectively in abeyance. From 1953 to 1963 the title was held by an unmarried cousin whom nobody ever saw — he may not have been an invalid in the sense that the poor old Duke of Gloucester was an invalid, given to biting visitors in the leg —but he was certainly too loopy to count for much. Thereafter the title but not, one gathers, the possessions went to two brothers, one childless and both over 55 at the time of their inheritance. Everything, in fact, was being held in trust for the young man who emerged .last week as the sixth duke, sole possessor of a fortune worth between £500 million and £2,000 million. Through prudent management, the only heavy slice of death duty was that payable on the death of Bend Or, the odious and profligate second duke, in 1953, whose persecution of his brother-in-law, Lord Beauchamp, made him the original White's Club Shit of the Year. To raise the £12 million payable on Bend Or's death, Pimlico was sold. The old brute used to boast in Who's Who that he owned 600 acres of London whereas even Dempster puts the present holding at a mere 300 acres. But for the last 25 years, under three caretaker dukes, the estate has simply been getting more and more valuable until now it devolves through a complicated system of trusts, entails, private companies, pension schemes, meetings with gloomy little men in offices and, no doubt, hundreds of thousands of pounds worth of Counsel's opinions, all on the grinning young head of the sixth duke, aged 26. The operation would appear to have been successful.
So far as I can see, there is no heir to the dukedom after young Gerald. The Grosvenors have always sailed rather close to the wind in the matter of male heirs — this duke is the first to have inherited the title from his father. From the earliest years, I was brought up to believe that in some turret or clock tower at Eaton Hall, or in some cottage on an outlying farm of the estate, there lived a crazy old woman who was, in fact, the rightful Duke of Westminster, having quietly changed her sex over the years. Obviously one would not care to identify her or him from the family pedigree in Burke, and I do not know whether she is still alive. Perhaps she explains why the family decided to knock down Eaton Hall. Or perhaps one day she will come down from the north, twirling her fine gunner moustaches, to claim her rightful inheritance and cause havoc among the trustees, investment advisers and Chancery silks. One almost hopes so, of course, but why? Is it honest mischief, undirected malice, or is it the horrible sin of envy which is destroying our society and threatens us all, on our different levels, with the jealous hatred of those underneath?
Of course, there is no reason why we should feel particularly well disposed to the Grosvenors. In over 800 hundred years of hanging around Cheshire, they have produced one field-marshal and one Fellow of All Souls. Since their ennoblement they have done nothing whatever except be rich. Parts of London are better preserved than they might have been under divided ownership, except that nearly all the capitals of Europe are better preserved than London, presumably because the dispersal of ownership forces governments to preserve them. The Grosvenors have destroyed Mayfair and put up the horrible American Embassy in Grosvenor Square.
But this is no reason for wishing them ill. They are no greedier than small landlords or small developers, and probably rather less greedy than many. They have never done me any harm, in fact rather the reverse. I was a tenant of the Grosvenor estate in Chester Row from 1961 until 1964, and sold the shortish lease on my house at the end of that time for much more than I had paid. One can see all the arguments for preserving them, even if they can't see the arguments for preserving Eaton Hall — one of Waterhouse's most important domestic commissions and comparable in importance with the Prudential Assurance building in Holborn. It is just that when one contemplates the grinning young couple and thinks about the modern house which they have apparently built in place of Eaton Hall — it has fourteen bedrooms, one fewer than my own modest residence — one is visited by a sort of philosophical despair. This grinning couple does not represent the summit of any aristocratic or hierarchial society. It does not represent the summit of some imaginary pyramid of material expectations. They do not even have a useful purpose as food for a nursery maid's dreams, so thin on the ground are nursery maids nowadays. They are nothing at all — an irrelevance, a sport of some random computer mechanism which puts them where they are for no greater purpose than to be gaped at. They are in fact a denial of all the envy, all the greed, all the wistfulness of our consumer society. They are an absurdity.
There is disagreement among gossip columnists about whether the young man is worth £500 million, or £800 million, or up to £2,000 million (Dempster). Momentarily, one catches one's breath. All this and a dukedom too! Even his pretty young wife must be something of an heiress since her uncle, fair young Wernher, died. Reading how one of her own sisters is to be a duchess, how one of her husband's has already achieved the happy state (even if the other married a photographer) one finds oneself catching one's breath. Perhaps it is all a pack of lies— England is the same as it always was, nothing has changed. Like the recent General Strike, which we can now see to have been got up by the press, the 'irreversible shift of wealth' is no more than', a bad dream, the product of Mr Benn's fevered imagination and our own paranoia. If these noble people can survive on 98 per cent income tax, 75 per cent Capital Transfer Tax, 661 per cent Development Land Tax, 30 per cent Capital Gains Tax, the permanent threat of a capital levy and inflation on money savings bound to hit 25 per cent before the end of the year, what right have we to complain about the difficulty of paying school fees out of taxed income? What right have we to complain if we now regularly drink anonymous red wine instead of Burgundy for luncheon, if our dear wives quietly use sunflower oil instead of olive oil and hope we don't notice the difference? The young Westminsters, God bless them, presumably are not worried by such matters but with a fortune of that size there must be problems. If one's idea of heaven is eating pâté de foie gras to the sound of trumpets, all the geese of the Languedoc and the Quercy will immediately give up their livers, every trumpeter in the land will beat a path to one's door. And before long, one would hate the taste of goose liver, the sound of brass. If one's idea of heaven is to be delicately massaged by beautiful Thai girls, the same considerations must apply. The sad truth is that the modern world is simply not adjusted to the subtler pleasures of the very rich — the joys of grandeur, of power and deference, of magnanimity and artistic patronage. I have written often and long about the evils of primogeniture, which I regard as being the greatest single cause of the English disease. The young Duke of Westminster is the living embodiment of it in all its absurdity, best expressed in the paradox that nobody really knows whether he is worth £500 million or £2,000 million. God knows I am no egalitarian, but anybody can see that our society would be a healthier and more resilient organism, and privilege would have a better chance of surviving, if 200 families had £10 million each. In the years or months before he is nationalised, the young man might cast his mind over the very few things he can in fact do. He might buy up the New Statesman and try to inject some vitality there. He might rebuild Waterhouse's comic masterpiece of 1870 stone by stone even to the campanile which played 'Home Sweet Home'. He might bring pressure on the Americans to pull down their revolting embassy and restore Grosvenor Square to its former glory. But • for heaven's sake, young man, do something.
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