Keith Schellenberg
Former owner of Eigg
BORN MAY 13, 1929 – DIED OCTOBER 28, 2019, AGED 90
FOR 20 years Keith Schellenberg owned the Scottish island of Eigg, but the dream ended up a nightmare with prolonged legal disputes.
Being the heir to a glue-making fortune meant money was never really a problem for Yorkshire-born Schellenberg, the issue was how he would release his high energy levels.
Playing rugby for both Yorkshire and Middlesbrough helped when he was a young man and put him in good shape for the British Olympic bobsleigh team – which he captained in the 1956 Winter Olympics – and in the luge in the 1964 Winter Olympics.
In the mid 1970s he paid £270,000 for Eigg with his second wife Margaret, setting out to make the island self-sufficient and attractive to tourists.
Although a lot of building work was done and properties improved, he started falling out with his tenants who complained he had stopped paying for essential repairs.
In a telling BBC interview he complained: “My ultimate failure with Eigg is that I can’t be bothered to try and get on with them any more.”
A shed housing his prized Rolls Royce was burned down in a 1994 arson attack.
A year later he sold the island for £1.5million to a German called Maruma Gotthilf, whose creditors later sold to an island trust.
In 1964 with the Liberals he tried to win the Richmond seat in Yorkshire but was unsuccessful.
He later got into financial difficulties with expensive libel actions against The Sunday Times and The Guardian.
His four wives were Jan Hagenbach, Margaret de Hauteville Hamilton, Susan Urquhart and Jilly Miller, who survives him.