Dream on, ‘Sir’ Colin! TV whisky buff isn’t really a knight at all
WIDELY described as Sir Colin Hampden-White, the whisky expert sees his upper-crust credentials emphasised by streaming giant Amazon Prime, which on trailers for his show, The Three Drinkers, films him arriving at a Scottish castle in a chauffeur-driven Rolls-Royce.
H o w e v e r, I c a n r e v e a l t h a t t h e ‘aristocrat’ is not all he seems.
He is, in fact, a photographer who has no right to use the title of ‘Sir’, as he’s neither a knight nor a baronet. When I confront the phony knight, he admits his ‘title’ does not feature in Debrett’s Peerage, which contains a record of all titled families. ‘I didn’t go down on bended knee to be knighted by the Queen,’ he tells me. ‘As far as I’m aware, the family were given an honour under Edward III’s reign. He handed out some, and they weren’t recorded, so the Palace doesn’t put them in Debrett’s.’ A Debrett’s spokesman confirms: ‘Colin Hampden-White doesn’t have a hereditary title that would grant him the foretitle “Sir”.’
The whisky industry is peopled with many grandees with genuine titles, such as the Duke of Argyll, and the bumptious tippler, 49, has been happy for publications to describe him as ‘Sir Colin’. An article on Whisky Corner called him ‘a real live bone fide Sir’ and he’s referred to as ‘Sir’ on the website of Cask Trade, the business for which he’s listed as a nonexecutive director. ‘People have used it for me — they’ve used it in interviews and things,’ he tells me. ‘The family came across in the first millennium, and they were members of a chivalrous order, so I can use the title in Europe. I can’t put it on my passport, but I can use it.’
And there appears to be more than one explanation as to how his passion for whisky was ignited. He told Cask Trade: ‘I vividly remember being given a dram by a gamekeeper on a freezing cold shoot in Scotland when I was about 15 or so.’ Yet, in the interview with Whisky Corner, he says it was only when working as a photographer and tasked with taking pictures of so many distilleries that he was then asked to start writing about them, too.
FOREIGN holidays are being cancelled left, right and centre, but Zara Tindall is determined to travel abroad. I hear the Queen’s granddaughter will take her nine-month-old son, Lucas, to Australia for the first time next month. Olympian Zara will attend the Magic Millions equestrian event on the Gold Coast. ‘We are excited to be able to come back — I love Australia,’ says Zara.
COUNTESS Emma de Bendern — whose four husbands included my illustrious late predecessor Nigel Dempster — left more than £5.2 million in her will.
A granddaughter of the Marquess of Queensberry, Emma was said to have had the naughtiest face in London, and enjoyed flirting outrageously, dancing on tables, and arm-wrestling husbands at hunt balls.
The socialite, who died in January aged 70, left most of her estate to her three children: screenwriter Amber Trentham, Atalanta de Bendern, and artist Dmitri Galitzine.