Earl’s twin brother left just £250k in £18m will
BEING a younger son in an aristocratic family can be hard to take. But for a twin brother, it’s even more galling. Due to being born just a few minutes later, Martin Janson has had to watch his brother Alistair become the 25th Earl of Sutherland and inherit the bewitching 120,000 acres of Dunrobin Castle in Sutherland.
And now Martin appears to have suffered another blow from beyond the grave.
I can reveal that he has been left just £250,000 in the £18million will that his mother, Elizabeth, Countess of Sutherland, wrote three days before she died last December aged 98. By contrast, his sister, Lady Annabel Bainton, was bequeathed £3.5 million.
Newly published probate documents confirm that the Countess made a new will, determining the fate of her vast fortune, drawn up with the assistance of Farrer & Co, the Queen’s solicitors.
Elizabeth left £25,000 to each of her grandchildren, £10,000 to each of her great-grandchildren, and £5,000 both to Alistair’s current wife, Gillian, and to his first wife, Eileen.
Farrer explains that it cannot comment, nor could staff at the 189room castle, which the Countess and Alistair restored to its former glory after years of institutional use as a boys’ boarding school and opened it to the public.
Elizabeth had inherited the castle when her uncle, the 5th Duke of Sutherland, died childless in 1963.
The Countess, who was also Chief of Clan Sutherland, was orphaned at
the age of ten, before becoming, in quick succession, a Land Girl during World War II, a proficient linguist and an accomplished laboratory technician.
A fellow aristocrat expresses confidence that neither Alistair nor Martin will have been taken aback by their mother’s last gasp will.
‘They are a very well advised family,’ he assures me. ‘All sorts of other trusts and so forth — dating back many years — will apply. And I’m sure that lots will have been handed over during her lifetime.’