Mark Roper
Saviour of Forde Abbey in Dorset, whose drive and ingenuity secured the former monastery’s future
MARK ROPER, who has died aged 86, was the devoted custodian for 50 years of Forde Abbey in West Dorset.
The former Cistercian monastery founded in the 12th century was one of England’s richest monastic institutions, and became the property of the Crown during the Dissolution in 1539. It was transformed into a private home a century later by Edmund Prideaux, Oliver Cromwell’s Attorney General.
In the 18th century the house and its estate were the property of Prideaux’s daughter Margaret and her husband Francis Gwyn (who served as Queen Anne’s Secretary of War) and then their descendants, before passing through a succession of owners until it was left to Elizabeth Roper by a cousin. She and her husband, Freeman Roper, moved into the Abbey in 1905.
Mark Roper, born on June 27 1935, was one of four children of Elizabeth’s son Geoffrey and his wife Diana. His growing up at Forde Abbey was in the shadow of wartime, then of post-war austerity, and Geoffrey’s watchword was frugality. According to Mark’s brother Christopher (later a Reuters journalist who covered the death of Che Guevara), “[Geoffrey] lived like a modern self-sufficient farmer.”
Although the family had ready access to home-killed meat and produced their own eggs and butter, their father insisted that the family kept to the rations specified by the government. His passion, meanwhile, was trees, and in the 1930s he planted a multitude of oaks with no thought of seeing a return in his lifetime.
On leaving Bradfield College, Mark did National Service with the Rifle Brigade, serving in Kenya during the Mau Mau Uprising, before reading Estate Management at Magdalene College, Cambridge. Then, in 1959, he took over the running of Forde Abbey from his father.
Explaining his philosophy for securing the Abbey’s future, Mark Roper liked to quote from Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s novel The
Leopard: “If we want things to go on as they are, we have to change.”
With no family fortune to fall back on, he was well aware that an income from honey, apples, hen and duck eggs, coppiced products from the woods, and a modest harvest of Christmas trees, was never going to keep the Ropers at Forde Abbey into the 21st century. His grandfather had considered selling to America the priceless Mortlake tapestries, woven from cartoons painted by Raphael and hanging on the walls of the Abbey’s Saloon. He had been unable to secure a deal, and Mark was determined that the tapestries should stay where they were.
He opened the house and gardens to the public several days a week (instead of only six times a year) and set about repairing the fabric of the Abbey with the help of the architect Richard Tyler, noted for his restoration of large private houses. Tyler observed: “The great thing about Forde Abbey is that for the past 300 years none of its owners has been rich enough to seriously mess it up.”
To help pay for this Roper explored new business ventures, often with local partners, among them growing soft fruit, initially blackcurrants, and then strawberries and raspberries, to exploit the Pick-your-own market. He very successfully expanded his father’s small forest nursery to produce Sitka spruce for forestry management companies in Scotland; joined a local farming family in a goat-milking business; and developed a plant nursery in the kitchen garden.
His wife Lisa, meanwhile, ensured that the house offered a warm welcome to all who visited them and supported him in all these enterprises; it was she who established the Abbey’s world-famous herd of Devon cattle.
Roper loved the 30 acres of gardens at the Abbey, and was delighted when, in 1992, Forde Abbey was named the Historic Houses Association’s Garden of the Year. In 2005, to celebrate the Roper family’s centenary as custodians of the Abbey, he installed a fountain which spouts water more than 35 metres into the air from one of the ponds. He reckoned that this feature increased visitor numbers by 10 per cent in its first year.
Under Roper’s aegis Forde Abbey also became a favoured destination for musicians seeking to exploit the superb acoustics of the Great Hall – the violinist Nigel Kennedy was among those who liked to record there. The Abbey was also in demand as a film location, in productions such as Far From the Madding Crowd (2015); Restoration (1995), based on the novel by Rose Tremain; and the BBC series Daniel Deronda (2002).
In 2009 Roper and his wife moved into the Home Farm, handing over the stewardship of Forde Abbey to their eldest daughter Alice and her husband Julian Kennard.
Mark Roper served as a High Sheriff of Dorset. He was also Wessex branch chairman of the Historic Houses Association, and twice chairman of the Dorset branch of the Country Landowners’ Association (now the Country Land and Business Association).
Racing was a lifelong enthusiasm, and for many years he was a regular presence at big meetings at Newmarket, York, Chester, Ascot and Goodwood. He had an encyclopaedic memory for pedigrees and for the winners of Classic races. A voracious reader, he had a fondness for the work of Beatrix Potter, frequently naming his dogs after her characters.
Roper married, in 1967, Lisa Bagot, whose family own Levens Hall, near Kendal; she survives him with their three daughters, Alice, Victoria and Lucinda. He is buried in the arboretum planted by his father at Forde Abbey after the Second World War.