‘Lady Bath? She’s a ghastly racist bitch’
Tin hats on! You read about the mud slinging at Longleat... now here comes the most stinging, non-PC riposte of all
THESE should be the happiest of times for Suzanna McQuiston. It’s not every mother whose beautiful daughter has just married into one of the most famous aristocratic families in the country. Or who can dote on an adorable 11-month-old grandson, a boy destined to become, in time, the Marquess of Bath.
As she prepares to move into a delightful seven-bedroom late-16th Century manor house on the 10,000-acre Longleat estate, Suzanna – an elegantly wellpreserved 71-year-old – could be forgiven for thinking it was all quite a dream come true.
Yet Longleat is now in turmoil, and so are those who live there, gripped by a family feud more befitting Albert Square than a 400-year-old seat of aristocracy.
There have been accusations of racism and snobbery, bullying and rank incompetence – and none of those involved have been more wounded than Suzanna and her daughter Emma, the 29-year-old who is set to become Britain’s first black marchioness. Beside herself with anger at the way she and her family have been treated, Mrs McQuiston has finally been driven to give this, her first interview, setting out in the frankest terms imaginable her disdain for the woman she says is behind the whole poisonous saga – Anna Thynn, the Marchioness of Bath.
Lady Bath, wife of the current marquess, is not merely ‘ghastly’, says Suzanna, she is ‘racist’, and a ‘bitch’ who stirs up trouble whenever she arrives at Longleat from her permanent home in Paris.
‘All the years Emma was growing up, we never encountered any racism,’ says Suzanna at her multi-million pound cottage, near Kensington Palace in London. ‘We’ve been lucky until now. I’ve known Anna for years but I won’t speak to her again as long as I live.’
There is no doubt that the past few years have been difficult ones at Longleat, famous for its safari park and the colourful antics of the current Marquess, with his string of ‘wifelet’ lovers and curious taste in erotic art. There was astonishment when Lord and Lady Bath failed to attend their 41-year-old son Ceawlin’s marriage to Emma in 2013, which came not long after Ceawlin – Viscount Weymouth – removed several of his father’s lurid self-painted murals from the walls of Longleat House.
That same year, the newly appointed chief executive of the safari park left suddenly in unexplained circumstances. Ceawlin, who had taken over the running of the estate in 2010, was left to face angry staff and estate residents – and to tell the world why a surplus of lion cubs had, controversially, to be put down.
Now it seems that the colour of Emma’s skin has become an issue, with 41-year-old Ceawlin lambasting his own mother for her attitude.
In recent days, he made the damaging claim that his mother said to him: ‘Are you sure about what you’re doing to 400 years of bloodline?’ Sources close to Ceawlin insist she has in fact said it on more than one occasion.
Ceawlin was apparently so incensed by her remarks that he banned her from the wedding and even put security on the door to ensure she did not attend. Lord and Lady Bath have denied this version of events, saying they failed to attend their son’s wedding because they accepted an invitation elsewhere.
Recent months have been all the more distressing for Suzanna because for years she and Emma enjoyed a harmonious relationship with the Baths. Indeed, Suzanna has not one child in the family but two.
She shows me a striking family photograph taken for Hello! magazine at the 1989 wedding of her eldest son, Iain – who is Emma’s half-brother – to Lady Silvy Thynne, the much younger half-sister of Lord Bath. She kept the ‘e’ in the surname; Lord Bath dropped it in the 1970s.
It was not long before the McQuistons were looked upon as something akin to locals in the nearby estate village of Horningsham in Wiltshire.
In Suzanna’s view, trouble began with the announcement in 2012 that
She is from Hungary, for God’s sake. We’re more British than she is
Ceawlin wanted to marry her daughter, whose father is the Nigerian oil tycoon Ladi Jadesimi. ‘Anna won’t acknowledge Emma. It’s a race thing,’ Suzanna says. ‘Why would anyone say such a thing if they weren’t racist? Would she have said it about a white girl? Anna’s just ghastly. And she’s Hungarian for God’s sake. ‘We’re more British than she is.’ When The Mail on Sunday spoke to Lady Bath, 71, she said she preferred to make no comment about the claims. ‘Ceawlin wouldn’t lie,’ continues Suzanna. ‘He’s been pushed to the very limit. He and Emma spoke out to set the record straight and I want to speak out on behalf of them.
‘Anna has said more things than that. I can assure you that’s probably the least awful thing she has said to Ceawlin. People are always saying Alexander [Lord Bath] is mad, but I think Anna is.
‘Ceawlin is so hurt by it all. He loves his father and would like things to be better but every time his mother stays at Longleat she poisons Alexander against him. She is the culprit. Nobody else at Longleat likes her. People know that when she comes, it’s hell there.’
Some of these tensions will spill out in a new BBC documentary series, All Change At Longleat, that starts tomorrow. In the first episode, Jeff, the house steward, claims that Lord Bath’s movements are governed by his wife. Suzanna is more forthright.
‘She bullies Alexander,’ Suzanna says. ‘He’s scared of her; he’s cowed. I asked him once, “Why are you afraid of her?” He ran into the bathroom and hid from me. He’s like a child.
‘Do you know, Ceawlin often gave his mother lovely presents but several days later he’d find them on his bed with a note saying, “This is not suitable for me.”
‘She’s a bitch. We’ve been trying to rise above it all for the sake of this little one,’ she says looking adoringly at her grandchild, John, whom she is looking after while Emma and Ceawlin are abroad. ‘He’s got the love of his parents and all the love of us,’ Suzanna says. ‘We’re a family. If Anna doesn’t want to be part of it that’s up to her,’ Suzanna says. ‘She’s never seen John. She hasn’t even looked in the pram.’
She is clearly a devoted grandmother and, with her other daughter, Samantha – Emma’s 50-year-old halfsister – often babysits the 11-monthold. That’s why she has been granted a home on the estate previously listed for rent at £4,000 a month.
Suzanna admits she is currently staying rent-free but expects she will have to pay eventually.
‘I’m at Longleat when Emma and Ceawlin are there and then, when they’re in London, we come back. We follow them around,’ she says.
‘I’ve spent tons of money on it already. The garden had become rather overgrown so I’ve already had the landscape gardeners in.’
All decidedly impressive, yet she has little time for those who label her ‘upwardly mobile’.
‘It annoys me that people talk about Emma as though she’s come from some ordinary life and has now been swept into the doors of Longleat.
She grew up in Belgravia and we’ve known this family for years.
‘I suppose we’re like the Middletons,’ she adds referring to the Duchess of Cambridge’s family. ‘They’re always being got at aren’t they?’ That said, there’s no denying that Suzanna has come a long way from Weymouth, Dorset, where she grew up. Born Eileen Patience Pike, she hated her name and officially changed it to Suzanna in the 1990s.
She met her husband, Iain McQuiston, a ‘star salesman’, in Weymouth when she was 17. They married just six months and her son Iain, now 53, was born when she was 18. Samantha came along two years later. Emma was born in 1986. The documentary contains a number of excruciating moments – including the first awkward public meeting between Ceawlin and his father since a disagreement at the annual country fair. Lord Bath, who walks with sticks, hobbles along with Trudi, a fish-lipped wifelet. There is a scene in which the lions are fed a severed horse’s head.
Emma, meanwhile, is shown looking lonely, rattling round the 10,000-acre estate while Ceawlin is at work. Her only responsibility appears to be learning how to manoeuvre the Silver Cross pram (a favourite of the Royals) around her cramped apartments.
A number of the villagers shown in the series seem critical of Ceawlin and his handling of the estate, but Suzanna is firmly in his camp. ‘That guy is so nice and so entirely different from his father,’ Suzanna gushes. ‘He’s trying to turn Longleat back into a lovely place and is doing a fantastic job. Maybe they [Lord and Lady Bath] are jealous that Ceawlin is making great improvements to Longleat that they between them never managed to do.
‘Daphne, Ceawlin’s grandmother, expressed her wish that it would become a wonderful family home again. I hope it does.’ For now, though, the great house contains a family divided against itself.