The woes of a reluctant duke

The 6th Duke of Westminster The 6th was “a classic example of Duke of money buying everything Westminster except contentment”, said the 1951-2016 Daily Mail. As a young man, Gerald Cavendish Grosvenor unexpectedly inherited an immense fortune (now estimated at some £9bn) – and the heavy responsibilities that went with it. Ever afterwards, he “suffered permanent anxiety because of what he regarded as his lack of personal achievement”. Unsurprisingly, his stewardship of the vast family estates proved a full-time job. These comprised a portfolio of around 132,000 acres worldwide, including a prime 300 acres of central London. Yet to Grosvenor, who has died of a heart attack aged 64, it became more of a burden than a pleasure. “Given the choice, I would rather not have been born wealthy,” he once confessed. “But I never think of giving it up. I can’t sell. It doesn’t belong to me.” The name of Grosvenor originally derives from “gros veneur” (fat huntsman), the nickname of his ancestor Hugh Lupus, who served as huntsman to William the Conqueror, said The Guardian. For this service, Lupus was rewarded with land in Cheshire; but it was in 1677 that Thomas Grosvenor “cemented the family fortunes”, by marrying 12-year-old Mary Davies, heir to 500 acres of “boggy farmland” in what is now Mayfair and Belgravia. Gerald himself enjoyed a blissfully happy childhood far away from London, on an island on Lough Erne in Northern Ireland, where his father was a beef farmer and a local MP. Then came five years at Harrow, which he loathed and left with only two O-levels. At 15, he learned to his dismay that his father had become the 5th Duke of Westminster (his uncle, the 4th Duke, having died childless). The news, Grosvenor recalled, “almost made me run for the door”. It meant his life was no longer his own. As a last hurrah, he went travelling in the Middle East. From Iran, he telegraphed his father requesting money to buy an exquisite carpet. The reply came back: “Wrap carpet round head, have both examined.” Grosvenor slunk back to the imposing ducal seat of Eaton Hall in Cheshire, where the distance between the kitchen and the dining room was so great the food was cold by the time it reached the table. There he applied himself to learning the ropes of the family business. His duties increased after 1970, when his father’s health went into a decline that ended in his death nine years later.

Grosvenor’s years at the helm included successes (he diversified the estate, buying land in Europe, Asia and the US), as well as failures (his attempt to persuade the Tories to jettison their right-to-buy reforms). Some described him as a “grasping” landlord, but as he pointed out, it was usually the richest tenants who complained most. In private, Grosvenor led a simple life, said The Times. He was thrifty (finding it annoying if anyone left lights on, for example), and liked nothing better than to dine on a baked potato. However, he did buy himself a private plane (the only way to be sure of being allowed to smoke during flights, he used to joke). He found great satisfaction in his long involvement with the Territorial Army, eventually becoming a major general. Even so, a combination of self-doubt and a punishing schedule led, in 1998, to a breakdown. The experience, he later said, had the benefit of teaching him to have more “empathy with people in trouble”.

In 2007, he was embarrassed by scandal, when a tabloid alleged that he had entertained prostitutes at his home in London while his wife, Natalia, was in Cheshire. Around the same time, said the Daily Mail, he retired from the Grosvenor Group, and devoted himself to charity work: he made a founding gift of £50m towards the construction of a new Defence and National Rehabilitation Centre for the treatment of injured members of the Armed Forces. The “real tragedy” of Gerald Grosvenor, according to one of his friends, was that he died convinced that he had “failed to be a good duke”. And in that belief, he was simply “wrong”.