Eccentric aristocrat famous for his “wifelets”
The 7th Marquess of Bath, who has died aged 87, was the chatelain of the Longleat estate in Wiltshire, said The Times, and one of England’s most prominent eccentrics. A believer in polygamy known for his multiple girlfriends (or “wifelets”), he covered the walls of his 16th century home with explicit murals he called “therapies”, and founded the secessionist Wessex Regionalist Party. With his straggly hair and “crushed velvet trousers” , he looked like an “off duty wizard”. Yet behind this was a “serious man”, who cared about his heritage while resisting its confines. With an
“almost obsessive need to explain himself to the world”, he planned a 19-volume biography, but only four volumes were issued, perhaps because his publishers baulked when he revealed that he’d written six million words, yet had only managed to get to 1991.
Born Alexander George Thynne (he later dropped the “e”), he claimed descent from Tacitus and Charlemagne. Among his more recent ancestors were a great-grandfather who once forced two prostitutes to share his wife’s bed at gunpoint, a grandmother whose five marriages made her the model for Nancy Mitford’s character “the Bolter”, and an aunt who hoarded food in her cheeks like a hamster, said The Daily Telegraph. Alexander had a not altogether happy upringing (Evelyn Waugh visited the family in 1948, and described the house as “noisy and drunken”). He got on badly with his father (whose own eccentricities included collecting Nazi memorabilia), and was raised by his nanny. His parents were unfaithful to each other, and divorced when he was 21. When he was at Eton in 1946, his grandfather died, and he became the 11th Viscount Weymouth – “a great embarrassment for a schoolboy”. After National Service, he went up to Oxford, where he studied PPE, and was president of the Bullingdon Club.
His father had opened Longleat to visitors in 1949, to help pay death duties, and had brought in its famous lions in 1966, to create what is believed to have been the first drive-through safari outside Africa. Alexander started to help run the estate in the 1950s; and after his father’s death in 1992, he took it over – evicting his brother Christopher, who had run the house, and opening new attractions. His many “wifelets” lived in cottages in the grounds, and were depicted in the textured murals that covered ever more of Longleat’s walls. In 1969, he married the Hungarian actress Anna Gaël, with whom he had a son, Ceawlin, and a daughter, Lenka; but they led separate lives. Claiming to hate the class system, he sent his children to state schools. Ceawlin took over the running of the estate in 2010, and almost immediately fell out with his father by removing the erotic murals from the private apartment he planned to share with his wife. Towards the end of his life, the Marquess suggested to his friend Gyles Brandreth that he had some regrets: one was referring to his girlfriends as “wifelets”; another was never having had a soulmate. “But I haven’t,” he said. “And it’s too late now.”