Art expert, philanthropist and second wife of billionaire heir
The cloister of Gloucester Cathedral has echoed for centuries to the sound of scriptures that promise redemption for sinners, but in 2022 it was threatening to crumble into ruin – until Julia Rausing and her former heroinaddict husband Hans, a billionaire heir to the Swedish Tetra Pak fortune, stepped in. Their £550,000 donation helped to restore the cathedral’s 14th-century walkways, including the world’s earliest surviving fan-vaulted ceiling.
Rausing, who has died at 63, was a petite and chic figure with a sheet of golden hair, and she shied away from publicity. “I don’t like the cameras,” she told Time Out magazine in a rare interview about the legacy of her older sister Isabella Blow, the stylist and fashion editor who took her own life. “I don’t know how Issy did it really. If I was with her and I saw a camera I’d think, ‘Oh my God’!”
Funding the work at Gloucester Cathedral, which had held Blow’s funeral, was the latest in a long list of charitable donations made by the couple, whose families had known murder, suicide, drugs and tragedy. Over the past decade, the Julia and Hans Rausing Trust has given £330 million (NZ$697.4m) in more than 1000 grants to organisations working in health, welfare, education, and arts and culture.
The couple first met in 2002 when Julia was a senior director at Christie’s and Hans, a serious art collector, took his first wife, Eva, to a lunch there. They met again in 2006 when he invited the auction house to undertake a valuation at his £70m mansion in Belgravia.
Eva died of an overdose in 2012, but her body was not discovered until two months later when police searched their house after arresting her husband for erratic driving and finding drugs and a crack pipe in his car. Her body was so badly decomposed that she had to be identified from a fingerprint and the serial number on her pacemaker. Staff had been told not to enter the bedroom because she was unwell. Hans, who claimed he was “unable to let her leave”, was given a suspended sentence for preventing a lawful burial. He was given another suspended sentence for driving while unfit through drugs and checked himself into a psychiatric hospital, where he was visited by Julia, who supported him through his recovery.
They were married in 2014 and she helped bring him back from his grief, encouraging him to find happiness through philanthropy. Gradually re-emerging into society, he was spotted with Julia at parties and at Ascot. The house he had shared with Eva was sold and the couple moved to a mansion in nearby Cheyne Walk, bought for £28m from Roman Abramovich, the Russian oligarch.
In 2019 they gave English Heritage what was then its largest single private donation, £2.5m for a footbridge at Tintagel Castle, the birthplace of King Arthur as legend has it, recreating the historic crossing from the mainland to the headland. Others to benefit from their philanthropy included the Royal Opera House, the Prince’s Trust and the National Gallery, where they gave £4m to refresh Room 32, now called the Julia and Hans Rausing Room, which is filled with 17th-century Italian treasures including Caravaggio’s The Supper at Emmaus. Early in the coronavirus pandemic they were quick to donate more than £16m, including £5m to support NHS staff and £2.5m to organisations such as the Chelsea and Westminster Hospital.
Julia Helen Delves Broughton was born in Cheshire in 1961, the second of four children of Major Sir Evelyn Delves Broughton, 12th baronet, and his second wife Helen Mary (nee Shore), who had been Britain’s youngest female barrister when she qualified at the age of 21 and who survives her with a younger sister, Lavinia. Their brother, John, died from choking in 1964 after falling in an ornamental pool on the family estate at the age of 2.
In 1941 their grandfather, Sir Jock Delves Broughton, had been sensationally acquitted of murdering the Earl of Erroll, his wife’s lover, in Happy Valley in Kenya. A year later he died of a deliberate heroin overdose at the Adelphi Hotel in Liverpool. Their love triangle was the subject of Michael Radford’s colonial drama White Mischief (1987) starring Greta Scacchi, Charles Dance and Joss Ackland.
The Delves Broughton sisters were brought up at Doddington Hall, the family’s 35,000-acre estate near Nantwich in Cheshire, where life centred around the dressing-up box. “We didn’t need to go to the theatre as children, we had Issy at home to entertain us,” Julia told the Evening Standard in 2010. She described their childhood as “normal”.
Things changed with their parents’ divorce in 1972. According to Detmar Blow, Isabella’s husband, their mother “lined up her children on the gravel outside the gardener’s cottage and shook their hands goodbye... the culmination of a truly dreadful mother-daughter relationship”.
Like Isabella, Julia was educated at Heathfield School, Ascot. A regular treat was visiting London, where the family had a flat in Cadogan Square, Knightsbridge. “Daddy would take us to Harrods and we’d go to the pet department and they had exotic animals. It was something we did, and it was something we did with Daddy. We worshipped him,” she told Time Out. On his death in 1993, however, he left each daughter only £5000 from his £4m estate.
For a time Julia worked as a project manager for Sarah, Duchess of York.
“I was very traditional and Sloanie,” she recalled.
By the early Nineties she was personal assistant to John Bryan, the duchess’s “toe-sucking” financial adviser. The tabloid press was quick to suggest that it was more than a business relationship. “I can’t answer that,” Julia replied when asked if they were anything more than friends.
She began at Christie’s as a secretary, rising through the ranks to work in Old Masters and the valuation department before becoming a senior director, working in the chairman’s office for Viscount Linley, a cousin of the King.
For several years she dated Kim SmithBingham, an equine physiotherapist and hunting enthusiast. She married Rausing at Woburn Abbey, home of the Duchess of Bedford, whose mother had become her father’s third wife. Rausing had proposed while on holiday in Barbados and she was given away by the Earl of Derby in front of 60 guests, keeping news of their nuptials out of the press for a week. At their subsequent celebration at One Mayfair in central London, the newlyweds were toasted by an assortment of aristocrats, artists and celebrities including Jools Holland, the pianist and TV presenter, Nick Mason, the Pink Floyd drummer, and Philip Treacy, the milliner.
By then they had started the Julia and Hans Rausing Trust to channel the wealth Rausing had inherited, though he never went into the family business.
They spent £11m acquiring the Lasborough Park estate, including a grade II-listed, 11-bedroom house near the King’s Highgrove estate, near Tetbury in Gloucestershire. They also rebuilt Greensleeves, the £20m estate in Barbados that Rausing had bought with his first wife and which, in earlier days, had been the site of wild parties. He survives her with four stepchildren.
Despite maintaining a low profile, the couple insisted on seeking out good causes, stressing on their website that their trust “does not accept unsolicited applications for funding”. A family statement described how Julia “took a keen interest in all the trust’s giving, no matter how large or small the grant”.
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