britain’s blingiest couple
When it comes to flashing the cash, glitzy (and slightly ghastly) friends, ritzy parties, lavish mansions and more cars than you can count, the Bamfords make Gatsby look positively restrained
tHE King of Saudi Arabia. Presidents of countries from Ukraine to Pakistan. Despots from around the world. And, buried in the paperwork, the name of one Lord Bamford, the JCB machinery billionaire and longstanding Tory donor.
He’s just one of many uber-wealthy people embarrassed by last week’s leak of the Panama Papers — documents from law firm Mossack Fonseca, which revealed how the world’s richest people use secretive tax regimes, and the often vast sums they move off-shore.
There is no suggestion of any illegality on Lord or Lady Bamford’s part, and his spokesman said his company named in the Panama Papers, Caspar Ltd, was inactive for its entire existence.
But the furore has brought the spotlight onto one of Britain’s most gilded couples.
Anthony Bamford and his wife Carole — organic farmer extraordinaire and founder of the ultra high-end Daylesford food and lifestyle company — enjoy a life of almost unimaginable opulence.
How fascinating, then, to note the couple’s downto-earth origins . . . particularly Carole’s. A former air hostess, she was nicknamed ‘doors-to-manual’ long before Carole Middleton — a monicker that’s not prevented this daughter of a Nottingham house-builder from taking to her plutocratic lifestyle with exquisite elan.
So much so that one source claimed that, when with her husband, she’s been known to travel with a retinue of up to 12 assistants, who refer to her as ‘Lady B’ or ‘Lady Barracuda’ — after the ferocious and sharp-toothed fish.
While she can be very warm, even her admirers concede that Carole has a razor- sharp tongue. Perhaps unfairly, her staff — and some of her so-called friends — are utterly terrified of her.
And while Carole might preach the eco gospel, she is not averse to hopping on private jets when the need takes her. To her friends, she is generous to a fault. To her enemies her other nickname is Marie Antoinette for her ‘let them eat organic cake’ attitude to those lower down the social scale.
As for Lord Bamford — a man of great charm — he’s descended from Uttoxeter blacksmiths. He only became a peer in 2013, following a humiliating episode in 2010 when he withdrew his name from consideration. One minute he was being measured for his ermine robes — the next, it seemed he didn’t want the honour after all.
There were whispers of the tax authorities being unhappy with the suggestion of a peerage. Bamford insisted the dramatic volte-face was because he needed time to concentrate on steering JCB through the then-tricky financial climate.
Today, thanks to his business acumen the company employs 12,000 people on four continents with a turnover in the billions.
The family joke is that the Bamfords have more (domestic) staff than the Prince of Wales. What’s certain though is that nothing is allowed to dent this remarkable couple’s zest for a glitzy life.
Here we present the ultimate guide to Britain’s blingiest couple.
PARTY, PARTY, PARTY!
WHETHEr they’re in India or Barbados, the Bamfords never fail to party. Their gatherings make a night at Jay Gatsby’s look like a barn dance in the village hall.
Some believe there’s a tactical element to their socialising: it allows them to expand their enviable little black book. For there aren’t many people the Bamfords don’t know.
In 2006, then Prime Minister Tony Blair was seen drinking chilled lager at Heron Bay, their Barbados holiday home. The couple are close to Prince Charles and Camilla, with Charles even borrowing their Sikorsky helicopter. Pink Floyd’s Nick Mason is also a chum, as is Joan Collins.
One can see the attraction of their set from the sheer decadent opulence of their partying.
Actor Christopher Biggins recounted how the Bamfords flew him and eight friends to Paris on their private plane. On another occasion, they were put up at the Paris ritz, with special flower arrangements ordered by Carole in each room.
Just last month, the Bamfords chartered two 737 jets to fly 180 friends — reportedly including Jeremy Clarkson, supermodel sisters Cara and Poppy Delevingne, and Viscount and Viscountess Linley — to India to celebrate their 70th birthdays in a four- day extravaganza around the palaces of rajasthan.
On the final evening guests were asked to dress in white, including turbans. Crown Prince Pavlos, bearded son of ex-King Constantine of Greece, was said to have particularly impressed the ladies present. ‘He looked like a dashing Moghul warrior,’ gushed one.
One guest at a pre- Christmas party in Barbados told me: ‘ The garden looks like Versailles. There were fireworks over the ocean at midnight, flowing champagne, staff in uniforms, caviar . . . The food looked like it was from the party of an Imperial Tsar. Carole, clad in diamonds, was very friendly. It was almost open house.’
A dinner at their Oxfordshire home saw guests given cashmere throws as gifts.
‘It was a tiny bit nouveau,’ one guest conceded, ‘ but then such things are all a matter of taste.’
Such largesse attracts envy. As one who knows them says: ‘They have a kind of Oxfordshire court: sycophants who never disagree with anything they say and will do anything for an invitation.’
The Bamfords’ youngest son, George, saw in his 21st birthday in 2002 at the family’s country home, with 550 guests at a James _ Bond- themed bash that cost £400,000. Boy George performed and cocktails were mixed by barmen borrowed from the Savoy.
At an Indian-themed party, guests were carried up the drive on elephants. Quite what the locals made of it is anyone’s guess.
After a shooting party, their neighbour and long-time friend, racehorse trainer Charlie Brooks — he was introduced to his newspaper boss wife rebekah Wade by Lady Bamford — told the peer: ‘You are going to be f****** disappointed when you die and go to heaven, Anthony…’.
Guests are often helicoptered up to their Staffordshire estate, Wootton Lodge, on a Friday evening, lavishly entertained and then presented with the finest shooting experience.
‘The bag can be exceptional, up to 1,000 birds,’ says one guest. ‘The beaters and loaders are often old friends of Anthony’s.’
FAMILY FORTUNES — AND FEUDS
WAY before they ‘ bulldozed their way into high society’ as one toff puts it, the Bamfords were Staffordshire blacksmiths and ironmongers.
Anthony’s father Joe began selling farm equipment from a lock-up garage in Uttoxeter. Brilliantly shrewd he went on to found JCB – the initials taken from his name, Joseph Cyril Bamford — which became the UK’s largest privately owned engineering company.
Joseph was a non-smoking teetotaler who was so careful with money he said his wife made their curtains herself. He sold farm trailers before coming up with his ‘breakthrough product’, the backhoe loader (basically, a tractor with a big shovel in front). By 1960 his hydraulic tractors were in the American market, and soon the U.S. military was a major customer.
Young Anthony was sent to Ampleforth, the Catholic public school in Yorkshire, and then to university in Grenoble. He became an apprentice at tractor firm Massey Ferguson before joining JCB, where he worked on the production line.
By the time he took over the company in 1975, aged 30, he had worked in every department.
But while the firm has boomed under his stewardship, the family’s lives have not been untouched by tragedy. Anthony’s first wife died in a car crash, before he married Carole in 1974. And in 1975, Joe left his wife, Marjorie, for Jayne Ellis, a secretary in the JCB typing pool. He lived with her as a tax exile in Switzerland until his death.
Since he died, there has been legal action between the family and Ellis, and between Anthony and his brother Mark, who is said to dislike Anthony’s extravagance.
AMBITIOUS LADY BARRACUDA
ENErGETIC, ambitious and relentlessly coiffed, Carole Bamford, aka Lady Barracuda, grew up in Nottingham, and reports that her mother cooked daily for four men – her father, brother, uncle and grandfather. Food was ‘scarce’ and her mother used to barter to fill her larder, ‘buying rabbits with the skin on or an old cockerel’, she says.
After a stint as an air hostess, Carole married Anthony aged 28. Today, she has a penchant for Bloody Marys and cigarettes, and claims she and Anthony spend Sunday evenings watching Call The Midwife in their pyjamas.
ECO-HYPOCRITE, MOI? SURELY NOT
Carole (pictured right) sees her homes as the nucleus of her green ambitions. Daylesford, the oxfordshire estate, is also a business that caters to the most chi chi of clients. There’s the Daylesford organic café and shop, favoured by celebrities such as liz Hurley and Kate Moss, as well as the Haybarn Spa. Daylesford Farm has lambing tours, a creamery and resident bees making honey
even the chicken house has a wind turbine. In a promotional film, Carole gushes about the merits of organic soil.
Some, though, see such sermonising as sitting uncomfortably with the extravagance of her own lifestyle.
as one close to their set said: ‘It’s all so lady Bountiful. The combination of flogging £3,000 jackets [from her ‘Bamford’ brand] and then preaching about the environment from private jets slightly sticks in the craw.’ Her clothing line consists of neutral, shapeless items made of the same organic cashmere she floats around in. When she does buy other designers, it’s Dior, Chanel or Valentino couture.
Her beauty range is also on sale in Daylesford’s spa, which offers everything from massage to ear candling — a method for removing wax by placing the bottom end of a lighted candle in the ear.
one local is less than impressed. ‘The problem,’ he said, ‘is that she’s turned that part of oxfordshire into a manicured, sickly perfect version of the country. It only appeals to townies who want everything sanitised.
‘It’s phoney.’
THE ROLEX-LOVING CHILDREN
THe Bamfords are a close-knit clan, with three children — alice, nearly 40, Jo, 39, and George, 35 — and five grandchildren. alice, who runs a hip hop record label, lives with an estate agent called ann eysenring in California.
Her son, anthony otis Joseph, was born in october 2015. The name of his father has never been disclosed.
eldest son Jo, meanwhile, works at JCB. Married to knitwear designer alex Gore Browne, they have two children.
Younger son George has two children with wife leonora. owner of Bamford Watch Department, he customises designer watches, spray-painting rolexes black or coating them in titanium and selling them for vast sums.
RACING — SPORT OF (ECO) QUEENS
Carole has a string of thoroughbreds, 29 at the last count, many of them in training in the country’s top yards. Her trainers include John Gosden whose horses have won over 2,500 races; Michael Bell, who trains for the Queen, and legendary Newmarket trainer Sir Mark Prescott. Their box at Cheltenham — where lord Bamford sponsors the JCB Triumph Hurdle — is right next to the royal Box in the New Stand. Uniquely at Cheltenham, where most racegoers have to use the race course caterers, the Bamford box serves their own Daylesford food. one horse, a three-year-old colt called Mr Singh, has a special history. It was named after an Indian bicycle shop owner waspersuaded by lord Bamford to sell diggers rather than cycles. Their collaboration made the man very rich.