Bidding Duke farewell, his £9bn bachelor heir
HIS father’s death at the age of 64 thrust him to prominence as Britain’s most eligible bachelor.
Yesterday 25-year-old Hugh Grosvenor, the seventh Duke of Westminster and heir to a £9billion property portfolio, appeared in public for the first time since inheriting the title to read his father’s favourite poem.
Watched by a large contingent from the Royal Family, including the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge and the Prince of Wales and Duchess of Cornwall, he read If by Rudyard Kipling at a memorial service to celebrate his father’s life.
The poem – written by Kipling as advice for his own son John, later killed in the First World War – ends with the words ‘you’ll be a man, my son!’
The sixth duke, Major General Gerald Cavendish Grosvenor, a close friend of the Royal Family, died of a heart attack aged 64 on August 9 while on a visit to his Abbeystead Estate in Lancashire ahead of the grouse season. At the time of his death he was third on Britain’s rich list.
Hugh, a fresh-faced recycling firm accounts manager turned billionaire landowner, was accompanied by his three sisters, Lady Tamara, 36, Lady Edwina, 35, and Lady Viola, 24. The older two were passed over for the title because of Britain’s inheritance laws which say that estates go to the eldest son.
They joined 1,400 guests ranging from foreign royalty to workers from the family estate at a private ceremony at Chester Cathedral yesterday.
Lady Edwina – married to television historian Dan Snow – read her own ‘A letter to my father’.
An excerpt released by the family said: ‘You taught me so much. Fight for what you believe in. Don’t ever give up. If you are knocked down, dust yourself off... and get back on your feet.’
Prince William read the Garter Prayer, part of the service for Knights of the Order of the Garter, with which the late duke had been honoured. The prayer asks God to grant that ‘all those who go out as leaders before us’, including ‘the men of wealth’, may ‘serve as a wholesome salt unto the earth’.
But it was Hugh’s decision to read If that may have given the clearest clues to his intentions after succeeding his father.
The poem begins: ‘If you can keep your head when all about you are losing theirs and blaming it on you, if you can trust yourself when all men doubt you, but make allowance for their doubting too.’
And the final stanza starts: ‘If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue, or walk with Kings – nor lose the common touch.’
By matching these ideals, the poem concludes: ‘Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it, and – which is more – you’ll be a man, my son!’
Certainly, despite his grand upbringing at the Grosvenor family’s ancestral home, Eaton Hall, near Chester, Hugh’s schooling differed from that of many other children of privilege.
Along with his sisters, he attended a state primary school before going to the co-educational £10,296-a-term Ellesmere College in Shropshire.
Security was exceptionally tight in Chester’s narrow streets yesterday, with armed police occupying vantage points as hundreds gathered for a glimpse of the new duke and his royal guests.
Royal fans were delighted as they spotted the sombrely-dressed Duke and Duchess of Cambridge – who named Hugh as one of Prince George’s godfathers – arrive for the hour-long service, led by the Dean of Chester, the Very Rev Gordon McPhate.
Also present were Princess Eugenie, the Duke and Duchess of Gloucester, the Duke of Kent, Prince and Princess Michael of Kent and Princess Alexandra, along with high-ranking representatives of the Saudi, Bahraini and Greek royal families.
As Prince Charles was representing the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh, he and Camilla arrived at the cathedral last, after the Grosvenor family.
It was one of the biggest royal turnouts ever seen at a memorial service and a sign of the high esteem in which the late duke was held.
But perhaps those that would have meant most to him were the staff and pensioners of his estate. Some had known him since he was a boy and loved him both for the passion he brought to running his estate and his life-long insistence on being courteous to all, regardless of status or wealth.