A VERY TOXIC COCKTAIL!
Take a famous gin dynasty. Add a large tot of money. Stir in bitter sibling rivalry and a brawl between the 95-year-old matriarch and her baronet son. So what do you get?
AMID the run- of- the- mill prosecutions that came before Horsham Magistrates’ Court last week, the case of The Crown v Sir Gavin Gilbey stood out as a particularly sorry affair.
The court heard how Sir Gavin, 68, the 4th Baronet of the family which created Gilbey’s London Gin, threw his 95-year-old mother to the floor and snapped her walking stick during a heated row at her £950,000 home near Pulborough, West Sussex, in August last year.
Sir Gavin’s claim that Lady Elizabeth Gilbey ‘was in the process of assaulting me’ at the time of the incident fell on deaf ears. He was found guilty of assault by beating, given a restraining order and ordered to pay a total of £1,197.
But as was made clear by his extraordinary allegation that he was the victim of a plot by his younger sister to gain financial control of the family estate, there is more to this unseemly saga than meets the eye. As the Mail has discovered, behind the bitter courtroom drama is a tale of sibling rivalry and of an aristocratic family at war with itself.
Sir Gavin, who intends to appeal against his conviction, alleges his 64-year-old sister Lady Camilla Frederick persuaded their mother to make up the assault to get him out of the way. Mother-of-two Camilla, who prefers not to use her title, told me this week that such claims are nonsense and that she cares only about her mother’s ‘safety and safeguarding’.
Lady Gilbey, who gave evidence via video link from her home, has also pooh-poohed her son’s allegations. ‘It’s so funny it’s actually making me laugh. You can tell him that from me,’ she told the court in a moment of exasperation.
So how on earth did this once noble family end up tearing itself apart in such a public fashion? This week the Mail spoke to Camilla and others who know the family to uncover the truth about the bitter rift.
Neither side disputes that on August 26 last year, a row took place between Lady Gilbey and her son in the sitting room at her home in the village of Bury, apparently over whether Lady Gilbey, who has the eye condition glaucoma, was still fit to drive.
A fortnight earlier, Lady Gilbey, who as a teenager in World War II had taught Army officers to drive lorries, had been found guilty of speeding through a village near her home. She received a £440 fine and six penalty points on her licence. Sir Gavin had tried to confiscate her car keys.
‘He was trying to get our mother off the road,’ Camilla told me this week. ‘She doesn’t want to be a prisoner in her own home. She doesn’t drive much, only to the river so she can walk her dog. She’s had her eyes tested. She is completely legal.’
At the time of the incident, Sir Gavin had temporarily moved into his mother’s house to care for her, but tensions were running high against a backdrop of years of wrangling over who should have lasting power of attorney in relation to Lady Gilbey’s finances.
In court, it emerged that Sir Gavin lost power of attorney in 2014 but regained it last year after moving in with his mother. At the time of the assault, it is believed he was under investigation by the Office Of The Public Guardian over his handling of her affairs.
Concerns were also raised in court about a payment of £3,465 by Lady Gilbey to her son in the lead-up to the assault. The baronet said she had given him this money to cover expenses he incurred while living with her and away from his home in Dornoch in the Scottish Highlands.
And while Sir Gavin denies wrongdoing, and alleges the assault claim was concocted by his sister so she could take control of their mother’s affairs, Camilla says she has no interest in stepping into her brother’s shoes and that management of Lady Gilbey’s finances has been placed in the hands of independent solicitors.
But even without financial disputes, tensions between the siblings run deep.
‘It was always a fractured relationship,’ admits Camilla, an artist who appeared on BBC1’s Big Painting Challenge last year. She says there wasn’t one specific incident that caused a rift, but that their four-year age gap and boarding school educations meant they were never close.
‘We hardly saw each other growing up. We don’t really know each other,’ she says.
BROTHER and sister both enjoyed a privileged upbringing in a large country pile in West Sussex. But while Camilla adored her childhood, she says her brother ‘despised our parents’ for being away so often on foreign business trips and leaving them in the care of a nanny.
The Gilbeys made their fortune in the 19th century as the UK’s third largest wine importer and the owner of a gin distillery in Camden. They owned whisky distilleries in Scotland as well as a vineyard complex in the Medoc in France.
As son and heir, Sir Gavin might have been expected to follow in his father’s footsteps and lead the business. But despite being educated at Eton, where, according to his sister, he was an amazing cricketer, he left school at 16 and set off on a rather less conventional path.
‘He could have played for England,’ Camilla says. ‘It went a bit pearshaped after that.’
Sir Gavin spent most of his teen years backpacking around Europe and North Africa, before dipping into a trust fund he inherited on his 21st birthday to spend £11,000 on Tan-YFfridd — an isolated farmhouse with 75 acres in Llanrhaeadr, Wales. Despite having no prior experience he built up a herd of 30 young Hereford cows and a flock of 75 sheep.
The Mail visited him there in 1974, and he told our reporter: ‘I could never go back. It doesn’t grieve me one bit that I have left behind the life of London, the dinner parties and dances. I have found reality.’
But the ‘good life’ was not without its complications, especially when he opened up the farm to friends he had met while backpacking.
Some insight into how he lived during those years is provided by court reports from 1977, when he found himself in front of magistrates — this time as a victim — after a fracas with a ‘girl hippy’ who lived in his cow shed.
Sir Gavin, then 28, had locked up the 17-year-old’s pet peacock after it made a mess of his onion patch. According to reports, the girl hit Sir Gavin on the head with a 4ft cow stick, yelling: ‘Where’s my peacock?’
The attack left him requiring a stitch to his head.
By the Eighties, Sir Gavin had moved to Miami in Florida, where he is believed to have married twice. His first marriage, to divorcée Mary Pacetti, lasted just four years. His second, to British acupuncturist Ann Prosser, was also short-lived. SIr
GAvIN now lives quietly in Scotland with his partner Penny Carmichael — but without a son, it is thought that the baronetcy will pass to another branch of the family living on the Isle of Man.
Camilla’s path through life has been more conventional. Educated at Catholic girls’ boarding school Tortington Park in Arundel, West Sussex, she studied art in Florence in her late teens, lived abroad for years and worked as a photographer’s agent in advertising in London, before marrying Tv producer Sir Christopher Frederick when she was 36. They have two children and live in Batcombe, Somerset, where she paints as well as caring for the family’stwo dogs, cat, goats and a sheep.
According to Camilla: ‘ Gavin has always felt so hard done by, but he was given the same as me. We were treated as equals. He says I am jealous of him but there is nothing he has that I would want.’
Caught in the middle of this rivalry is Lady Gilbey, the daughter of Colonel Keith Gordon Campbell, who served in India and was decorated by George v.
Born Elizabeth Campbell, she grew up at Standen House near Arreton on the Isle of Wight. She became a wartime driving instructor and a wellknown beauty and in 1948, aged 26, married Sir Walter Derek Gilbey at a glittering society wedding at Holy Trinity Brompton in Knightsbridge.
Their first child — Sir Gavin — was born the following year, before the Gilbeys moved out to West Sussex. Lady Gilbey became a respected pony breeder, driving horse boxes around the country up until the age of 78.
Sir Derek, who had been a PoW in Germany when he inherited the baronetcy in 1945, worked as a director in the family business until 1972, when the company was taken over and he stepped down with a £60,000 severance payment.
The Gilbey’s brand is now owned by drinks giant Diageo. Sir Derek died of cancer in 1991, after which Lady Gilbey sold the family home and moved to her present house, which she shares with her 86- year- old housekeeper.
Neighbours in the close- knit local community say that she is a modest woman.
‘Everyone in the village knows Lady Gilbey,’ says one. ‘She isn’t stuck up or a snob, although she sounds very old school. She’s very old now but used to be much more involved in the
village. She’s still independent and I often see her driving her little car around.’
She is certainly indomitable. At one stage during proceedings, the court’s TV link to her home showed only an empty chair.
Magistrates waiting to hear Lady Gilbey’s evidence were informed in no uncertain terms that she was on a cigarette break. When she did appear, she was clear on the details of the altercation, right down to the fact that her hearing aid fell out and disappeared under the stove.
‘He came into the room with a menacing look on his face,’ Lady Gilbey told the court. ‘I raised my stick to defend myself. He maintains that I hit him, which I did not. I’ve never even hit my dog.
‘He snatched my arm and flung me on the floor and I landed on my face. He just stood over me. I was so scared. I ran into the neighbour’s house for protection.’
But it was Sir Gavin who dialled 999 and asked for the police, telling the operator that while he had been watching cricket on TV, Lady Gilbey had gone ‘crazy mad’ and made ‘wild assertions’. In court, the baronet was accused of making that call ‘ to get in first’ and cover his tracks’.
All in all, a sorry saga — but there is hope, on Lady Gilbey’s side at least, that it is not too late to repair her relationship with her son.
‘She still wants to see him,’ says Camilla. ‘She doesn’t want to lose him. She would like an apology. My mother would like to make peace.’
Whether or not Sir Gavin and his ‘to mother, let alone his sister, can repair their relationship remains to be seen. The baronet, who has been ordered to pay his mother £200 compensation, has been banned from seeing or contacting her for a month. After that, he is only allowed to speak to her via staff. He has been fined £339 and ordered to pay £625 costs and a £33 surcharge.
Sir Gavin declined to speak to the Mail this week but his lawyer insisted in court that he is not ‘some Victorian villain, twirling his moustache, planning his next move’.
But if he persists in his intention to appeal against his conviction, then the chances of this family resolving their differences remain as distant a prospect as ever.