Wacky Baronet and the Black Panther’s poet daughter, 28
ECCENTRIC aristocrat Sir Benjamin Slade, who once placed an advertisement for a wife who could provide him with two sons, may have found the answer to his prayers.
I hear the 74-year-old baronet has fallen for a poet/composer 46 years his junior — and he’s already persuaded her to move into Maunsel House, his 2,000-acre country pile where Geoffrey Chaucer is said to have written part of The Canterbury Tales.
She is Sahara Sunday Spain, daughter of Johnny Spain, a member of the Black Panthers who was jailed for murder. ‘We’re sort of dating, that’s right,’ Sir Benjamin tells me.
He explains that she visited at the start of the pandemic — and has been there ever since. ‘When lockdown happened, one of the people that came to stay was Miss Sahara Spain. She’s still here. She had a house in London and found it was better to be down here with me.’
It’s a far cry from where she was brought up in the urban desolation of Dogtown in Oakland, on the east shore of San Francisco Bay.
Her mother, Elisabeth Sunday, is a photographer while her father gained infamy in the Seventies as a member of the San Quentin Six, a group of prisoners who, after three fellow inmates were killed by guards, attempted a breakout. While Spain denied killing anyone in the uprising, he was found guilty on two counts of murder.
His daughter has been helping deal with the legal problems of Sir Benjamin, who was ordered to pay more than £150,000 in damages last year to two women forced out of their jobs because they were pregnant.
‘She is a paralegal in San Francisco,’ he says. ‘I have six legal cases coming up from women trying to sue me for discrimination to racism, and all of the rest of it. She’s been very helpful.’ Despite still suffering the side- effects of coronavirus he caught earlier this year, he’s determined to produce a male heir. ‘I have considerable charm, but I’m not actually in good health,’ he says. ‘I would like to start a family. My relatives don’t want to take on the house, and they’re very rich and would sell it. ‘After 40 years of working hard and buying bits of furniture and stuff like books, I ought to keep the show going.’ He’s clearly in awe of Sahara’s talents. ‘ She wrote her first book aged eight,’ he says. ‘And her first symphony at the age of 11.’ Sir Benjamin has not had the chance to meet her father. Reflecting on Spain’s radical past, he says: ‘ You cannot be blamed for what your ancestors got up to — after all, most of mine ended up at the Tower of London and got their heads cut off.’