So, what would any girl see in a £9billion Duke?
WHEN he woke up on Tuesday morning, Hugh Grosvenor faced a day no different from thousands of fellow twentysomething Londoners.
Life was comfortable enough, he had a good job working for a trailblazing eco-company in the capital and his biggest concerns were which pub to meet his mates in and where to spend the summer holiday.
Before the day was out, however, he would be plunged into a parallel reality the rest of us can only imagine. One minute he was plain old Hughie, as his friends call him. The next he was the seventh Duke of Westminster, the second richest person under 30 on the planet and the third wealthiest Briton.
from being an unassuming account manager at trendy energy company Bio-Bean (they transform coffee grounds into biofuel), he instantly became head of the Grosvenor Group, in control of a £9 billion property empire.
And if this weren’t enough of a burden, he also has to deal with losing his father, who died from a heart attack at the age of 64.
The sixth Duke’s sudden death, on the family’s shooting estate in Lancashire, came as a bolt from the blue and is understood to have left his sensitive son ‘in bits’.
He has good reason to worry. The burden of such immense wealth nearly destroyed his father, who suffered a mental breakdown as he struggled to live up to his inheritance.
The 6th Duke inherited at 27; Hugh is two years younger at 25. Taking over as head of the family at such a tender age is an enormous shock, and will test him to the limit.
‘Hugh’s not a networker or a schmoozer, nor is he the slightest bit boastful,’ was the assessment of one long-standing friend.
‘In many ways Hugh differs greatly from his father, in that he doesn’t have the same tortured soul. What he has in common with his dad is an innate sense of caution. He was raised to recognise that a lot of people — almost everybody in fact — would try to get close to him because of his money.’
‘He’s no wallflower and he likes a party as much as anyone. But he knows where to draw the line and would never do anything to embarrass his family.
‘Some people who’ve known him down the years will say he’s boring. That’s not true. He just doesn’t trust many people enough to let them see his true character.’
It is a burden he must carry alone, and one which has not affected his three sisters — Lady Tamara, 34, Lady Edwina, 33, and Lady Viola, 23. All three have forged identities distinct from the historic Grosvenor name.
Tamara, who graduated in Divinity from Newcastle University, is the most social of all four children and is married to Prince William’s great friend, Edward Van Cutsem.
Edwina, whose godmother was Princess Diana, is a tireless social campaigner. As a teenager, she was taken by her father to meet drug addicts in Liverpool and the experience stayed with her.
Today she is a trustee of The Clink Charity, which helps prisoners forge new lives. At home she has the unwavering support of her husband, the television historian Dan Snow.
The youngest, Viola, has a similar interest in good works. She has a hands-on role at the charity Kidscape, helping troubled youngsters. Her goal is to train as an art therapist and set up her own youth-focused charity.
Throughout this they will be able to fall back on healthy trust funds set up by their father.
But it is Hugh who will take charge of the trustees who manage the £9 billion portfolio. It falls to him to move from his London flat back to Eaton Hall in Cheshire and act as caretaker of the family fortune for the rest of his days, all the while living up to the family motto: ‘Virtue, Not Ancestry’.
How distant such responsibility must have seemed during his sheltered childhood. At the behest of his father, who loathed every second of his time as a boarder at Sunningdale and Harrow, Hugh and his sisters were given as ordinary an upbringing as money could buy.
They went to the local state primary, and while Hugh’s contemporaries were well aware his daddy owned the entire village and all the land around it, they still played football together day and night.
As a child, Hugh was football mad and a fanatical Liverpool supporter, even sleeping in the famous red kit.
AfTEr a brief spell at a nearby prep school, all the Grosvenor children started at Ellesmere College, a minor public school in Shropshire. Hugh played centre forward for the school team, knocking in so many goals that at 13 he was called up by the Crewe Alexandra manager, Dario Gradi, for a six week trial period.
His proud father, who himself was no mean footballer and once had trials for fulham fC, was very much hands-on, often flying back to Eaton Hall from London in his private jet on weekdays simply so the family could have dinner together. Growing up with family estates dotted around England, Scotland, france and Spain, with a £5 million Cessna jet at their disposal, the Grosvenor children were well aware that they were not ‘normal’.
However, it is a credit to the 6th Duke and their mother, Natalia, known to all as Tally, that they were just as comfortable singing in the choir with local villagers as breaking bread with the royal family.
While Hugh has known Princes William and Harry all his life — they share a love of country sports and often go shooting together — his closest friendships are far removed from London society.
Socialising is done in Cheshire, Shropshire and North Wales with a trusted circle who would never speak out of turn about him.
At school he worked hard, becoming a prefect and co-captain of his house.
But he was no saint and also enjoyed travelling the world with his friends, as shown by a set of revealing photographs on publicly available social media.
Drinking beers, jokingly gesturing at the camera and posing cheekily with a strategically placed cactus, he is no different from any other high-spirited young man.
ON A trip to South America in 2010, when he was 19 and on a break between school and Newcastle University, where he studied Countryside Management, he routinely dressed in baggy shorts, T-shirts and flip-flops. Hardly the traditional image of an English Duke.
A handsome young man, he has never been short of female attention, though unlike his older sisters, he has yet to settle down.
friends say he is ‘understandably wary’ about the attentions of the fairer sex, having long been subject to propositions on social media from girls he has never met.
‘That is only going to get worse now with all the talk of his massive fortune,’ adds the friend. ‘It’s reminiscent of when Prince William started university at St Andrews. There were girls queuing around the block to bag themselves a prince, which must have been overwhelming.
‘The difference between them is that all of a sudden Hugh has vastly more money than William, so he will have to be more wary than ever.’
He can, however, rely on the wise counsel of the Duke of Cambridge, who was mentored by Hugh’s father.
Just as the 6th Duke of Westminster encouraged William to talk about the loss of his mother, so is William ready to proffer his own advice on dealing with bereavement.
for not only has Hugh lost a father, he has also lost the only man who can truly guide him through the choppy waters stirred up by such a huge family fortune.
And family is the operative word here, as that is how the late Duke always treated staff and locals who lived around the Grosvenor estate.
Ken Davies, 80, who flew private jets and helicopters for the Duke and his father for 34 years until his retirement in 2004, said the family always invited him to stay at their Eaton Square home when he flew them down to London.
Many of his happiest memories were of flying the Duke’s children home from London to Eaton Hall after their births. ‘I flew all the children up
here, when they were just a few hours old,’ he said from his home on the estate.
He also told of the family traditions which formed such an integral part of young Hugh’s upbringing. Each year the family would holiday in the Western Isles from mid July, then fly down to their Abbeystead shooting estate in Lancashire in time for the Glorious Twelfth, which marks the beginning of the grouseshooting season. That date — yesterday — must have been particularly poignant.
Mr Davies recalled waiting in the family jet to take the first grouse of the season down to the Grosvenor Hotel in London, along with a bottle of Beaujolais from the family’s vineyard in France.
While his father’s sudden death will have come as an enormous shock, Hugh has clearly been prepared well for the challenges ahead. After leaving Newcastle University, he continued his studies briefly in Oxford, then spent two years working as a graduate trainee at the Grosvenor Group property business and Wheatsheaf Investment, which has stocks in food, water and energy businesses.
It was immediately before this that the one great indulgence of Hugh’s young life unfolded, in the form of an extravagant 21st birthday for 800 guests.
Guests included Prince Harry, yet a large proportion, typically, were long-serving estate staff.
The dress code was ‘black tie and neon’. Michael McIntyre performed a set over dinner about hunting and shooting (bespoke material for the country-sports-mad family) and Rizzle Kicks provided the musical entertainment.
LUcKy guests were treated to a plate of scotch eggs, Morecambe Bay potted shrimps and smoked salmon, followed by steak and chips, Hugh’s favourite. And while we understand the reported cost of £5million is a substantial exaggeration, as one guest put it: ‘It certainly wasn’t cheap.’
As for Hugh, the young man who could afford anything, he urged guests not to buy him presents (though if they insisted then a nice bottle of wine would suffice).
It was, by his own estimation, ‘simply amazing’.
He added: ‘It is the beginning of a new era in my life and I look forward to the challenges that lie ahead.’
This week another new era began. Whether he is still looking forward to it, however, is another question entirely.