Jousting lord rocks right up to the end

HE WAS custodian of Knebworth — which he called ‘a Tudor manor house with Victorian icing sugar on it’ — and of a pair of Sir Mick Jagger’s underpants, discarded in 1976 following a full-blooded Rolling Stones performance at one of the rock concerts held on the estate.

So yesterday’s funeral of Lord Cobbold, who was jousting in full chain mail well into his 70s and died on Monday aged 84, was always going to be a fusion of the ancient and the uninhibited.

‘His coffin was driven through Knebworth village,’ a Hertfordshire local tells me. David Lytton-Cobbold was accompanied by blasts of Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side Of The Moon — his favourite album, the cover design of which was painted on his cardboard coffin.

The Old Etonian and his wife took over Knebworth in the 1970s when it had dry rot and a leaking roof. The rock concerts ensured its salvation.