DID JEALOUS MOBSTER REBELLIOUS LORD OF
Tragic search for the truth behind gruesome death of love-lorn aristocrat who wanted to rule the waves
WHEN YOU get a 3am call it’s usually bad news, even if it’s from Hawaii. Even more so if the caller reverses the charges, as Ted did, back in the 1990s. I thought it must be some emergency, so I accepted the call. “Andy, I’ve found her!” he told me. “Who? What?” I replied, still groggy. “The perfect woman, of course. You have got to come and see her. Then you will believe!”
I’d always been sceptical about Ted’s dream, but had to admit when I met Lola at an “exotic dance” club in Honolulu, she was as perfect as one could imagine.
But I didn’t have to imagine, because she was naked, sitting on Ted’s lap, nuzzling his ear and pressing against him. Ted (aka “Lord Ted” or “lord on a board”) was Viscount Edward George William Omar Deerhurst, son of the Earl of Coventry and a black sheep of the aristocracy. Supposedly studying law at the University of Hawaii, he had been competing as a professional surfer.
Ted would have been 62 now, but I wrote his obituary in 1997. Some said he died of a heart attack, some of an epileptic seizure. Others thought he had drowned surfing. His parents – Ted had reconciled with his father – flew to Hawaii for the funeral but remained mystified. So what really happened?
A couple of years ago, Duncan Coventry, Ted’s cousin and the future Earl, got in touch to say he really wanted to know, just as I did. Twenty years after the death of Ted, I set off to find out.
Ted, born 1957, was son of Bill, Earl of Coventry, and Mimi Medart, ballerina daughter of a US burger millionaire. He started life in England but, after his parents divorced, his mother took him to Santa Monica in California where he discovered surfing. Bill didn’t want his son to be a “footloose beachbum”. He was supposed to follow family tradition and sit in the Lords after all. So, aged 15, Ted was torn away from his sun-kissed home and returned to England. He dyed his hair orange in protest.
He was always up to something. At Dartington Hall, a progressive school in Devon where Lucien and Clement Freud were pupils, he slipped rat poison into a love rival’s coffee (he survived).
He was always broke and tried his hand as a waiter, petrol pump guy, barista and male model, but he never gave up on his quest.
The tenth Earl (Ted’s grandfather) died heroically at Dunkirk. The family’s parish church on one window had a Crusader in chainmail with a white mantle emblazoned with a red cross.
Then there was Ted, on a crusade of his own. I met him in the summer of 1989 in southwest France. I was a surfing correspondent, he a would-be surfing champion. The resort of Lacanau, colonised by the Quiksilver surf gear company and full of tents, stages, pennants and music, had the feel of a medieval tournament. Riding a board of his own Excalibur design, his trusty sword carving through the surf, blond locks flowing in the sun,
Ted was like a knight on a quest.
In fact, as an amateur he’d represented
Great Britain, and was now in search of points to climb the ASP (Association of Surfing Professionals)
rankings. Surfing was his own personal Shangri-la and an impossible dream. I only saw him really down once, when he came 231st in the world and vowed to try snowboarding.
“What’s the worst that can happen?” he said. He spent six months in traction being pieced together. It was back to surfing. Ted would have to take on the giant waves of Hawaii and his quest led him to the North Shore of the isle of Oahu. It was a long way from Croome Court, Worcestershire, the family seat since the 18th century. The Coventrys – motto, “Candide et constante” (candidly and constantly) – go way back. Archives note a “william Coventrie of ye Citty of Coventrie” from the time of Chaucer. Later Coventrys lived through the Plantagenets and Tudors, the Spanish Armada, rebellion, uprisings, wars and the Industrial Revolution, attending either Balliol College or Christ Church, Oxford. There were warriors and cardinals, lawyers and ambassadors, members of the Privy Council and Lord Keepers of the Great Seal. Plus occasional cads and wastrels.
In the 1990s, disowned and disinherited,ted became a regular at Sunset Beach.the bigger the surf, the better he liked it. He said surfing Waimea Bay was “like jumping off the top of a three-storey house and then having the house chase you down the street”.
He would re-enact Second World War battles on the beach with toy soldiers, tanks and planes while waiting for his heat. He was a surfer, but really he was Winston Churchill or King Arthur.
He was a visionary, an idealist, a dreamer. But he really believed love would save him. The Perfect Surfer needed a Perfect Surfer Girl. Hence that call, and that perfect girl who cost him his life.
THE PROBLEM with the North Shore is one of truth. Die in Hawaii and not too many people care about how and why and who did what to whom, basics that anywhere else would count for something.
On the North Shore, everybody lies, to themselves and others. On my quest, I retraced Ted’s footsteps, piecing him back together, tracking down childhood friends, in Devon, New York and New Zealand. I found his ex-wife Susan in Australia. But it kept coming back to Lola. Ted had a notion that they were going to marry. But her gangster boyfriend, Pit Bull, had other ideas. The trouble with paradise is the bad guys always get there first.
“Life is short,” Ted wrote in a friend’s journal, aged 39. “Don’t waste it!” Maybe he’d had a premonition of doom. That might have had something to do with two heavy dudes, employees of Pit Bull, who I discovered had come knocking on his door.
They were perfectly polite and therefore terrifying. No weapons yet every word had the force of a sawn-off shotgun. “Hello, Ted,” they said. “Or should we say Lord Ted?”
They never crossed the threshold. Two big smiling guys. Or rather only one of them smiled. He did all the talking. The other just stood there.
“We hear you’re a good surfer, Ted”, said the smiler. “Way we hear it, you could be champion, one day.”
“One of these days maybe,”
‘The blonde, she’s not yours stop seeing her’
Ted replied. “Well, look here, Ted, how do you think it would be if you had to surf on just one leg? Do you think you would surf as good?”
Ted, heart in mouth, said: “I think that would be hard”.
AFTER a chuckle, the guy said, slapping him on the shoulder: “Come on, Ted, it wouldn’t be that bad. These new artificial legs are better than your actual leg.” Ted said nothing. His throat was dry. “Or...” said the guy. Pause. “OR,” with raised finger, “you could just leave Lola alone.” “Lola,” said Ted quietly. “The blonde. She’s not yours, brah. So you should stop seeing her, stop fooling around with her, stop driving her in your car, stop giving her presents. Just stop. Or you could try surfing on one leg.”
Ted managed to come out with a line that has stuck solidly in my mind. “It’s her loss,” he said. “Yeah, I guess she’s going to be real sad for a while. But don’t you worry, we’ll look after Lola. They said a polite farewell and politely drove away.
“This is going to break her heart,” Ted said later. “She really did love me, you know.”
He couldn’t see Lola again, but, my research shows, he did. A lot.
He made it to 40. After hunting down his death certificate and going to Honolulu police HQ, I found Dan Macleod, last man to see Ted alive and who found his body. The police said “natural causes”. But what natural causes would cause Ted to end up, face beaten, lying in the bath, no water, just his own blood? Still, Duncan Coventry was satisfied. Pit Bull was not forthcoming. One person had the answers: Lola. She didn’t work in Femme Nu any more.there was a rumour she had fled to the mainland.
So just like Ted, I’m still looking for the “perfect woman”.
● Surf, Sweat And Tears by Andy Martin (OR Books, £16). Order at orbooks.com, 15% discount with code SURFSWEAT15
‘How would it be to surf on one leg?’