The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Money
‘It’s totally nuts that the eldest son inherits’
Family scrapped the established rules, they tell Eleanor Doughty
Location: Founded:
FFife 13th century Sixty rooms in 1,200 acres
or 200 years, Cambo House, near St Andrews in Fife, had passed neatly from father to son down the Erskine family tree. But then the next generation decided it was time to end the “nonsense” of the mechanism that means the eldest son inherits. Instead, the five children of Sir Peter Erskine, the 6th Baronet, opted for a more collaborative approach – a family trust, which is now responsible for decision-making at 60-room Cambo, which sits in a 1,200-acre estate.
Sir Peter’s son, James, 44, was appointed director of the estate in 2021. Until 2019, he and his wife, Jasmine, were living in Myanmar, where Jasmine was working for Oxfam and the United Nations. They returned home to the UK in 2020 and now, with their three young sons, live in an apartment in the “preposterously big house” at Cambo. Establishing a trust and putting a stop to primogeniture has been a brave move, but an important one, he says.
The system of passing down the estate through the eldest male line is nonsense, he says, and all of his siblings are agreed. “It’s an interesting approach, but a brittle one, incredibly risky. It’s just not something you would come up with if you were starting from scratch – it’s totally nuts.”
The Cambo estate dates back to the 12th century and came into the Erskines’ possession in 1668, in whose hands it has remained, bar a 24-year period in the 18th century when it was owned by the Charteris family. When Thomas Erskine, 9th Earl of Kellie, bought it back in the 1790s, he invested heavily in it, building the elegant Georgian estate and farm buildings, and commissioning the architect Robert Balfour to remodel the house, which began as a simple tower dating from the 13th century.
Though Thomas Kellie had no children with his wife Anne, he had a daughter out of wedlock. Knowing he was likely to die without a male heir, he adopted his daughter’s children, the first of whom, David Erskine, was created the first baronet of Cambo in 1821, and from whose line the family descends today. In 1878, the house was gutted after a fire after a staff party, and the Erskines rebuilt the house, instructing architects that it must be bigger than Balbirnie, the home of the Balfour family 25 miles away.
The new house, a solid piece of Victorian engineering – or, as James puts it, “an absolute monster” – has been divided into apartments since the late 1940s when his grandparents, Sir David and Lady Ann Erskine, began letting parts of the house. They considered moving into the stables, but chose to stick with the house and built a family apartment on the ground floor, where James and his family live.
This has not always been entirely logical or functional, he says: “There was a kitchen in the hall when I was born, and no front door, so you had to be passed out of the window.”
Throughout the later 20th century, parts of the house were often let to students from St Andrews, becoming a happy source of babysitters for the Erskine children. After they left, Peter Erskine and his wife, Catherine, were running the house and they moved the estate towards self-catering.
In 2016, when Struan and his wife, Frances, took over, they pushed the events business, making Cambo a top-class, popular wedding venue. “It was a shrewd move,” says James. “They were definitely ahead of the trend in terms of whole-house hire.”
Now, Cambo hosts weddings and events; the house can be booked for self-catering exclusive-use, and sleeps 37. The gardens and parkland are open to visitors, who particularly come to enjoy the national collection of 350 varieties of snowdrops from January, and the glories of the alliums and roses through the spring and summer.
The archives have snowdrops receipts dating back to 1801, but it was not until the 1930s that the idea was really encouraged by then chatelaine Magdalen Erskine, a keen gardener, who took to propagating them, putting her children to work dividing and replanting them in the estate’s 70 acres of woodland.
The family is an integral part of the local community. In 2021, his sister, Gill, co-founded Wildstrong, a community fitness franchise, which she runs out of the old dairy, and James, whose background is in theatre production, has plans for an art gallery.
“That’s the kind of thing you should be doing on these estates,” he says. “If you’ve got this amazing toy, why wouldn’t you want to get people to come and play with it?”
He can’t imagine not opening up Cambo to the public – not just financially, but morally. “The idea that you wouldn’t want to share it I find monstrous – a bit Bond villainy.”