Keith Schellenberg
Colourful businessman, Olympic bobsleigher and turbulent Laird of the Hebridean island of Eigg
KEITH SCHELLENBERG, who has died aged 90, was a rambunctious Yorkshire-born heir to a glue-making fortune, a motoring magnate, former Olympic bobsleigher, powerboat racer, amateur aviator, vintage car collector, two-times Liberal Party candidate, socialite and, according to the Daily Express, the inventor of ice cricket.
He became best known, however, as the controversial owner for 20 years of the Hebridean island of Eigg.
Schellenberg bought the run-down island (with Margaret, née de Hauteville Hamilton, daughter of the 11th Lord Belhaven and Stenton and the second of his four wives) in the mid-1970s for £270,000 from Bernard Farnham-smith, a self-styled naval commander whose regime was described by the island’s retired GP as “living under enemy occupation, without the satisfaction of being able to shoot the bugger”. It turned out that the most Farnham-smith had ever commanded was a fire brigade.
Schellenberg’s takeover was greeted enthusiastically by the 39 remaining islanders. He wanted, he insisted, to make the island self-sufficient, primarily through tourism and farming.
Initially all seemed to be going well. He opened the community hall, which had been kept locked by the previous owner, so that there could be badminton in winter and dances in summer. A vegetarian, he banned hunting and shooting on his estate and encouraged the Scottish Wildlife Trust to create three nature reserves.
In addition, he renovated buildings for holiday homes and laid on boats to bring in tourists. Job ads in national newspapers brought an influx of new residents, the population rising to 60.
By the late Eighties, however, relations between laird and tenants had deteriorated, with Schellenberg accused of neglect, arrogance and autocratic tendencies. In 1980 he had divorced Margaret and, suddenly poorer, was running Eigg on a shoestring, unable or unwilling to fulfil his promises.
Planned golf courses and tennis courts never materialised and nor did the long leases promised to incomers; tourism ground to a halt; houses were neglected; the community hall was locked up once again. “I’ve kept its style slightly run-down – the Hebrides feel,” he claimed later. As his relationship with the islanders disintegrated, he refused to make essential repairs to properties while prohibiting tenants from carrying them out.
Islanders complained that, as they struggled to eke a living in leaky hovels, Schellenberg entertained well-heeled friends to motorboat races and “champers and hampers” weekends, forcing his tenants to live in primitive conditions “to satisfy his nostalgia for the 1920s”.
“We spent our days as if we were Somerset Maugham characters,” a one-time guest at Eigg Lodge recalled, “sunbathing or playing croquet on the manicured lawn. We piled on to the running board of the stately 1927 Rolls and made our way leisurely to jewelled beaches for long, lazy picnics or midnight games of moonlit hockey or football.”
Another guest described Schellenberg as a “Mr Toad” character: “I mean Keith actually wears those round goggles and he’s always arriving in places with a lot of noise and a cloud of dust.”
Schellenberg clearly tried to be kind and wanted to be popular, but he never seemed to realise how his flamboyance and caprice appeared to the tenantry.
In 1991, amid growing calls for land reform in Scotland, campaigners formed the Isle of Eigg Heritage Trust and launched a public appeal to raise the money to buy the island for its inhabitants.
Schellenberg’s “Big Hoose”, the Trust suggested, might become a Life Centre, where “bank managers would enrol to learn dry-stone dyking, admen would shear sheep, and lawyers muck out the byre”.
In May 1992, Schellenberg was forced by his ex-wife to put Eigg up for sale, but the Trust had not got its act together and in July the island was bought for under £1 million by the highest bidder: Schellenberg. The Scotsman reported the laird’s plans to take his vintage Rolls-royce Phantom on a “triumphal tour” of the island “once it was rendered roadworthy”.
In early 1994, however, a shed with the
Rolls inside was burnt down in an arson attack, an incident which prompted headlines such as “Scrambled Eigg”, “Burnt Rolls” and “Eigg comes to the boil”. The culprits were never identified.
Schellenberg blamed “hippies and drop-outs” and lashed out at “rotten, dangerous and barmy revolutionaries … more interested in smoking pot than growing crops”. “My ultimate failure with Eigg,” he explained in a BBC interview, “is that I can’t be bothered to try and get on with them any more.”
Things got worse when two members of the community were served with notices to quit. Their laird went on to send out Christmas cards inscribed with the legend “Isle of Eigg Bailiffs Plc”, accompanied by a picture of himself alongside two burly men in Father Christmas costumes, wielding croquet mallets. Inside the card was the message: “We specialise in recalcitrant tenants, squatters, junkies, weirdos, hippies, new age travellers and reds.” It was just a bit of fun, Schellenberg claimed later.
In 1995, however, needing money after an acrimonious split from his third wife, Schellenberg abruptly sold Eigg for £1.5 million to Maruma (real name Gotthilf Christian Eckhard Oesterle), a fireworshipping German “artist” and selfstyled “professor” who turned out to be heavily in debt and an even worse landlord than Schellenberg.
Within two years Maruma’s creditors had put Eigg up for auction and the Isle of Eigg Heritage Trust finally managed to raise £1.5m to buy it.
When Schellenberg finally departed in 1995, he turned to the crowd that had assembled on the pier to cheer him on his way. “You never understood me,” he shouted. “I always wanted to be one of you.”
Clifford Keith Wain Schellenberg was born on March 13 1929 in Middlesbrough, where his grandfather, Alan Edgar Schellenberg, had founded Cleveland Products, known locally as Schellenberg’s glue and hide factory, manufacturers of ossein gelatin. A profile on a Yorkshire website later described Keith as having made his fortune in shipbuilding, livestock feed and agricultural chemicals, as well as glue.
A keen sportsman as a young man, he played rugby for Middlesbrough and Yorkshire, and was part of the British Olympic bobsleigh team, captaining the team and competing in the two-man and four-man events at the 1956 Winter Olympics, and in the men’s singles in the luge at the 1964 Winter Olympics.
He was also a successful motor racer, took part in international vintage car rallies and raced power boats. He would often, he told an interviewer, play rugby for Middlesbrough on Saturday afternoon, head to Braemar to spend Sunday skiing and be back at his desk at the family firm by Monday morning.
Twice in the 1960s he contested the Richmond parliamentary seat for the Liberals, though only, he claimed later, to annoy his “old chum” Tim Kitson, the incumbent Conservative MP.
After his stewardship of the Island of Eigg came to an end, Schellenberg moved to the 2,400-acre Killean Estate in Kintyre and spent much of the rest of the 1990s involved in issuing writs against those he felt had unfairly represented his tenure as laird of Eigg.
In 1999, however, he was reported as being out of pocket by around £750,000 after abandoning libel actions against The Guardian and The Sunday Times.
Schellenberg’s first three marriages – to Jan Hagenbach, Margaret de Hauteville Hamilton and the garden designer Susan (“Suki”) Urquhart – were all dissolved. Subsequently he married Jilly Miller.
In 2001, after years in Scotland, he and Jilly returned to Richmond, Yorkshire, and bought St Nicholas, a 16th century house and adjoining gardens, formerly occupied by Lady Serena James and overlooking the River Swale, where Jilly devoted her energies to restoring the gardens to their full glory. “I’d done 40 years on the north-west frontier, trying to tame the Scots,” Schellenberg explained. The house was put up for sale in 2017.
Jilly survives him with two daughters from his first marriage and two daughters and a son from his second marriage.