Lord Cobbold
Landowner who secured the future of Knebworth with everything from jousting to rock concerts
THE 2ND BARON COBBOLD, who has died from Parkinson’s disease aged 84, was a landowner and banker who, against the odds, kept his ancestral home, Knebworth House, in the family by opening it to the public for everything from medieval jousting to rock concerts.
A passionate pro-european
Liberal Democrat, who later sat as a cross-bencher, he was among 92 hereditary peers elected to remain in the House of Lords in 1999.
David Antony Fromanteel Cobbold was born on July 14 1937, the eldest son of Cameron (Kim) and Lady Hermione Cobbold, née Bulwer-lytton, greatgranddaughter of the colourful novelist Edward Bulwer-lytton, who penned the immortal lines “It was a dark and stormy night” and “The pen is mightier than the sword.”
After spending her childhood at Knebworth, in Hertfordshire, once a huge red-brick Elizabethan manor house, remodelled in spectacular Gothic style in the 1840s, Hermione had inherited it unexpectedly after the deaths of her brothers, Antony, in an air crash, and John at Alamein.
Cobbold, a cheerful, fearless boy, grew up at Knebworth and loved running wild on the estate, galloping round the deer park, and playing tennis.
He was educated at Eton, where he became a talented oarsman, then read Moral Sciences at Trinity College, Cambridge. For his National Service he joined the Canadian Air Force, where his dashing good looks and unconventional manner made him a popular, uproarious companion.
He went into banking, and after a short stint in New York, moved back to London, later combining his increasingly demanding career in finance with weekends spent running events in Knebworth Park.
In 1960 he changed his name by deed poll to Lytton Cobbold, as a mark of respect to his mother’s family. The following year, he married Christine (Chryssie) Stucley, from Hartland Abbey, North Devon, after they had met at a dance in 1958.
Despite her fey, hippyish beauty and other-worldly air, Chryssie was a down-toearth country girl who had earned pocketmoney as a child catching moles for their skins. Her husband later remarked that she already understood the challenges of running a historic house as her childhood home was even bigger than his.
She coped calmly with the early challenges of life at Knebworth, waking up to find mice nibbling her toes. Although she often joked about David’s eye for a pretty girl, the couple’s sense of humour and tolerance of each other’s foibles kept the alliance an enduring and loving one.
In 1960 David Lytton Cobbold’s father Kim, a former Governor of the Bank of England, was elevated to the peerage as the first Baron Cobbold, and in 1963 he became Lord Chamberlain to the Queen. With little time to devote to the increasingly dilapidated great house, he offered it to the local authority, which declined it on grounds of expense.
Instead, despite parental reservations, the Lytton Cobbolds took it over in 1969 and threw it open to the public for everything from photo shoots and weddings to a famous series of rock concerts by the Rolling Stones, Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin and Oasis.
This produced some close calls. On one occasion, members of Pink Floyd and The Who were “partying hard” in one room while the Lytton Cobbolds entertained the Drugs Squad next door, desperately trying to keep the two groups apart.
The couple introduced a string of tourist attractions, including lion cubs, adventure playgrounds and even jousting tournaments, with Cobbold himself taking on his fellow knights in combat at a terrifying gallop. It was only in his 70s, as debilitating Parkinson’s took hold, that he was finally persuaded to give up.
Always fascinated by showbiz, music and drama, the Cobbolds successfully marketed their house as a location for TV productions and films, including The Shooting Party in 1983, Tim Burton’s Batman (1988) and Eyes Wide Shut (1999).
Lytton Cobbold inherited the title on the death of his father in 1987 but remained as lively and informal as ever, determined to share the Knebworth experience with people from all backgrounds.
Lord and Lady Cobbold were celebrated party-givers, organising amateur theatricals, bluebell picnics, tennis parties and concerts, often recruiting platoons of friends to perform at evenings featuring favourite songwriters like Jerome Kern and Irving Berlin.
When the family threw an “Underground” fancy-dress party at Knebworth, Cobbold had an entire Tube train carriage towed (with great difficulty) into the courtyard as an offbeat dance floor. The guests dressed as different stations including Dollis Hill (with a heavily bandaged dolly) and a near-pornographic Cockfosters.
Hermione, Lady Cobbold, by now living in a wooden chalet in the park, came, appropriately, as Bank station, resplendent in the helmet and hanging draperies of the Old Lady of Threadneedle Street.
Discovering that his great-great grandfather Edward Bulwer-lytton had put on theatrical evenings with his friend Charles Dickens, Lord Cobbold and the actor Gerald Dickens, himself a descendant of the novelist, restaged one of the original melodramas, each man playing his distinguished ancestor in velvet frock coats and tall hats.
Cobbold’s gift for friendship attracted such diverse guests as Dame Barbara Cartland, Auberon and Teresa Waugh, his neighbours Ken and Barbara Follett and the Bonham-carter family. Even in later life he was as happy in the company of the young, sparky or eccentric as with his own contemporaries.
When in the 1980s two of his eldest son Henry’s friends at Eton, the teenage Ugandan brothers Danny and Harry Matovu, suffered family problems, the Cobbolds virtually adopted them as their own sons, relishing their later successes as both became barristers and established an accomplished jazz duo.
After an eventful working life that included stints at BP and TSB, as well as financial director roles at Hill Samuel and Close Brothers, Lord Cobbold retired to focus on running Knebworth and became involved in numerous charities and local projects.
To secure the cash-strapped house and park for future generations, he set it up as a trust and developed peripheral estate land for housing and a hotel. In 2002, the Cobbolds handed over the house to their son Henry and his American wife Martha and moved to a nearby gatehouse.
Cobbold dealt stoically with the Parkinson’s with which he was diagnosed in 2008. His wife survives him with their three sons, their daughter, the Matovu brothers and two children from other relationships.
His eldest son, Henry Fromanteel Lytton Cobbold (born 1962), succeeds to the barony.
Lord Cobbold, born July 14 1937, died May 9 2022