Sir Peter Graham-moon, Bt
Bon vivant, rally-driver and ‘philandering baronet’ whose wronged wife chopped up his suits
SIR PETER GRAHAM-MOON, 5th Bt, who has died aged 80, hit the headlines in 1992 as the “philandering baronet” when his wife Sarah took a spectacular revenge after discovering that he was having an affair with a blonde down the road.
At three o’clock one May morning, dressed in her nightclothes, she drove to the woman’s house, spotted her husband’s sleek blue BMW in the driveway and poured five litres of white gloss paint over it before spearing a pair of his “mega-size” boxer shorts with the car aerial.
Returning home, she took out her scissors and cut one sleeve from each of five cashmere coats and 32 bespoke Savile Row suits, saying “He only needs one arm for what he does best,” then proceeded to empty his Havana cigars into the horse trough.
Next, she drove round delivering the contents of his wine cellar to the doorsteps of the needy folk of East Garston, Berkshire, including bottles of Château Latour 1961, worth £300 apiece.
Her retribution turned her into the patron saint of dumped wives, but did nothing to chasten her errant husband. By 2000, aged 58, and after several more romantic entanglements, he was reported to be living in a cramped two-bedroomed flat in an eight-storey tower block near Bangkok airport with a 22-year-old Thai girlfriend, putting his nightly researches in the local bars and go-go clubs on a website called www.baronbonk.com.
Peter Wilfred Giles Graham-moon was born in London on October 24 1942, the only son of Sir Wilfred Graham-moon, 4th Bt, a former ADC to the Governor of Fiji, and his second wife Doris, née Baron-jobson. The baronetcy had been created in 1855 for the printseller and publisher Francis Grahammoon who had served as Lord Mayor of London in 1854-55.
Peter had a difficult childhood. His parents divorced when he was five; his mother died when he was 11 and his father when he was 12, leaving him with a trust fund worth about £5 million in today’s money. After the death of a stepmother in 1956, he lived with various guardians.
He was educated at Lancing College but left with only one O-level (in English Literature) aged 17.
With a private income of the equivalent today of £50,000 a year, he set his heart on becoming a rally driver, but soon became involved in the first of several romantic entanglements.
Aged 22, he met Dorothy, a 42-year-old married woman with three children. Breaking into his trust fund, he embarked on a hedonistic splurge with her. Over two years, the bankruptcy courts heard later, he spent £7,000 on holidays, £3,600 on clothes, £2,400 on gambling and £47,000 on a luxury home that was eventually sold for £27,000 – “and there was a further £21,000 that he could not account for”, as the Telegraph reported. In addition, he paid for nannies for Dorothy’s children.
His counsel later explained that in a “whirl of social life with a mature and sophisticated lady he met a large number of people… and I have the impression that Sir Peter nearly always picked up the bill at the end of the evening.”
By the time his debts landed him in court he had married Sarah Chater (née Smith), a divorcee, also with three children. They had met in a casino and for a time before their marriage in 1967 he continued his relationship with Dorothy. A few months after the wedding, however, Graham-moon was declared bankrupt, and for the next five years he was in and out of court, seeking a discharge.
One judge observed: “There appears to have been a complete lack of any effort on [Sir Peter’s] part to do anything to meet his liabilities, which were incurred irresponsibly, recklessly and extravagantly.”
When Graham-moon was eventually granted a conditional discharge by the Appeal Court in 1972, he claimed that he had learnt his lesson: “Let my experience be a warning to other young persons finding themselves in similar circumstances,” he declared. “A title is a detriment to a young man with too much money.”
But his contrition did not last long, and according to his wife, with whom he had two sons, while his cellar grew and he returned to the rally-driving circuit (where he was known as Hippo on account of his 19-stone frame), she managed on an allowance of £12.50 a week for herself with £70 for food and the gardener. In 1976 he broke both legs when he drove his Porsche into a gate post at 90mph. In 1983 he was banned from driving after doing 103.5mph on the M5. In addition there were various failed business ventures.
By the time Sarah Graham-moon embarked on her orgy of vengeance, they were close to finalising their divorce. It was not jealousy that motivated her, she claimed, but “his lack of courtesy in doing what I regard as the final insult to a woman, right on my doorstep”.
After their divorce and a brief period in Budapest, in 1993 Graham-moon married, secondly, Terry de Vries, a South African casino croupier and mother of four 20 years his junior. The marriage ended after three months, Ms de Vries telling the South African press that making love to Grahammoon “was like being run over by a bulldozer”, adding, somewhat unnecessarily: “He’s too fat for me. I could not bring myself to make love to a man who wears button-up shirts and underpants in bed at night.”
With his inheritance almost exhausted, Graham-moon decamped to the Thai island of Phuket, where he opened a bar and embarked on a stormy relationship with a bar worker. Moving after four years to Bangkok, he met Mem Noodaeng Samingram, the 19-year-old daughter of a chicken farmer, with whom he had a daughter.
The couple returned to England, where Graham-moon became licensee of the Red Lion, a National Trust-owned hostelry in Bradenham, Buckinghamshire, but Mem became homesick and in 2012 they returned to Thailand, where they opened a cafe.
In 1999, in an interview with the Daily Mirror, Graham-moon admitted that many people might consider him a “dirty old man”, but he had few regrets: “I’ve always been a womaniser and I’ve always enjoyed a drink. Nothing’s going to change me… Who knows, I may even write a book about what I’ve been up to – it would make a damn good film as well. Ollie Reed would have been the perfect star to play me.”
He is succeeded in the baronetcy by his elder son, Rupert Graham-moon, born in 1968.