Armed with a camera and sheer bravado, the rebel aristocrat flouts law on a daring mission to save pigs
SHE might seem to spring straight from the pages of a P.G. Wodehouse novel: a pig-obsessed aristocrat driven to outlandish escapades to make a colourful point or two.
Not that there is anything fictional about 57-year-old Tracy Worcester, a real-life Marchioness, greatgranddaughter of the 2nd Earl of Dudley and a glamorous former actress who in 1987 married Harry, Marquess of Worcester, and moved to the 52,000-acre Badminton House estate in Gloucestershire. They had three children but separated two years ago.
A natural rebel, she was expelled several times from boarding school – once after slapping a deputy headmistress – and went on to perform in a saucy cabaret act in London pubs before starring in the TV detective series C.A.T.S Eyes.
Now she is taking on the Establishment as a longstanding environmental campaigner and – less orthodox still – is a fierce advocate for pig welfare. She has devoted herself to their cause for more than a decade.
In 2008 she released a shocking film called Pig Business, which exposed the bully-boy tactics of the big corporations behind intensive pig farming. She has broken into factory farms abroad, lobbied spectators at the Badminton Horse Trials and enlisted the support of the famous – including actors Dominic West and Helen McCrory (pictured left) – to her campaign Farms Not Factories.
Now she is turning her attention to the British pig industry, which she says is in a desperate plight as it battles cheap imports from countries with lower animal welfare standards.
Wodehouse’s Blandings stories famously deal with amusing skulduggery in toffish pig pens, but there is nothing humorous about the conditions Tracy Worcester seeks to expose. As she explains with devastating force below.