Gascoigne takes on duchess's challenge
AS QUIZMASTER for University Challenge, he was accustomed to posing difficult questions.
Now Bamber Gascoigne is rising to an almighty challenge — and coming up with the answers — after being taken aback to discover that he has inherited one of the most remarkable homes in the country.
His aunt, the Duchess of Roxburghe — one of the great beauties of her age and the goddaughter of George V — has left Gascoigne with the task of saving her family’s country home — West Horsley Place in Surrey.
The house, which has 11th-cen- tury roots, Tudor beams and a redbrick Georgian facade, has been described as “endangered” and must be rescued from ruin after the upper floor was shut and left to history with all its treasures inside.
Until being contacted by a solicitor, Gascoigne had no idea he was to inherit West Horsley Place, which had many visits from royalty, including one by Henry VIII in which he enjoyed a 35-course lunch. Now the broadcaster — famed for hosting University Challenge for 25 years with his catchphrase “Your starter for 10” — and his wife Christina have embarked on a project to save the house, sacrificing some of the valuables inside to finance much-needed repairs.
He is to sell an estimated £2.2million of jewels, paintings, furniture and artefacts through Sotheby’s auction house, giving the public its first glimpse into the remarkable lives of his ancestors.
Many of the items were discovered behind locked doors after the death of the duchess last year aged 99, while others had been packed away in trunks for decades.
Most were uncovered after Gascoigne, also the duchess’s godson, called in experts to uncover what lay behind every cobweb-laden door.
Aged 80, Gascoigne said he is committed to ensuring the house “continues to stand as a monument of its remarkable past”, and hopes eventually to open it to the public.
“It was completely unexpected by me that I would be heir to her estate,” he said. “She had expressed that, given the work required to restore the house, she expected I would sell it.
“But it’s such an incredible place and we knew it well, so the idea of immediately selling it seemed not only amazingly foolish but also missing the fun that was involved.
“Having spent many memorable times with my godmother here, and knowing how special the house was to her and her family, together with my wife I decided to take up the challenge of carrying out the essential work to the house to ensure that it can withstand what may lie ahead over the course of its future.”
He described the house as “completely charming” and said he was relatively “relaxed” about the daunting project of being its custodian as a result of having no children of his own to pass it on to.
The Sotheby’s sale, of 700 lots, is said by auctioneers to reveal a “portrait of an England that no longer exists but was preserved, untouched for almost half a century”. After passing through a dozen of England’s finest families since 1086, the house was bought by the Marquis of Crewe in 1931 as the family’s country seat and inherited by his daughter in 1973.
As a 20-year-old society beauty, she had married the Duke of Roxburghe at Westminster Abbey.
They lived at Floors Castle in Scotland, but after being served her divorce papers on a silver breakfast platter in 1953, the duchess — who had dozens of great nephews and nieces but no children of her own — retreated to West Horsley Place. Among the items for sale are jewels and tiaras used for high society balls, including a diamond tiara which could fetch more than £300,000. There are also gifts from the Royal Family, and the gown worn by the duchess when she bore the train of Queen Elizabeth at the coronation of George VI.
The most notable of the three miles of books lining the house have been donated to Trinity College, Cambridge.
The collection will be sold between three key Sotheby’s sales: the Magnificent Jewels Sale in Geneva on May 12, and the main collection sale in London on May 27 and 28.