Memories of My Favourite Viscount

How gratifying to read in this month’s Country Life that the 12^th Viscount Cobham is courting a new generation of visitors to his magnificent ancestral home in Hagley.

A few years before his death in 2006, John, the 11^th Viscount, told me how keen he was to pass on such a wonderful part of England's national heritage in a viable state.

Even then, he was selling £1m worth of antique furniture to help fund an ambitious £2m repair scheme.

A year earlier, two ancestral paintings had gone under the hammer to pay his £1 million divorce bill from Lady Cobham who left him and went on to marry former cabinet minister David Mellor

One, by the 17th century Italian artist Pietro della Vecchia, was aptly named Christ and the Woman Take in Adultery and sold for £86,250. John genuinely had no idea about the obvious connotation but said his brother laughed like a drain when he phoned to say which paintings had gone to auction.

Unlike his father, John never made decisions without giving any thought to the consequences.

It took some soul-searching to sell off so much of his family’s heritage but he considered himself caretaker rather than owner of Hagley Hall and raising money to keep the place going was a wretched but necessary means to an end.

“The house is made of sandstone,” John told me. “Bits are always falling off. My father was very much a man of the moment so when a chap drove through the gates in a Morris Minor one day and said "Sandblast your house, guv?" he didn’t think twice about giving him the job.

"I think he left about three years later driving a Land Rover and the repair bills are still coming in. Father timed his death to a tee around the same time leaving absolutely no cash and the family facing vast amounts in inheritance tax.

"The only drink we found in the house was a bottle of port - half of which he'd consumed the night before, a case of 1915 wine that I think my grandmother won at a village fete and an undrinkable case of 1878 sherry."

I’m sure dear John is chortling with delight at the way his brother now appears to be turning the tide.

He did think about throwing in the towel and finding solitude in a New Zealand orange grove when Penny took up with old chubb-chops but the Cobhams are made of stern stuff. We have only to look at what the 12^th Viscount has achieved to realise this.