Mary Gilliatt's Fabulous Food and Friends by Mary Gilliatt

Author:Mary Gilliatt
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781844688708
Publisher: Pen & Sword Books

CHAPTER SIX

THURLOE SQUARE AND TOSTOCK, 1968

JANUARY 5th, 1968 – TOSTOCK

DINNER: Paul and Annette Reilly

Terence and Caroline Conran

David and Angela Caccia

Anthony Green

Sarah Porter

Jane Porter

Billy McCarty

This was a post-New Year dinner party pre the Ickworth Ball. Ickworth, built in 1795 by the eccentric 4th Marquess of Bristol, was the home of the Hervey family, and consisted of a splendid rotunda with two side wings (although I read in a lively memoir of a visit to Suffolk, by a young Duc de la Rochfoucauld soon after it was built, that it was ‘a far from distinguished house’). The rotunda had a curving corridor for the display of paintings and a series of formal reception rooms, so seldom used – except for occasions like this – that the furniture and objects had been outstandingly well- preserved. The family actually lived in the east wing, to one side of the rotunda and the west wing, which balanced it, was just left empty. The surrounding park with its huge ancient trees and nibbling sheep was, and still is, the model of what such a grand country house park should be and the gardens, at that time, were immaculate. In fact, many of the Marquesses of Bristol were either eccentric or just plain bad. I read in the same de la Rochfoucauld memoir, that the Eighteenth Century French writer and philosopher, Voltaire, on a visit to Britain had written: ‘There are three sorts of people in England: Men, Women and Herveys.’

Victor Hervey, the 6th and then current holder of the title, had been the ringleader in his youth of the notorious ‘Mayfair Playboys’, a gang of loutish ex-public school boys, and was often called (quite kindly I thought, in the circumstances) ‘The Pink Panther’ of his day. He went bankrupt in 1937 at the age of 21 when he was selling arms to both sides in the Spanish Civil War and a deal went wrong, leaving him with debts of almost £124,000 (about £10 million in current currency). His ‘Mayfair Playboys’ gang assaulted a jeweller for Cartier during a massive jewellery heist, and he was sentenced to three years in prison while some others of the gang, were sentenced to the ‘cat-'o-nine-tails’ (a particularly unpleasant whipping). In spite of his early financial hiccups and criminal record, Victor Hervey went on to amass a fortune of some £50 million from various sources, then moved to Monte Carlo for tax reasons, with his very much younger third wife, his former secretary, by whom he had three more children (the 8th Marquess and the ‘It’ girls, the Ladies Victoria and Isabella Hervey). But almost all the fortune he had tried to save in Monaco was subsequently lost or spent on drugs by his eldest son and heir, the 7th Marquess, born to his first wife.

The house had already been sold to the National Trust, although the family retained a substantial lease on the east wing which remained the family seat. Unfortunately for the 8th Marquess, his elder halfbrother sold back

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