Last night I exercised a good choice in deciding to watch a programme on Chanel Four about the life and death of 10th Earl of Shaftesbury which revealed a kind loving gentleman who decided to give himself to hedonistic pleasure just after his sixtieth year squandering the greater part of his fortune and meeting untimely death a long away from his family and those who loved him as long term friends.
One of my heroes was the Seventh Earl of Shaftesbury who biography by Georgina Battiscombe I acquired in 1974. The Earl is said by Georgina to be among the few where it can be said they contributed substantially to the reduction of human misery and added to the sum of human happiness. He experience an unhappy childhood and was prone to melancholy. He was an aristocrat of the highest order with his mother was a daughter of the 4th Duke of Marlborough. One of his interests was the protection of young children and around 1848 he spoke in Parliament about how 10000 Artful dodgers had been taken off the streets and he was responsible for legislation which restricted the hours which a child could work and in stopping the use of children in climbing inside chimneys to clean them a cause taken up by Charles Kingsley in the Water Babies
As he grew into old age he suffered the loss of his wife and then the death of several of his children. Most men would have retreated into self pity and preparation for their own demise but at the age of 76 he took up new causes and filled his day with sufficient work to exhaust younger men. He supported anti vivisection, the suppression of child prostitution, the improvement of the conditions of workers in India and as a consequence he struggled to maintain the family house on its estate in Dorset.
In yesterday's programme which concentrated on the last five years of the life of the 10th Earl a close friend described how he was shown the vault where the long line of Earls are buried and he pointed to the space prepared for himself. The former friend described the space as dark, scary and lonely and it is evident that loneliness, the loss of physical abilities, the entering of the state when you become aware of the reality of death, together with a combination of economic and social changes which had escalated the declined of his position, and I suspect awareness of the legacy of the Seventh Earl and the expectation of a dynasty of public service all contribution to abandoning his former sense of duty and concentrating on hedonism which appears to have always been a part of his life and which also appears to have been inherited from his father. He appears to have moved fulltime to his home in Paris using his wealth to purchase the time and affection of young women, and then in the South of France where is acquired another property, leaving his estate and homes on the South coast and in London.
Anthony Ashley-Cooper was born a year before me and it can be argued that apart from this similarity the differences in our educational and cultural backgrounds could not have been more different. He went to Eton while I went as subsidised pupil to a denominational preparatory school and then to a school with ambitions to become a public school so that we had an Olympic team coach as games master. I did not know who my mother was for several years and grew up without a father, or knowing of him, Anthony's father died in 1948 when he was eight years of age and therefore may not have known much about his father's lifestyle until later or that there had been a social scandal when he married a model of lingerie and Cochran chorus girl, similar to the Ziegfield Follies. She became and actress and went on to have five husbands including Douglas Fairbanks, Clark Gable and the racing driver Prince Dimitri Djordjadze.
I believe he had graduated and left Oxford as I was about to go to Ruskin College, in 1961 the year his grandfather died and he became the 10th Earl at the age of 22. His grandfather had married a daughter of the Grosvenor family and in addition to management of the family estate and properties he was Lord Chamberlain to the Prince fo Wales and subsequently Queen Mary and the Lord Steward 1922-1936 as well as being the Lord Lieutenant of Belfast 1904-1911; Antrim 1910-1916 and Dorset 1916-1952, with the function of accompanying Members of the Royal family and other dignitaries when they visited the counties.
There is no information when the Earl's inclination to waywardness commenced although a BBC profile sates that his interest in exotic women had commenced when he was at Eton and that had written an adverse comment about the pink champagne drinking debutantes. One source suggested the family had been crippled by death duties but another stats that provision had been made to protect the family from the impact of death duties and that the 10th Earl had been a good financial manager h in the lower millions still by 1990. My interest in the part the aristocracy played in creating social reform commenced while first studying social and economic history on the politics and economics diploma and then with an early Criminology tutorial, assignment after switching to the post graduate diploma in Public and Social Administration and asked to read about the impact of the churches and others on penal reform. I had had some marginal contact with members of the House of Lords arising from my campaigning activities, but it was not until over Christmas 1961 that I had my first direct encounter with the self confidence, outlook and influence of those of inherited nobility and when a few days earlier it could all have been very different.
I had published an article in Isis, the student weekly magazine, just before Christmas which contained aspects about prison and a young man of birth and public school education at one of the great colleges who I had never met telephoned me on either Christmas Day or Boxing day for advice about some of the issues I had raised in the article, having obtained my home telephone number from the then editor, who presumably he had also contacted over the holiday. During the conversation he mentioned to having also spoken with the then Home Secretary. It was an important lesson which I learnt that if you are going to do something set no boundaries yourself until others set them for you.
It could have all been very different if a couple of weeks before I was at the point of going back to prison again when I changed my mind. The Committee of 100 of which I had resigned as member, had initiated a number of separately organised marches and demonstrations on the same weekend and one was t taking place in Oxfordshire at the then USA airbase at Brize Norton and I had decided to act as a march steward but had still not made up my mind about participating in the sit down although I had taken the precaution of preparing a detailed statement about what I was doing and why in the event that joined the sit down and was arrested.
The march assembled on the Green at Witney and the police asked for a meeting with stewards although all approval for the march and the details of its stewarding had been agreed beforehand. The police, no doubt guided by government and political interests, then adopted a clever but dubious tactic of unearthing an ancient law which enabled them to arrest all the marshals and require us to agree on a good behaviour undertaking or go to prison over Christmas. The police station and the magistrates court were located at one end of the Green so we just had to walk over. I was arrested by a polite young officer who allowed me to make my long statement which was of a political nature. When it was my turn as we all appeared individually before the bench of magistrates, the clerk asked if I had said anything on being charged, the young man produced his notebook and commenced to read out what I had said word for word. It was a long speech and part way the Chairman of the bench drew attention that it was a political statement but the young constable forcefully pointed out that it was what I had said and therefore was required by law to be reported. He put some enthusiasm into the speech and it was evident he was sympathetic to cause. Having gone this far it seemed inappropriate to do anything other than refuse the recognisance and I was held at the station pending transfer to a prison. However all the horrors of my previous experience flooded back as I waited and the obvious concern that even if the college accepted my return, the County Council funders of the further education grant might take a different view and after that first term I knew that I had made the right decision to take up the place and not become the first paid organiser of the London region Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. I contacted the court to say that I would accept the recognisance and because I had not been involved in illegal activity that was the end of the matter officially and in fact there was such an outcry about the use of this ancient law which undermined the right to participate in protest marches, that it was never used again.
There was a further twist in this experience which had I not accepted the recognisance would have put in question everything else including that phone call over Christmas, in that half a year later I decided that I did not want to study economics but wanted to study criminology and psychology and through the understanding support of the college principal I was given an interview which led to being accepted on the post graduate diploma certificate in public and social administration course at Barnett House and to my return to work for Oxfordshire as a qualified child care officer, Several of us joined the Children's department that autumn for completed training course and I was allocated to a small team which covered Witney and Burford when I was also appointed as the representative of the County at the Juvenile courts, and if required adult court in the area, including the court at Witney, where over the three years I got to know the local area police and magistrates, and where the Marquis of Blanford, a son of the Duke of Marlborough presided over the court at Burford and his wife the Juvenile Court at Witney. I was reminded of the prison governor of Drake Hall in Staffordshire who had put me on an outside working party demolishing a World War II armaments factory complex and that within a couple of years of my appointment I was being escorted to the office of British Commanding officer of the base to interview an officer who had declined the request I had made on behalf of a court in family proceedings.
There were many inside out turnings during the five years studying, working and living in the city and county of Oxford but a great lesson was to look beyond the appearance of people and their education, cultural and denominational backgrounds and recognise what was common, especially that we are all human mixtures, a point which the 10th Earl made himself during the film on camera as others were also to made and that if one is going to be so bold as to make a judgement about the life of another human being, account should be the totality of their being,
Anthony Ashley-Cooper was married three times, in 1976 to a woman ten years his senior of Italian background which lasted for ten years and then to the daughter of a diplomat who bore him two sons. The eldest, the 11th Earl died with a short time of the discovery of his father's body when only in his mid twenties, to be succeeded by his younger brother in 2005. My understanding is that the 10th Earl always led two lives. He continues to this day to have been loved by those who worked or lived as part of the family estate in Dorset with one person saying that whatever he had done and whatever his condition he would have been welcomed back into the community had he chosen to do so. He had been an active conservationist.
The break up of his second marriage where his former wife was given the family seat as part of the divorce settlement may have bee one factor in his decision to abandon his role as an aristocrat although there is some evidence that he also reacted strongly to the Labour Government decision to abolish the right of heredity and other Peers to sit and speak in the House of Lords. This prompted the Earl to make his only speech and which according to the extract in the TV programme was intellectual, whimsical and embarrassing, and with this he departed to Paris where he changed his image and took to wearing black, I like it I like it, and was soon seen escorting one of the most beautiful of photographic models of the day with whom he is said to have developed into a serious relationship becoming engaged and where he subsequently confirmed he spent over £1million in presents and monetary gifts. She was said to be member of an Italian Royal house but their relationship ended in 2002 after it was revealed that she was a French nude model, a Penthouse Pet with silicone enhancements of pneumatic proportions.
He remained desperate for female sexual company and used an established Parisian Madam to provide girls, willing to pay whatever price was asked. He drank heavily and used other recreational substances and then came the under influence of two exotic sisters well known to the rich and famous in Paris and the Rivera and to the disapproval of family and friends married one, a Tunisian divorcee with two children although it appears he saw himself with a hareem. The disturbed brother of the sisters also joined the household but the marriage failed and he was soon frequenting the bars in search of picks ups. He then met a Morrocan hostess and they set up home together wanting to make her his fourth wife but his third wife wanted a divorce settlement beyond his means. According to programme his third wife and her brother was subsequently convicted of planning his murder for which the brother was said to have been given 150000 euros but his sister and they were imprisoned for life. It was six months before his body was found on a rubbish dump, ravaged from wild boar. It is recorded that an ancestor the third Earl gave the following counsel to his wayward son "The extending of a single passion too far, or the continuance of it too long is able to bring irrevocable ruin and misery."
One of my heroes was the Seventh Earl of Shaftesbury who biography by Georgina Battiscombe I acquired in 1974. The Earl is said by Georgina to be among the few where it can be said they contributed substantially to the reduction of human misery and added to the sum of human happiness. He experience an unhappy childhood and was prone to melancholy. He was an aristocrat of the highest order with his mother was a daughter of the 4th Duke of Marlborough. One of his interests was the protection of young children and around 1848 he spoke in Parliament about how 10000 Artful dodgers had been taken off the streets and he was responsible for legislation which restricted the hours which a child could work and in stopping the use of children in climbing inside chimneys to clean them a cause taken up by Charles Kingsley in the Water Babies
As he grew into old age he suffered the loss of his wife and then the death of several of his children. Most men would have retreated into self pity and preparation for their own demise but at the age of 76 he took up new causes and filled his day with sufficient work to exhaust younger men. He supported anti vivisection, the suppression of child prostitution, the improvement of the conditions of workers in India and as a consequence he struggled to maintain the family house on its estate in Dorset.
In yesterday's programme which concentrated on the last five years of the life of the 10th Earl a close friend described how he was shown the vault where the long line of Earls are buried and he pointed to the space prepared for himself. The former friend described the space as dark, scary and lonely and it is evident that loneliness, the loss of physical abilities, the entering of the state when you become aware of the reality of death, together with a combination of economic and social changes which had escalated the declined of his position, and I suspect awareness of the legacy of the Seventh Earl and the expectation of a dynasty of public service all contribution to abandoning his former sense of duty and concentrating on hedonism which appears to have always been a part of his life and which also appears to have been inherited from his father. He appears to have moved fulltime to his home in Paris using his wealth to purchase the time and affection of young women, and then in the South of France where is acquired another property, leaving his estate and homes on the South coast and in London.
Anthony Ashley-Cooper was born a year before me and it can be argued that apart from this similarity the differences in our educational and cultural backgrounds could not have been more different. He went to Eton while I went as subsidised pupil to a denominational preparatory school and then to a school with ambitions to become a public school so that we had an Olympic team coach as games master. I did not know who my mother was for several years and grew up without a father, or knowing of him, Anthony's father died in 1948 when he was eight years of age and therefore may not have known much about his father's lifestyle until later or that there had been a social scandal when he married a model of lingerie and Cochran chorus girl, similar to the Ziegfield Follies. She became and actress and went on to have five husbands including Douglas Fairbanks, Clark Gable and the racing driver Prince Dimitri Djordjadze.
I believe he had graduated and left Oxford as I was about to go to Ruskin College, in 1961 the year his grandfather died and he became the 10th Earl at the age of 22. His grandfather had married a daughter of the Grosvenor family and in addition to management of the family estate and properties he was Lord Chamberlain to the Prince fo Wales and subsequently Queen Mary and the Lord Steward 1922-1936 as well as being the Lord Lieutenant of Belfast 1904-1911; Antrim 1910-1916 and Dorset 1916-1952, with the function of accompanying Members of the Royal family and other dignitaries when they visited the counties.
There is no information when the Earl's inclination to waywardness commenced although a BBC profile sates that his interest in exotic women had commenced when he was at Eton and that had written an adverse comment about the pink champagne drinking debutantes. One source suggested the family had been crippled by death duties but another stats that provision had been made to protect the family from the impact of death duties and that the 10th Earl had been a good financial manager h in the lower millions still by 1990. My interest in the part the aristocracy played in creating social reform commenced while first studying social and economic history on the politics and economics diploma and then with an early Criminology tutorial, assignment after switching to the post graduate diploma in Public and Social Administration and asked to read about the impact of the churches and others on penal reform. I had had some marginal contact with members of the House of Lords arising from my campaigning activities, but it was not until over Christmas 1961 that I had my first direct encounter with the self confidence, outlook and influence of those of inherited nobility and when a few days earlier it could all have been very different.
I had published an article in Isis, the student weekly magazine, just before Christmas which contained aspects about prison and a young man of birth and public school education at one of the great colleges who I had never met telephoned me on either Christmas Day or Boxing day for advice about some of the issues I had raised in the article, having obtained my home telephone number from the then editor, who presumably he had also contacted over the holiday. During the conversation he mentioned to having also spoken with the then Home Secretary. It was an important lesson which I learnt that if you are going to do something set no boundaries yourself until others set them for you.
It could have all been very different if a couple of weeks before I was at the point of going back to prison again when I changed my mind. The Committee of 100 of which I had resigned as member, had initiated a number of separately organised marches and demonstrations on the same weekend and one was t taking place in Oxfordshire at the then USA airbase at Brize Norton and I had decided to act as a march steward but had still not made up my mind about participating in the sit down although I had taken the precaution of preparing a detailed statement about what I was doing and why in the event that joined the sit down and was arrested.
The march assembled on the Green at Witney and the police asked for a meeting with stewards although all approval for the march and the details of its stewarding had been agreed beforehand. The police, no doubt guided by government and political interests, then adopted a clever but dubious tactic of unearthing an ancient law which enabled them to arrest all the marshals and require us to agree on a good behaviour undertaking or go to prison over Christmas. The police station and the magistrates court were located at one end of the Green so we just had to walk over. I was arrested by a polite young officer who allowed me to make my long statement which was of a political nature. When it was my turn as we all appeared individually before the bench of magistrates, the clerk asked if I had said anything on being charged, the young man produced his notebook and commenced to read out what I had said word for word. It was a long speech and part way the Chairman of the bench drew attention that it was a political statement but the young constable forcefully pointed out that it was what I had said and therefore was required by law to be reported. He put some enthusiasm into the speech and it was evident he was sympathetic to cause. Having gone this far it seemed inappropriate to do anything other than refuse the recognisance and I was held at the station pending transfer to a prison. However all the horrors of my previous experience flooded back as I waited and the obvious concern that even if the college accepted my return, the County Council funders of the further education grant might take a different view and after that first term I knew that I had made the right decision to take up the place and not become the first paid organiser of the London region Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. I contacted the court to say that I would accept the recognisance and because I had not been involved in illegal activity that was the end of the matter officially and in fact there was such an outcry about the use of this ancient law which undermined the right to participate in protest marches, that it was never used again.
There was a further twist in this experience which had I not accepted the recognisance would have put in question everything else including that phone call over Christmas, in that half a year later I decided that I did not want to study economics but wanted to study criminology and psychology and through the understanding support of the college principal I was given an interview which led to being accepted on the post graduate diploma certificate in public and social administration course at Barnett House and to my return to work for Oxfordshire as a qualified child care officer, Several of us joined the Children's department that autumn for completed training course and I was allocated to a small team which covered Witney and Burford when I was also appointed as the representative of the County at the Juvenile courts, and if required adult court in the area, including the court at Witney, where over the three years I got to know the local area police and magistrates, and where the Marquis of Blanford, a son of the Duke of Marlborough presided over the court at Burford and his wife the Juvenile Court at Witney. I was reminded of the prison governor of Drake Hall in Staffordshire who had put me on an outside working party demolishing a World War II armaments factory complex and that within a couple of years of my appointment I was being escorted to the office of British Commanding officer of the base to interview an officer who had declined the request I had made on behalf of a court in family proceedings.
There were many inside out turnings during the five years studying, working and living in the city and county of Oxford but a great lesson was to look beyond the appearance of people and their education, cultural and denominational backgrounds and recognise what was common, especially that we are all human mixtures, a point which the 10th Earl made himself during the film on camera as others were also to made and that if one is going to be so bold as to make a judgement about the life of another human being, account should be the totality of their being,
Anthony Ashley-Cooper was married three times, in 1976 to a woman ten years his senior of Italian background which lasted for ten years and then to the daughter of a diplomat who bore him two sons. The eldest, the 11th Earl died with a short time of the discovery of his father's body when only in his mid twenties, to be succeeded by his younger brother in 2005. My understanding is that the 10th Earl always led two lives. He continues to this day to have been loved by those who worked or lived as part of the family estate in Dorset with one person saying that whatever he had done and whatever his condition he would have been welcomed back into the community had he chosen to do so. He had been an active conservationist.
The break up of his second marriage where his former wife was given the family seat as part of the divorce settlement may have bee one factor in his decision to abandon his role as an aristocrat although there is some evidence that he also reacted strongly to the Labour Government decision to abolish the right of heredity and other Peers to sit and speak in the House of Lords. This prompted the Earl to make his only speech and which according to the extract in the TV programme was intellectual, whimsical and embarrassing, and with this he departed to Paris where he changed his image and took to wearing black, I like it I like it, and was soon seen escorting one of the most beautiful of photographic models of the day with whom he is said to have developed into a serious relationship becoming engaged and where he subsequently confirmed he spent over £1million in presents and monetary gifts. She was said to be member of an Italian Royal house but their relationship ended in 2002 after it was revealed that she was a French nude model, a Penthouse Pet with silicone enhancements of pneumatic proportions.
He remained desperate for female sexual company and used an established Parisian Madam to provide girls, willing to pay whatever price was asked. He drank heavily and used other recreational substances and then came the under influence of two exotic sisters well known to the rich and famous in Paris and the Rivera and to the disapproval of family and friends married one, a Tunisian divorcee with two children although it appears he saw himself with a hareem. The disturbed brother of the sisters also joined the household but the marriage failed and he was soon frequenting the bars in search of picks ups. He then met a Morrocan hostess and they set up home together wanting to make her his fourth wife but his third wife wanted a divorce settlement beyond his means. According to programme his third wife and her brother was subsequently convicted of planning his murder for which the brother was said to have been given 150000 euros but his sister and they were imprisoned for life. It was six months before his body was found on a rubbish dump, ravaged from wild boar. It is recorded that an ancestor the third Earl gave the following counsel to his wayward son "The extending of a single passion too far, or the continuance of it too long is able to bring irrevocable ruin and misery."
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