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Monday, February 13, 2006

5th Earl of Lichfield

The 5th Earl of Lichfield (created 1831), Viscount Anson and Baron Soberton (1806), a cousin once removed of Queen Elizabeth II, and son of the late Princess Georg of Denmark died 11 November, 2005.He was aged 66.
http://www.vogue.co.uk/vogue_daily/story/story.asp?stid=30472
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2005/11/12/db120...
Thomas Patrick John Anson was born 25 April, 1939, the only son of Thomas Anson, styled Viscount Anson, by his wife the former Anne Fenella Ferelith Bowes Lyon, niece of Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother.
His parents marriage hardly survived World War II. They had married only a year before the war started, and when his father, an officer in the Grenadier Guards, returned in 1945 they were, in Lichfield's words "different people." His mother was only 19 when she gave birth to her only son, and another sibling, Lady Elizabeth, soon followed.
http://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/main/w-vh/w-visits/w-findaplace/w-shu...
Patrick and his sister were brought up in a succession of stately homes, accompanied everywhere by his nanny, Agnes Maxim. All through the war she went to bed with her boots on so that ifb there was an air raid she could quickly whistle her aristocratic charges down to the air
raid shelter. He was tossed from one set of great-grandparents to the another. There was the Earl of Strathmore, at Glamis Castle, Lord and Lady Clinton in Devon at a house callled Heanton and another in Scotland called Fettercairn, and Lord & Lady Lichfield who owned Shugborough and other erections. For a time his home was in Windsor Great Park because his father was based at Victoria Barracks. He would go up to the Castle for
dancing-classes and home-made pantomime. Young Patrick recalled that life in Windsor Park was never dull. He saw
men pushed to their limits on route marches up and down the Long Walk, and watching them as they collapsed. And then waking up one morning and
finding thatb all the trees had been covered in silver foil from the enemy aeroplanes. A method to jam the radar. If home was anywhere it was at his maternal grandmother's house in Mayfair and increasingly, Shugborough, where his father's family had lived for centuries, and where his grandfather was head of the Home Guard. There, on a thousand acre estate, he grew up sheltered from the world outside and had little conception of how other people lived other than what he could see from a railway carriage window. He was sent to Wellesley House prep school at Broadstairs, Kent, where he was very unhappy, not least because of the behaviour of some of the male staff towards each other in the presence of the boys. Back at Shugborough for the holidays he would borrow his grandfather's box Brownie camera, take a couple of photographs and then replace it, with the result that there would always be two or three shots his grandfather could not remember taking. When the film came back from the developer's one day with a picture taken through a window from a fire escape into the house-maid's bathroom, the game was up. "That was my first nude", said the man who in later years persuaded Russian girls to take off their clothes in Red Square and New Yorkers in Manhattan for the Unipart calendars. When he wasn't mucking about with the camera or cycling on the estate ("I wasn't allowed off it", he recalled), his grandfather was giving him lessons in life and man-management. After 7 years in the nursery, the following seven years were spent acting as understudy for the senior servants in the servants' hall at Shugborough. He was a pantry boy, boot-boy, fourth footman, third footman, and second footman, first footman, valet and butler. His sister Lady Elizabeth acted as laundry maid, housemaid, scullery-maid, pantry-maid,
and so on. The fourth Earl of Lichfield's ruling was "never ask anyone to do something you can't do yourself." In the evening when houseguests were down in the dining room Patrick and his sister woulod be in their bedrooms polishing the pennies with Brasso and ironing any pound notes they found. His first camera ("a horrid little Russian thing, I don't know why it was Russian") had been given to him at prep school. Before he went to Harrow at 13, he received a more ambitious Kodak Retinette, which he used to undercut the school shop by charging ninepence for pictures of his friends, as opposed to the official two shillings and sixpence. He was no happier at Harrow than he had been at prep school. He was the
smallest boy in the school (even so he reached 6ft in manhood) and was bullied. He was also homesick, not for a place but for his nanny and mother. Eventually, after having run away to London once, he grew and became good at boxing and, particularly, swimming. Academically he just about got by. Socially, he later claimed he was shy, but in his teens he began to meet the girlf friends of his sister, one of whom was treated to a date
at the Essoldo cinema in Stafford. "They had a commissionaire there with a peaked cap and a long coat so that he looked like a Russian general and he would prowl up and down the aisle with a Flit anti-mosquito gun", recalled the earl, "So just when you were about to have a crack at the girl he'd come barging down the aisle and Flit you with insecticide." It had always been assumed that he would follow the family army career and so, having quite enjoyed the school corps, he took the Civil Service examinations for Sandhurst. "I realised that I was going to have to kill some time before I inherited, it could have 30 or 40 years, and I was going to have to do National Service anyway I thought I might as well become a regular army man." While at Sandhurst there were lots of debutante dances, during which time he was considered to be not entirely safe in taxis. Much of his army career was spent either on Salisbury Plain or in Chelsea, but also in west Africa and on Horseguards Parade, where he marched in the Birthday Parade (Trooping the Colour). Looking back decades later he admitted he loved the army, and never enjoyed such camaraderie thereafter. He succeeded to the peerages of his grandfather in 1960, his father having died from an allergy resulting from a bee sting 2 years earlier,
and he resigned his commission in 1962. Throughout his career in the army he had been taking photographs and, at the suggestion of the father of a girlfriend (there were always lots
and lots of girlfriends), he decided to become a professional photographer, working as an assistant with Dmitri Kasterine and Michael
Wallis. Over the years he lured a lot of girls who few men would turn away. There was the actess Alexandra Bastedo, the American socialite Susan Young (rather rich, that one), Britt Ekland (who actually said of him: "He wasn't all that well-known until he was seen with me"), Lady Jane Wellesley, Gayle Hunnicutt, the delicate actress Jane Seymour. Oh, and there was Miss Iceland of 1974. He recalled: "I left the army at 2.30pm on October 14, 1962, took off my uniform and put on a pair of jeans, and within the hour was earning my living as a photographer's assistant for £3 a week." On the same day he paid a visit to a tattooist in London's Waterloo Road. "Antony Armstrong-Jones (who later married his cousin Princess Margaret) had taken a picture of him and I wanted to see if I could take one as good." "I'll let you photograph me if you let me tattoo you, guv," was, he says, the tattooists reply. "Because I was leaving the army I'd got so drunk so I agreed". The result was a tattoo on his arm, much regretted afterwards. Lichfield's socialite name and rank didn't always ease his route to a girl's affections. Dewi Sukarno, widow the Indonesian tyrant and herself a tough, selective girl, responded with some coolness to his ardent pursuit. She observed tartly" "Patrick was very special. But the
prospect of riding pillion on his motor bike somehow didn't appeal to me." The woman whom he eventually married - he was 35 - was the small, tough, determined Lady Leonora Grosvenor, daughter of the late Duke of Westminster. He married her in a blaze of bliss at Chester Cathedral, 8
March, 1975. 1,600 guests attended, plus the Queen, Queen Mother, Princess Margaret and Prince Michael of Kent. The Archbishop of Dublin performed the ceremony, assisted by the Bishop of Chester. How did he and his bride meet? "Well, I had become, quite frankly, rather pissed off with flying round the world - and my reputation as being one of lifes diletttantes. So, I rang my sister, Lady Elizabeth Anson, and said 'look, just ask me down for the weekend and find me some nice English girl. Someone English. Very English. And above all, quiet.'" Sister Liz came up with Leonora. The marriage produced a son, Tommy, born in 1978, and two daughters, Rose (a goddaughter of Princess Margaret) and Eloise, now a model and "It Girl". The Countess of Lichfield was granted a divorce after 11 years of marriage in 1986 on the grounds of her husband's behaviour. Stories abound (always denied) about his relationship with glamorous models on shoots all over the world.Neither remarried, though Patrick has had a very long relationship with a society lady since. Parting with Leonora was so ghastly that he shed several stone in weight Lichfield almost died in February 1992 when he fell off a wall beside his swimming pool in Mustique. "I was horsing about with a friend, trying to push him into the pool" he said. But as he tugged at his friend's cowboy boots, he lost his balance and fell 22 feet, fracturing his skull and breaking half a dozen ribs and injuring his back. "I think I was the only person
who didn't think I would die", he said airily. Throughout his life he played the jester. When a schoolboy at Harrow, he set fire to the officers' latrines while attending a cadet camp. Most famous of all is the apocryphal story which dates back to his stint in the Grenadier Guards: he placed an alarm clock in an officer's bearskin - just before
he went out on parade. Lichfield was Roy Plumley's penultimate guest on
Desert Island Discs, and having discovered that it was traditional to submit his list of records just before transmission, he deliberately set out to choose a really obscure recording. To his astonishment, the tune was found in the BBC archives, last transmitted in the 1930s. Like
all practical jokers, he was rather cross to have been beaten. But being an irrepressibly boyish enthusiast, he was also massively impressed. Patrick Lichfield took the official wedding photographs at the wedding of the Prince of Wales and Lady Diana Spencer in 1981. He also photographed the Queen for her Golden Jubilee in 2002. Other "royal sitters" included Princess Margaret, the Queen Mother, the Princess Royal, and the Duke and Duchess of Windsor. His publications include: "The Most Beautiful Women" (1981); "Lichfield on Photography" (1981); "A Royal Album" (1982); "Patrick Lichfield's Unipart Calendar Book" (1982); "Patrick Lichfield Creating the Unipart Calendar" (1983);
"Hot Foot to Zabriskie Point" (1985); "Lichfield on Travel Photography"
(1986); "Not the Whole Truth" (autobiography, 1986); "Lichfield in Retrospect" (1978); "Queen Mother: The Lichfield Selection" (1990); "Elizabeth R: a photographic celebration of 40 years" (1991). He is succeeded in his peerages by his only son, Thomas William Robert Hugh Anson, styled Viscount Anson, born 19 July, 1978.


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