Longleat`s Beastly Feud

FOCUS
CAMILLA LONG
The Marquess of
Bath’s estate,
home to the
famous lions, has
become the scene
of a fierce family
row over racism
T
he Marquess of Bath is
a steaming pile of ancient
kaftans and one of our wuffliest
and weirdest mad-hatter aristocrats. He is best known for
swanning around Longleat, his
enormous Elizabethan pad in
Wiltshire, entertaining his 75
concubines,orashecallsthem,
“wifelets”.
The wifelets have included
former Bond girls, Sri Lankan
teenagers, as well as housewives and according to some,
in a couple of unfortunate
cases, actual prostitutes. The
deal is simple: the wifelets get
to hang out with Lord Bath in a
jewel of a palace and in return
he gets unlimited sex.
And for a long time the
whole dirty bonanza has
worked. Only the marquess is
83 now and can barely manage
to walk with two sticks. So he
has officially started to offload
the pressures of his £157m
estate, handing over most of
the running of the house — but
not the title or the chequebook
— to his son Ceawlin, Viscount
Weymouth.
And — wow — Ceawlin, 41,
could not be more different.
First, he is dressed sleekly in an
expensive suit and totally clean
open-necked shirt when I turn
up at Longleat. Second, his
hair, a kind of Byronic swish,
seems to have been cut quite
recently. Third, he appears to
have merely one lover, his wife
Emma, a tall and lithe halfNigerian television presenter
who
dandles
their
11month-old son, the Hon John,
in their private apartments.
Ceawlin (it is an old Wessex
name, pronounced See-awlin) says he is “completely”
used to other people traipsing
through his bedrooms, but as
Emma says, they are really
“living in a theme park” with
toddlers and buggies swarming all over the estate, which
includes a safari park (with 33
lions) and a fairground.
The house contains a £5m
Titian, a golden carriage and
such curiosities as the doublet
Charles I wore to be executed,
as well as Winston Churchill’s
half-smoked cigars. These
were “fished out of ashtrays”,
says Ceawlin as he sweeps
through a corridor.
In their flat there is a butler,
a housekeeper, a modern
kitchen and perfectly normal
sitting room — normal in the
sense that there are three enormousspraysofflowersandgold
fruit and silk walls and giant
pictures of ancestors crammed
awkwardly on the picture rails.
Ceawlin has had his own
portrait done, but “it’s not in
the most prominent place”, he
explains. “The guy — oh, this
sounds so vain — has agreed to
redo it.”
A three-part BBC series on
the house and its inhabitants
begins next week. Ceawlin says
he invited the cameras in as
part of a grand unveiling of his
reign at Longleat, but as far as
I can see most of it serves to
affectionately slag him off
(“I wouldn’t say Ceawlin got off
to the best start ever,” drawls
an estate manager over his
decision to raise rent).
And, well, everything is terrifically awkward. Ceawlin is a
wild, slightly puffy-eyed Peter
Pan type who is so nervous he
can’t even serve coffee. He tries
to pour a cup, throws it everywhere, calls for the butler.
He nearly passed out with
fear during filming, worrying
he would look like a “numpty”
or say the wrong thing. Part of
the problem was the naughty
producers kept on dragging up
family feuds — the latest being
a terrible row over Ceawlin’s
desecration of one of his
father’s murals, described by
Bath as his “life’s work”.
Ceawlin decided to rip it out
as part of a swanky refurbishment when he moved into the
private apartments three years
LONGLEAT'S
BEASTLY
06.09.15 / 21
FEUD
SHE SAID: ARE YOU
SURE ABOUT WHAT
YOU’RE DOING TO
400 YEARS OF
BLOODLINE?
out; how Ceawlin has known
since they first started dating.
How things got worse just
before the wedding when he
visitedherinherdrawingroom
in order to tell her he wished to
get married, only to be asked,
he claims: “Are you sure about
what you’re doing to 400 years
of bloodline?” How he always
had an inkling she held these
sort of views but, still, he was
gobsmacked.
He managed to ignore it the
first couple of times and
“hoped against hope something would change”. But the
third time she said it he
“realised it is what it is, I’m not
going to change anything”.
And he “felt no alternative but
to share it with Emma”.
Emma was devastated. It
was the first time she had been
made to “ever” think of her
race: “My mum did such a great
job of raising me, and my dad
was always around,” she says.
“It didn’t have to be thought
about. It was fine. And why
shouldn’t it be?”
But it wasn’t fine and the
marchioness was not going
to change her mind. Ceawlin
duly “demanded she return
the wedding invitation and
made it clear that under no
circumstances would she be
attending”. It took a while for
her to accept he meant it but
eventually the invitation came
back.
By the day of the wedding
he was still so hurt he had
“security on standby to prevent her from accessing the
area. All the doors were
manned and various corridors
and outdoor areas.” But did he
really think she would make a
“grand statement”, as he says?
“I thought there was a risk of
it,” he says quietly.
S
JASON HAWKES/STEPHEN
COKE/JON TONKS
Ceawlin, Viscount Weymouth, left, and wife Emma, far right, are taking over the running of Longleat, main picture,
from the Marquess of Bath, above with Ceawlin’s mother the marchioness
ago. I might easily have sided
with Bath in the argument,
until Ceawlin showed me one.
The Kama Sutra room is
right next to Ceawlin’s sitting
room, a dark and musty sex
chamber featuring one of
Bath’s most spectacularly hideous productions. And, whoa,
every eye-flaming position is
depicted on its walls.
So the first thing Ceawlin
decided to do was remove one
particularly insufferable specimen that dominated his sitting
room. He could no longer cope
with staring at the “really big
pig on that wall”, he points to
the fireplace. “Right there.
With suckling pigs under it. I’d
been looking at that pig since I
was four years old. And I
thought: ‘I can’t be looking at
that pig, pushing 40.’”
Bath was duly incensed,
saying Ceawlin had “killed”
their relationship after he
“quietly binned” part of his
magnum opus. He refused to
turn up to Ceawlin and Emma’s
wedding as a result, citing the
muralgeddon, although everyone assumed he simply disapproved of the match.
And usually Bath is so unselective,
whispered
the
hundreds of guests during the
ceremony in the Orangery in
Longleat — among them 30
members of Emma’s family in
traditional Nigerian dress. The
row was “very sad”, said
Emma at the time, “but what
can I do?”
Ceawlin begins by saying
things are relatively fine now,
he just wants everything to
calm down and go away. To this
end I received a strict email
ahead of the interview saying I
should “stick to a certain line of
questions not going into personal details about Ceawlin’s
upbringing or his past relationship with his father”.
Yet what else is there to talk
about? Longleat is only fights
and high drama. The most
awkward area is, obviously,
the wifelets. Ceawlin says he
used to cope by “blanking”
them, mostly out of loyalty to
his mother. Now he seems
moreresigned.“Yougetusedto
them,” he shrugs; they are “a
feature” of his father’s life,
much like the murals. There are
“actually one or two” he quite
likes. But would he ever be
friends with them? “Oh,
SUDDENLY THEY
CALL ME AND SAY
THEY ARE FED UP
WITH NOT TELLING
THE TRUTH
Camilla ...” he sighs. “I’ll
body-swerve that one.”
A
s it happens, one of the
wifelets is the secret
star of the documentary. Someone said
the BBC had been worried
Longleat wouldn’t be interesting enough for a show, but
little did they count on the luscious presence of Sylvana, a
Caribbean former Bond Girl.
She is shown arriving at
Bath’s apartment in the film,
whereupon she pours him a
pint of cheap plonk before
posing under her portrait in
“Bluebeard’s gallery”, a spiral
staircase that contains a
(grotesque) painting of each of
the wifelets.
Sylvana tells the interviewer
that, oh no, she never remotely
dreamt of marrying someone
as posh as the marquess.
“Being a chocolate lady coming
into a family like this would
never be accepted,” she says.
Coincidentally, Emma, who
started dating Ceawlin four
years ago, has experienced a
bit of “snobbishness” over “the
racial thing” but today she
smiles very sweetly at me and
says: “Everything’s been
pretty good, hasn’t it?” And
Ceawlin nods vigorously.
Actually, I am not sure
everything is all right — but
now Emma has given birth to
son and heir John, she has
wasted no time going the full
viscountess, launching tea
towels
and
posing
for
portraits (her latest
shows her prowling
towards the viewer in diamonds and heels à la Grace
Jones).
I have always found her
charming and self-effacing,
but fortunately not selfeffacing enough not to get
married in a huge Disney
princess wedding dress (and
then display it).
She is now 29 and in some
ways her life would probably
have always turned out this
way — she is the illegitimate
daughter of a billionaire
Nigerian oil tycoon and a
professional beauty called
Suzanna McQuiston (née
Eileen Patience Pike).
Emma has known the Baths
“since I was three”, after her
older half-brother married
the marquess’s half-sister.
Ceawlin knew her as a “mini
child” but only met her much
later in London’s Soho House
club by chance. By that stage
she was some kind of fitness
guru/health expert/YouTube
channeller and he was
desperate to get married. “I
was definitely sick of being a
bachelor,” he says.
He has had many girlfriends,
including one who tragically
died. At one point earlier in his
career he had thought India
was one of the great undeveloped areas of the world for ski
resorts. But while he was
staying in Delhi his girlfriend and best friend
were crushed and killed
after a terrorist bomb hit
their hotel.
He remembers being
dug out of the rubble and
finding his friends were
bothdead.Forawhileafterwards he was so upset he
wanted to kill himself.
So when he found himself
looking across the bar and
thinking, “My God, who is
that?” he knew he had finally
found his balsam and proposed
to Emma in the early hours
after a night out at Annabel’s.
Emma says the wedding was
wonderful, Longleat is wonderful and she totally doesn’t
feel like she now has to “disappear”. And that would have
been that, only something
must have snapped a few days
later, because suddenly they
call me and say they are fed up
with not telling the truth.
THIS is the first time I’ve done
the real interview after the
actual interview, but apparently a terrible rift has sprung
up between the couple and
Ceawlin’s mother.
Anna Gael (née Gyarmathy)
is a former actress who has
lived most of her life with
a lover (not Bath) in
France. If anything, she
is a largely a mystery,
described variously as
the star of the lesbian
romp Therese and Isabelle,
or a “Hungarian aristocrat”.
Anyway, the marchioness
objects to Emma. It all tumbles
ince the wedding, the
marchioness routinely
ignores Emma whenever they cross paths in
the grounds. She is back at
Longleat “too much”, says
Ceawlin, after the death of her
long-term lover in France. But
the blanking, says Emma, is
“ridiculous”.
“You know, walking around
Longleat in freezing January,
freezing cold, nobody around
for literally miles, heading
towards each other, me with
the Silver Cross [pram] and
John, and her with Ceawlin’s
dad and two dogs. We’re
walking towards each other,
and the tension is building. I
don’t know what she’s going
to say, so I say hello first. And
then she goes, ‘Oh sorry, I
didn’t recognise you’ and
keeps walking.” Emma laughs.
“That’s the bit that pushed me
over the edge.”
She says she is “the least
confrontational, least dramatic
person, but I don’t think
anyone could have that happen
at least three times, and not just
say, well . . . ” She tails off. “F***
this,” says Ceawlin.
The marchioness, who is 71,
has been banned from
appearing in the documentary
and has no contact with
John. “I don’t want him
contaminated by that sort of
atmosphere and those sort of
views,” says Ceawlin.
And yet “at the same time”,
he adds, “apparently she’s
miffed we haven’t presented
John to her. There is an
expectation we go on bended
knee and make a formal
presentation.”
He laughs in disbelief.
“Camilla, it’s off the charts.”
Has it affected his relationship with Emma in any way?
“If anything it’s brought us
together,” he says. Emma finds
talking about the rift over her
race physically painful, “extremely” upsetting, something
that gives her a headache,
makes her “shake like jelly”
and “feel ill”.
After the interview, she
says, she’ll have to “go on the
treadmill for about an hour and
a half”.
In many ways the whole
thing is antediluvian. But in
other ways, their response is
typically flamboyant.
The marchioness, for her
part, says she “did not know”
she was banned from seeing
her grandson. “He is a lovely
little chap.” But she admits that
she promised her children, “I
would tell them what I think
about their serious partners.
Then I would never mention it
again. That is what I did with
my son.”
I can already hear the estate
diamonds rattling.
All Change at Longleat begins
on BBC1 on September 14 at 9pm