Anthony Barbour; Landowner who developed the Bolesworth estate, which attracts thousands of visitors and supports 800 jobs
Hyfler/Rosner
Last Updated: 1:35am BST 15/10/2007
Telegraph
Anthony Barbour, who has died aged 68, was one of the
largest landowners in Cheshire and ran the Bolesworth estate
near the Domesday village of Tattenhall.
Since inheriting Bolesworth Castle nearly 20 years
ago, Barbour had developed the estate as a centre for small
businesses, restoring redundant buildings and modernising
its 16 farms in the belief that such enterprises represent
the future of rural communities. Premises on the estate, set
in 6,000 acres of lush Cheshire dairying country, now
support some 800 jobs. One old farm building houses a candle
factory that attracts tens of thousands of visitors a year.
Barbour was regarded as a generous gentleman
entrepreneur who treated his tenants as though they were
members of his extended family. As well as his commercial
activities, Barbour replanted the garden at Bolesworth,
which now contains more than 350 varieties of trees and many
different rhododendrons, azaleas and camellias.
The castle also houses Barbour's collection of modern
art, featuring British and American paintings and sculpture.
Built by George Walmesley, a Liverpool businessman, in
1826, Bolesworth Castle stands on the site of an older house
that dated from 1750. In 1856 it was sold to Robert Barbour,
who had journeyed south from Scotland to found a cotton
textile business in Manchester.
The site was noted in one Georgian account as being
"particularly romantic and interesting", and by the early
20th century the Barbours owned some of the most
richly-productive farmland in Cheshire, and were famed for
the estate's locally-produced cheese.
The house was substantially remodelled in the 1920s by
another Robert Barbour, grandson of the original purchaser,
who employed the architect Clough Williams-Ellis, best-known
for designing the Italianate village of Portmeirion in north
Wales, who was related to the Barbour family.
The house still has the original pipes and radiators
installed in 1922, and the Williams-Ellis outer hall, with
its black and white marble floor, remains unchanged. When
Barbour moved into Bolesworth in 1987 it took almost two
years to re-roof, re-wire, re-plumb, re-decorate and make
ready.
Robert Barbour junior was killed in 1928 by his
runaway horse while returning home from a day's hunting, and
was succeeded by his son Richard. While serving with the
Cheshire Yeomanry in Palestine in 1944, Richard Barbour
married Eva Houry, a Greek Cypriot always known as Lulu.
Anthony, his adopted stepson, inherited Bolesworth Castle on
his death in 1989.
Anthony George Sanders was born on October 19 1938 on
Cyprus, the son of Henry Charles Weston Sanders, Lulu
Barbour's first husband, a lawyer and a former Colonial
Service official. Young Anthony was brought up at Haifa, in
a flat overlooking the harbour, and one of his earliest
memories was of an aircraft plunging into the sea after
being shot down.
Because his mother held a British passport, she was
persuaded to escape the war engulfing the Middle East by
emigrating to South Africa, and was said actually to have
boarded the ship before deciding at the last moment to stay.
"Had she gone," Barbour later recalled, "I would have gone
with her and my life would have been very different."
When Lulu divorced Henry Sanders and married Richard
Barbour in 1944, Anthony changed his name to Barbour. The
following year he arrived at Bolesworth, aged seven, and
remembered generators supplying electricity to the castle
before it was connected to the mains in 1948.
After Stowe Barbour worked for the District Bank in
Manchester, while at the same time reading for the Bar. He
passed his finals while at New College, Oxford, but left
university after a year to join his stepfather at
Bolesworth. In 1960 he became a director of the Bolesworth
estate company.
In the general elections of 1964 and 1966 Barbour
stood for the Conservatives in the constituency of Crewe,
reducing the Labour majority on both occasions.
In 1998 he was awarded the Royal Agricultural Society
of England's Bledisloe gold medal for landowners by the Duke
of Edinburgh for his work in developing and diversifying the
Bolesworth estate.
Barbour's public posts included the chairmanship of
the Cheshire branch of the Country Land and Business
Association in 1986 and the presidency since 1999. Following
the tradition of three generations of his family, in 1987-88
he served as High Sheriff of Cheshire.
Anthony Barbour died at Bolesworth Castle on October
9. He married, in 1976, Diana Blackwell, who survives him
with their two daughters.
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