+5th Earl of Lichfield, DL (1939-2005)
Michael Rhodes
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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