2nd Baron Cobbold
Brian Coleman
marquess
rich...@googlemail.com
The 2nd Earl of Lytton (d.1947) left no surviving sons. Viscount Knebworth, his heir, died in 1933 and his second son was killed in action in 1942 so Knebworth was inherited by the eldest daughter Lady Margaret Hermione Milicent Bulwer-Lytton (1905-2004) who m.1930 Cameron Fromanteel Cobbold, 1st Baron Cobbold, created 1960.
rich...@googlemail.com
colinp
He threw Knebworth open for everything from photo shoots to rock concerts and gave a party to which guests came as Underground stations
The 2nd Baron Cobbold, who has died from Parkinson’s disease aged 84, was a landowner and banker who, against the odds, kept his ancestral home, Knebworth House, in the family by opening it to the public for everything from medieval jousting to rock concerts.
A passionate pro-European Liberal Democrat, who later sat as a cross-bencher, he was among 92 hereditary peers elected to remain in the House of Lords in 1999.
David Antony Fromanteel Cobbold was born on July 14 1937, the eldest son of Cameron (Kim) and Lady Hermione Cobbold, née Bulwer-Lytton, great-granddaughter of the colourful novelist Edward Bulwer-Lytton, who penned the immortal lines “It was a dark and stormy night” and “The pen is mightier than the sword”.
After spending her childhood at Knebworth, in Hertfordshire, once a huge red-brick Elizabethan manor house, remodelled in spectacular Gothic style in the 1840s, Hermione had inherited it unexpectedly after the deaths of her brothers, Antony, in an air crash, and John at Alamein....
In 1960 he changed his name by deed poll to Lytton Cobbold, as a mark of respect to his mother’s family. The following year, he married Christine (Chryssie) Stucley, from Hartland Abbey, North Devon, after they had met at a dance in 1958....
In 1960 Lytton Cobbold’s father Kim, a former Governor of the Bank of England, was elevated to the peerage as the first Baron Cobbold, and in 1963 became Lord Chamberlain to the Queen. With little time to devote to the increasingly dilapidated great house, he offered it to the local authority, which declined it on grounds of expense.
Instead, despite parental reservations, the Lytton Cobbolds took it over in 1969 and threw it open to the public for everything from photo shoots and weddings to a famous series of rock concerts by the Rolling Stones, Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin and Oasis....
Lytton Cobbold inherited the title on the death of his father in 1987 but remained as lively and informal as ever, determined to share the Knebworth experience with people from all backgrounds....
When in the 1980s two of his eldest son Henry’s friends at Eton, the teenage Ugandan brothers Danny and Harry Matovu, suffered family problems, the Cobbolds virtually adopted them as their own sons, relishing their later successes as both became barristers and established an accomplished jazz duo....
To secure the cash-strapped house and park for future generations, he set it up as a trust and developed peripheral estate land for housing and a hotel. In 2002, the Cobbolds handed over the house to their son Henry and his American wife Martha and moved to a nearby gatehouse.
Cobbold dealt stoically with the Parkinson’s with which he was diagnosed in 2008. His wife survives him with their three sons, their daughter, the Matovu brothers and two children from other relationships.
His eldest son, Henry Fromanteel Lytton Cobbold (born 1962), succeeds to the barony.
Lord Cobbold, born July 14 1937, died May 9 2022