3rd Baron Vestey GCVO
Brian Coleman
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colinp
Sam Vestey was a Gloucestershire sporting grandee, a member of the innermost circle of royal courtiers and the fourth-generation steward of a family business empire that had once been the world’s largest meat supplier. But he was also completely unstuffy and at ease in the company of all manner of people......
The founding Vestey brothers, Edmund and William (Sam’s great-grandfather and the first baron), were sons of a Liverpool butcher and provisions merchant; at the end of the 19th century they ventured abroad to create a vertically integrated conglomerate encompassing cattle ranches in Argentina and Australia, processing, canning and cold storage, the Blue Star shipping line and a chain of more than 2,000 Dewhurst butcher’s shops on British high streets.
Both brothers became baronets, followed in 1922 by William’s peerage. They also amassed an enormous fortune, assisted by complex (though entirely legal) tax arrangements dating from 1915, which continued to benefit the family until the relevant loophole was closed in 1991..........
As an accomplished horseman and trusted friend of the Royal Family, Vestey was a natural choice to be Master of the Horse from 1999 to 2018. Day-to-day management of the Queen’s stables and carriages is delegated to the Crown Equerry, but Vestey was to be seen mounted in splendid dress uniform at the Queen’s Birthday Parade, and in her carriage procession on many other occasions.........
Samuel George Armstrong Vestey was born on March 19 1941, the elder son of Captain William Vestey and his wife Pamela, née Armstrong, a granddaughter of the Australian diva Dame Nellie Melba. William, the only son of the second Lord Vestey, was killed in action with the Scots Guards near Lake Bolsena in Italy in June 1944.
Sam was a schoolboy at Eton when he inherited the barony and baronetcy from his grandfather in 1954......
He was a deputy lieutenant of Gloucestershire, chairman of the Royal Agricultural Society of the Commonwealth and past president of the Royal Horse Society. Appointed KCVO in 2009, he was raised to GCVO on his retirement as Master of the Horse and became a permanent Lord-in-Waiting to the Queen.
He was also a former Chancellor and Lord Prior of the Order of Knights of St John and patron of the St John of Jerusalem Eye Hospital – proudly displaying a photograph of himself with the Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat alongside one taken with the cricketer Lord Cowdrey.
The Vestey family fortune, though diminished from its peak, was estimated in 2020 at more than £700 million. Besides the 5,500-acre Stowell Park – acquired by his grandfather in 1921 and a place of memorable hospitality during Cheltenham week – Lord Vestey kept sporting properties in Yorkshire and on the Isle of Jura.
He married first, in 1970, Kathryn Eccles; the marriage was dissolved in 1981 and that year he married, secondly, Celia (“CeCe”) Knight, a godmother to Prince Harry. She died suddenly, aged 71, in November 2020. He is survived by two daughters of his first marriage and two sons and a daughter of the second; the heir to the titles is the elder son William Guy Vestey, born in 1983.
Lord Vestey, born March 19 1941, died February 4 2021
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Former Cheltenham chairman and royal master of horse Lord Vestey dies aged 79 - Horse & Hound (horseandhound.co.uk)
