_.The Earl of Euston, who died on October 1 aged 61, was the heir to
the Duke of Grafton; having made a successful career as a corporate
financier in the City, he went on to transform the fortunes of the
family estates in Suffolk.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/royalty-obituaries/6432353/The-Earl-of-Euston.html#
The Grafton dukedom was created in 1675 for Henry Charles FitzRoy, the
third of five illegitimate children of King Charles II by his long-
time mistress Barbara Villiers – who became Countess of Castlemaine
when her husband was ennobled (as compensation for being cuckolded)
and was later Duchess of Cleveland in her own right.
She was admired by Pepys for her beauty, but the "crudeness of her
manners, her ridiculous haughtiness and her perpetual suspicions" made
her disagreeable to another writer, Anthony Hamilton. But she was
certainly skilled at obtaining the King's favour for her offspring:
Henry FitzRoy's two brothers received the dukedoms of Southampton and
Northumberland respectively, and Henry himself had earlier been
created Earl of Euston, Viscount Ipswich and Baron Sudbury. Perhaps
the most distinguished of his descendants was his great-grandson the
3rd Duke, who was Prime Minister from 1768 to 1770, at the height of
the American War of Independence.
James – who bore the courtesy title of Viscount Ipswich until his
father succeeded to the dukedom in 1970 – was educated at Eton and
Magdalene College, Cambridge, where he read History.
He went on to qualify as an accountant with Spicer & Pegler, and to
join the merchant bank J Henry Schroder Wagg. He also became a
director of the discount house Smith St Aubyn, and in 1982 he and a
group of friends, chiefly from Hambros Bank, moved to set up Enskilda
Securities, a boutique corporate finance house which rapidly made a
name for itself in the boom years of the 1980s City.
After five years the founders were bought out by Enskilda's
Scandinavian parent, and went on to establish another boutique,
Jamestown Investments, which specialised in putting deals together in
the financial sector. Through that connection, James Euston became
finance director of Central Capital Holdings and Capel-Cure Myers
Capital Management.
Tall, shy and aristocratically unkempt, Euston was very happy not to
be considered "a people person" in business. A man of few words in
public, he gave the impression of being irritated and depressed by
aspects of the modern world, particularly electronic gadgetry.
As chairman of the Turf Club – where he sharpened financial
performance, renegotiated the Crown Estates lease of the club's house
in Carlton House Terrace and negotiated the purchase of a set of
paintings that might otherwise have been lost – he once rejected a
prospective member whose mobile phone rang at the wrong moment. He
also took a dim view of anyone who wore a brown suit in the City,
though he himself wore his grandfather's increasingly threadbare
overcoat.
But behind the somewhat forbidding exterior was a wicked sense of
humour, a high intelligence and a deep loyalty to old friends and his
extended family, the younger generation of which was especially
devoted to him.
In the mid-1990s, Lord Euston took over the management of the
extensive Euston estates near Thetford, which had seen no
modernisation for many years. He took several farms back in hand and –
through the construction of a reservoir for irrigation – brought
previously infertile land into productive use, leased to a commercial
vegetable-growing concern.
A passionate conservationist, he took every possible step to protect
the habitats of wild and rare species; he also greatly improved the
shooting, and its related pheasant- and partridge-breeding operation.
A keen shot himself, he also loved salmon and trout fishing, and
racing at Newmarket. For some years he managed the racing interests of
his brother-in-law Edward St George, who was based in the Bahamas but
had inherited from his brother Charles St George the Sefton Lodge
stables at Newmarket which became the Lucayan Stud.
Among their successful horses were Desert Prince, which won the Queen
Elizabeth II Stakes at Ascot in 1998, and Bahamian Pirate, winner of
the Nunthorpe Stakes at York in 2004. St George liked to name horses
after friends, so called one Speedy James and another Nobby, an old
school nickname for Euston. When set up for a great betting coup at
Nottingham, Nobby was beaten by a head.
Lord Euston married, in 1972, Lady Clare Kerr, a daughter of the 12th
Marquis of Lothian and sister of the Conservative politician Michael
Ancram; they had a son and four daughters. Their son, Henry FitzRoy,
Viscount Ipswich, born in 1978, succeeds to the courtesy title of Earl
of Euston and is heir to the dukedom.
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