‘A TYPICAL LARGE COUNTRY ESTATE IN 1961…’

Mulholland explained what was to be expected as they drove down to meet the trustees.

‘This is a big job, Ian probably the largest estate the firm has handled for years. Rumour has it that the first Earl Lundy, bought his peerage for a political donation of about £1 million in the early 1920’s, through a man called Maundy Gregory, who was Lloyd George’s whoremaster in such matters. Can you imagine £1 million forty years ago? But this was a mere drop in the ocean of his vast fortune made in mining, shipping, banking and property. The grandson, Marmaduke, has not been too clever; lost a stack of money in some hair brain property venture in Bath. Neither he nor his father, the second Earl, did any death duty planning, as no doubt will be revealed later this morning.’

The estate was enormous. The first Earl had been very canny. Both son and grandson had been barred from selling any part of the estate. However, this had not prevented them from borrowing heavily over the last fifty years, in order to maintain their lavish lifestyles.

‘So there you have it Mr Mulholland,’ Malcolm Austwick, the principal trustee, summed up at the end of their first meeting. ‘It encompasses at least ten per cent of Bath, with all sorts of commercial buildings. There are countless shops, factories, hotels, pubs and other businesses, as well as thousands of freehold ground rents and rent charges, not to mention swathes of working class terraced houses all let on weekly tenancies.’

Austwick stopped and looked directly at Ian.

‘Do you drive?’

‘No sir.’

‘You’d better learn. In the counties around the city are about twenty thousand acres of agricultural and woodland, and much of the Somerset and Bristol coalfields that produced over 8,000 tons a month. Then there are the Fuller’s earth workings that are still profitable but the stone quarries, some dating back to Roman times, lose money – now either too dangerous or uneconomic to work.’

A second extract from chapter forty seven of – ‘Go Swift and Far – a Tale of Bath’ The first book of The Westcott Chronicles