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Telegraph – Obituary – The Duke of Buccleuch

The 9th Duke of Buccleuch and 11th Duke of Queensberry, who died yesterday aged 83, was Scotland’s grandest aristocrat and the largest private landowner in Europe.

Laid end to end, the walls and fences that bounded his 280,000 acres would have stretched from Drumlanrig, his castle in Dumfriesshire, to San Francisco. The management of such a demesne was, as the Duke maintained, “every bit as much a business as running a chocolate factory or a chain of shops”.

Yet such abundant means inevitably aroused envy, speculation and the disapproval of the Left. …

Although one of only 24 non-royal dukes, he was a member of a larger minority group, the disabled, as he had been in a wheelchair since breaking his back in a hunting accident. As for the charge that he was out of touch with ordinary people, the Duke maintained that the management of his estates brought him into contact with the 1,000 people who lived on them.

Each year his lands produced some 127,000 sheep, 13,500 cattle and 50,000 tons of timber, and his sensitive stewardship brought him several countryside awards and much admiration from his fellow landowners.

For good measure, he personally supervised the introduction of his own malt whisky, Spirit of Douglas. This was intended to help tourism in south-west Scotland, but he gave most of it away to friends, designing the packaging to suggest an antiquarian book so that a clergyman or temperance society director could have “the odd snifter” without anyone suspecting.

Journalists hazarded wildly that the Buccleuch estates, which run in an almost unbroken line across southern Scotland, were worth upwards of £300 million, but the Duke was swift to counter the notion that the extent of his property implied Gulbenkian riches: “It is seldom realised that one acre of windswept hill, typical of my family estate, is worth about as much as the space occupied by a wastepaper basket in a Fleet Street office.”…

In 1968 he was chairman of the Conservative Party forestry committee. Despite representing a city centre constituency, his heart remained with the land. “During my years as an MP,” he later recalled, “I was as struck by the lack of understanding of the countryside among my fellow MPs as among my constituents.”

Dalkeith held his seat for 13 years, soundly defeating the young Robin Cook on his first attempt to enter the Commons in 1970; but the following year he was thrown from his hunter as it failed to take a drystone dyke near Hawick; the horse fell on him, fracturing his spine and paralysing him from the chest down.

He returned to the Commons in his wheelchair and announced his resignation at the next election, but had to leave earlier, after his father’s death in 1973. In addition to the dukedoms, he inherited the marquessate of Dumfriesshire, the earldom of Drumlanrig and Sanquhar, the viscountcy of Nith, Thortorwald and Ross and lordship of Kinmont, Midlebie and Dornock.

It also goes on to list his holdings and knick-knacks (a house with seven courtyards, 12 entrances and several acres of roof, the only Leonardo still in private hands, and assorted villages) but I have to quote this:

Buccleuch, though he had favoured a limited representative selection of peers in the Lords, had doubts about the dukes’ collective decision not to seek a place in the Upper House after Tony Blair introduced his constitutional reforms. But he was no supporter of life peers ennobled “from the wastepaper basket of the Commons” either. Quoting approvingly one Labour peeress of an earlier generation, he would muse: “Is it really better to be appointed by Harold Wilson than by the Almighty?”

And:

When Debrett mistakenly printed the Buccleuch arms with the coronet of a baron instead of a duke, he urged the editors to lose no sleep over the matter, suggesting that they tried a trilby next time.

Hehehe.

The Duke was created a Knight of the Thistle in 1978, and had been Chancellor of the Order since 1992.

He married, in 1953, Jane McNeill, a former model for Norman Hartnell. They had a daughter and three sons, of whom the eldest, the Earl of Dalkeith, born in 1954, succeeds to the dukedoms.