The 4th Baron Palmer, who has died aged 71, was a scion of the biscuit firm Huntley & Palmers and one of the original 90 peers elected to remain in the House of Lords after the reforms of 1999; as an idiosyncratic – and self-aware – crossbencher he argued among other things that the living wage had made tipping in restaurants redundant, and that if “smoking was completely outlawed, the entire British economy would literally collapse”.
Lord Palmer was also a much-loved figure in the Scottish Borders, and Manderston, his 109-room Edwardian stately home near Duns, 14 miles inland from Berwick-upon-Tweed, is said to be the only house in the world with a silver-plated staircase, which was inspired by Madame de Pompadour’s staircase at the Petit Trianon in Versailles.
In its Edwardian heyday the staircase took three servants three weeks to bring to a polish. But while the property’s value made him enormously rich “on paper”, Palmer was struggling to survive on a dwindling income from farming and tourism.
Manderston was built at the turn of the 20th century for Sir James “Lucky Jim” Miller, Bt. The architect, John Kinross, was told that money was no object and fitted the house with all the early 20th-century’s mod cons, including electric lighting, bathrooms and central heating. Outside were stables described by Horse and Hound magazine as “possibly the finest in the world” and a marble dairy.
“It was an architect’s dream come true,” Palmer told Eleanor Doughty in The Sunday Telegraph in 2020. The house is full of Louis XIV-style furniture, while the ballroom boasts Italian crystal chandeliers and 19th-century Meissen porcelain, and is decorated in Lucky Jim’s racing colours of primrose and white.
When Sir James died childless in 1906, Manderston passed to his nephew, Major Hugh Bailie, Palmer’s maternal grandfather, who bequeathed it to his grandson in 1977. Although the house was “in good nick”, the silver staircase had not been cleaned since the First World War.
“You have to allow it to get dirty because otherwise you can’t see where you’ve been,” he said.
Manderston was also used in a photoshoot for Baroness Mone’s Ultimo bra collection and was home to what was said to be the world’s largest collection of biscuit tins.
In 1996, however, its owner was rusticated by the Royal Company of Archers, which forms the monarch’s bodyguard in Scotland, for his display of lèse-majesté by allowing the house to be used as a stand in for Kensington Palace and Highgrove in a CBS film about Diana, Princess of Wales’s affair with Major James Hewitt.
Lord Palmer and his first wife, Cornelia, entertained paying guests, who would take over the whole house. This included, on many occasions, a sophisticated French group. The caretaker at Manderston would dress up in Palmer’s Eton tails and be passed off as the butler.
Geoffrey, as the “butler” was called, would go round with a bottle of expensive Château Palmer (no relation) and make sure that the French guests saw the label. After that, vin ordinaire was poured into decanters. Geoffrey would pour that into their glasses – and the guests never noticed the difference.
By 2020, however, Palmer was living there alone and using only a few rooms, shuffling from the kitchen to the smoking room, and taking “the lift to my bedroom, which is icy cold”. It was, he agreed, a large house for one person, adding: “It’s got 100 rooms too many.” Upstairs there was yet more silver: “My bathroom is very special to me. I’ve got a silver-plated bathtub set in marble pillars.”
Adrian Bailie Nottage Palmer was born on October 8 1951, the son of Colonel Sir Gordon Palmer, chairman of Huntley & Palmers, and his wife Lorna, née Bailie. His younger brother, Mark, is a former Telegraph journalist. His aunt was Eleanor Retallack, known professionally as Eleanor Bailie, who rebelled against her aristocratic background to become one of the country’s foremost musical scholars.
Palmer told how during the war art from Edinburgh galleries was stored at Manderston. “Within a couple of days my grandmother had put the curator into the butler’s uniform,” he said. On one occasion he drove her to a neighbouring stately home, though as they left she said how appalling it was that during lunch the butler “gave our hostess a note, but it wasn’t on a silver salver”.
The title of Baron Palmer was created in 1933 for Sir Ernest Palmer, a reward for his services to music. It passed in 1948 to his son Cecil and in 1950 to Raymond, the 3rd Baron Palmer, Adrian’s uncle. The 3rd Lord Palmer had three daughters, one of whom died in infancy, but no male heir. Thus on his death in 1990 it passed to Adrian, who escaped the worst rigours of inheritance tax by agreeing to open up Manderston to the public.
He was educated at Eton, but claimed to have been asked to leave because he was “so incredibly stupid”. “Everything was so formal,” he said of his childhood in an interview with The Newcastle Journal in 1984, recalling how there were once maids to answer the 50-plus bells, and “going for picnics in the hills nearby when the silver teapot would be produced and a fire would be started to boil the water”.
He received a certificate in farming practice from the University of Edinburgh and became an apprentice at the family biscuit factory in Reading, though manufacturing ceased there in 1976 and the family eventually lost control of the business. Before that he was the company’s sales manager in Belgium, living with a couple of other friends in a house known as Villa Costa Lotta.
This work brought him into diplomatic circles, and at a dinner party he met Cornelia Wadham, social secretary to the British ambassador’s wife in Paris. For six weeks he bombarded her with passionate letters, though never received a reply: “I had sent them to the wrong address.” They were married in 1977 and had two sons and a daughter.
This was about the same time that he took on Manderston, though chronic hay fever prevented him from undertaking the work he wanted to accomplish on the farm. He was appointed Scottish representative to the European Landowners’ Association and in 2000 became president of the British Association for Biofuels and Oils. He was also secretary of the Royal Caledonian Hunt, president of the Palm Tree Silk Company in St Lucia and a member of the Lords and Commons Cigar Club.
After succeeding to the title, Palmer was an occasional and often eccentric speaker in the Lords, campaigning against Air Passenger Duty and objecting to “derisory” plans to pay peers “only” £200 a day to turn up at the House. He questioned how many tattoos had been removed by the NHS and at what cost, and in another debate made the case against sell-by dates on food by describing how he once ate a 20-year-old biscuit that was “perfectly edible”.
He made contributions on the effect of Brexit on agriculture, on tobacco use and vaping, and, in October 2022, in a debate on the proposed Great British Railways body, said: “My Lords, I have been travelling up and down the east coast main line for 71 years, and I would like to place on record how incredibly helpful, polite and nice all the staff are, whether it be actually in Scotland or in England. They deserve a serious clap on the back.”
During unrest in Zimbabwe in 2019 Palmer raised the prospect – mockingly, as part of a wider set of questions about the failed state and former colony – of a British recolonisation of the country. But he was firmly told by Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon, the foreign minister: “That is not an option I have considered.”
On another occasion he noted “everybody’s amazement” when he passed a breathalyser test at 10.30am.
Palmer got on well with all social classes; his staff were loyal to him and he took a great interest in their lives. The annual Christmas party for estate workers and their families – which included carols around a huge tree in the marble hall – was a highlight.
He was not always up to speed with modern culture, though. When asked by one of his children if he knew the band Blur, he replied saying: “Do you mean Tony Blair?”
As a young man Palmer was a keen shot. On one occasion he wore such a loud pair of plus-fours to shoot grouse on the Lammermuirs that his host’s keeper accused him of scaring the birds away from the butts. He also rode to hounds – always donning a top hat – and the Berwickshire Hunt hounds were housed on the estate.
He used to drive around the grounds and local roads on an electric scooter, cutting an eccentric sight, invariably – in summer – clad in tatty shorts, a husky jacket and flip-flops.
He was patron of the Manderston Cricket Club (“the real MCC”, as he put it). Every year there was a Patron’s XI v Manderston match. Palmer captained the Patron’s team and tried to draw on the spirit of his uncle by marriage, Freddie (FR) Brown, who captained England in the late 1940s and 1950s. Palmer’s highest ever score was one not out.
Adrian Palmer’s first marriage was dissolved in 2004. In 2006 he married, secondly, Loraine McMurrey, a Texan who once dated the CNN tycoon Ted Turner; that marriage was dissolved in 2013. He is survived by his children, of whom the eldest, Hugo, born in 1980, a racehorse trainer at Manor House Stables in Cheshire, succeeds as the 5th Baron.
The 4th Baron Palmer, born October 8 1951, died July 10 2023
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