Gerald Hugh Tyrwhitt-Wilson, 14th Baron Berners
The 14th Baron Berners (1883-1950) mixed eccentricity with undoubted talent. At his house in Faringdon, Oxfordshire, Lord Berners had a pet giraffe, doves dyed multiple colors, whippets with diamond collars, and a 140-foot tower bearing the legend: ‘members of the public committing suicide from this tower do so at their own risk’. And yet, Berners was an accomplished painter, novelist, and composer of numerous musical pieces, including 5 ballets and an opera. His self-composed epitaph is fitting: ‘Here lies Lord Berners/ one of the learners/ his great love of learning/may earn him a burning/but, Praise the Lord!/he seldom was bored.’
Growing up with a father he described as ‘worldly, cynical, intolerant of any kind of inferiority, reserved and self-possessed’ and serving for 10 years as a diplomat made Lord Berners intolerant of convention and pomposity. Taking a dislike to one embassy member who punctuated every sentence by pretentiously putting on his glasses, Lord Berners once attached them to an ink bottle and several pens on the desk, causing a hilarious scene. When objections were raised to his plans to build the Faringdon Tower, Lord Berners responded that ‘the great point of the tower is that it will be entirely useless’.
Lord Berners, who was famous for entertaining distinguished guests, once taunted a renowned social climber, Sibyl Colefax, by sending her an invitation to ‘a tiny party for Winston [Churchill] and GBS [George Bernard Shaw]… There will be no one else except for Toscanini and myself’, with the address and his name deliberately illegible. Another pair of climbers, universally acknowledged as bores, rented his residence in Rome for their honeymoon, and Lord Berners had his butler send them 2 calling cards a day from his collection of other people’s, forcing them to hide from their supposed visitors for their entire stay.
But this persecution of the upper classes was all done with a sense of fun. As the picture above commemorates, Lord Berners once invited Penelope Chetwood and her Arab Stallion to tea, having taken literally the gossip that she was inseparable from the horse, and painted their portraits. As a famous man in the public eye, Lord Berners had to take precautions if he wished to be alone. When traveling by train, he would don a disguise and lean out of the window at each station to beckon people to sit in his compartment. Those who obliged never stayed long.
Where did we find this stuff? Here are our sources:
“George Hanger, Who Did His Best to Keep the Georgian Era Weird”. StrangeCo. January 12, 2015.
Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.
Sitwell, Edith. The English Eccentrics. London: Faber & Faber, 2005.