Families come in every configuration you can envisage: from aristocratic clans stretching back centuries, entwined in each other’s lineages, to the very modern family of friends. In this issue, we think about some of the ways the concept of family, which is at the heart of a lot of what Spear’s does (family businesses, trusts and foundations, for example), has adapted
Families come in every configuration you can envisage: from aristocratic clans stretching back centuries, entwined in each other’s lineages, to the very modern family of friends. In this issue, we think about some of the ways the concept of family, which is at the heart of a lot of what Spear’s does (family businesses, trusts and foundations, for example), has adapted. Sophie McBain looks at a surprising set of displaced families: royals who have been dethroned, degraded and exiled.
If we learned anything from Bleak House, it’s that inheritance litigation can lead to despair, death and (in one case) spontaneous combustion. The story of Terry Marley, as told by Irene McMillan, should stand as a warning, then, that there’s only a way where there’s a will.
Sophie has done double duty this issue. Her second dispatch, is from the City, where former military officers are creating their own family in the steel towers and plush boardrooms of banks. Once you start looking for military men around the Square Mile, you can see their ramrod-stiff bearing everywhere
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Mark Nayler talks to the entrepreneurial scion of a dysfunctional aristocratic family, that of Lord Brocket. Alex Nall-Cain, together with business partner Richard Dinan, has built a reward-card business with no help from his father, who was jailed in 1996 after burying classic cars around his estate as part of an insurance fraud. Mind you, I suppose there’s nothing especially modern in the rakish noble family.
Our other pair of talented twentysomethings in this issue is Duncan Stirling and Charlie Gilkes. William Sitwell talks to them about Bunga Bunga (their new club in Battersea, before you ask) and their other boîtes. They have been enlivening the evenings of those with cash to spare since they were teenagers yet even though they delight hordes of bankers, still they can’t get financing for new ventures. Time for those boogying bankers to take their bosses to Bunga Bunga.
I AM PLEASED to welcome back Anne McElvoy to Spear’s — she profiles Matthew Hancock MP, co-author of Masters of Nothing, a controversial, unsparing new book on how to mend capitalism — and Marlon Abela for his second wine column. This is not like any other wine column you’ve ever read: over a dinner at The Greenhouse, his Mayfair restaurant, he and an expert panel compare Lafite Rothschild, Latour and Mouton Rothschild from the excellent years 2000, 2001, 2002 and 2004. No dregs here.
Finally, a clarification: due to a production error, a question was repeated in Sir Frank Williams’ At the Sharp End from the previous issue. We are happy to clarify that he has no grandchildren.
Josh Spero
josh.spero@spearswms.com
Nominated for Editor of the Year and Fiona Macpherson
New Editor of the Year at the BSME Awards 2011
| Facts from this issue of Spear’s: |
| The supposedly dry UAE imported 1.2 million bottles of champagne in 2010 |
| It costs £10,000 to have a negative story pushed off the first page of Google |
| Deposed King Simeon II was elected prime minister of Bulgaria 55 years after his exile |
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