From: The Telegraph
by Harry Mount
by Harry Mount
(And some which do not)
"The 12th Duke of Manchester was a similar disappointment. Born in 1938 in
spectacular style, he was due to inherit the family seat, Kimbolton Castle,
the last home of Henry VIII’s first wife, Catherine of Aragon.
By the time of his death in 2002, however, the duke’s fortunes had collapsed:
over 20 stone and married four times, by then he lived in a Sixties block of
flats in Bedford. He had worked as a clothes salesman, crocodile-wrestler
and barman. He had flogged the family silver and furniture in exchange for
his five favourite things: “Flights, food, drink, narcotics, girls,” as his
biographer puts it.
It didn’t help that he was also a fraudster, jailed for 33 months in 1996 in
Virginia for conning the owner of the Tampa Bay Lightning, a Florida ice
hockey team. His family had form: the 12th Duke’s father sold Kimbolton
Castle for a song in 1951. In 1935, his grandfather, the 9th Duke, was
imprisoned in Wormwood Scrubs for defrauding a London pawnbroker." MORE
