BACK TO NEWSLETTER 1999 CONTENTS
An O.C's career, including - "How I came to own the sales brochure of the Iwerne Estate"
Mitson, David (52-57) explains his career and how he came to own the sales brochure of the Iwerne Estate . The whole 3263 acres and all the buildings could have been had for £150,000 in l930. Today you could not buy a house in the village for that amount.
I am now working three days a week after thirty years as a chartered loss adjuster, dealing mainly with aviation, art and antique losses based on the dubious qualification of being a one time holder of a private pilot's licence (having failed an RAF pilot's course), and a period working for Country Life. This was very civilised, sitting in a Lutyens chair at a Lutyens desk in a Lutyens building, looking out onto the flower market in the old Covent garden. Sadly it was assumed that you had a private estate and or/private income, and the pay was meagre, certainly not enough for light aircraft and vintage cars. I thus sold my soul to the City, but not before an overland trip to Calcutta, working my return passage on a Bank Line boat, being paid a shilling a week all found. I've forgotten another delight of Country Life; I met my wife there, she was working for the associated but down market title, Amateur Gardening.
Country Life had tenuous links with Clayesmore. The magazine's founder Edward Hudson, was a chum of James Ismay(of the family who built the house and owned the estate and the Titanic). (Wasn't the house built by the Wolverton family and later bought by the Ismay family? Ed) Country Life published a book on Iwerne in memory of the fallen in the First World War. I liberated that book as well as the eleven page sale booklet.(well they would only have been thrown out otherwise.) This outpouring was stimulated by the recent discovery that Hugh Thompson (among other things) edits The Loss Adjuster(wow) which was a good excuse for a lunch in the City.
..Twenty years ago David showed the sale booklet to J. D. Spinney, who noted "There were no offers for the estate as a whole, so it all came under the hammer piecemeal on 19 September 1930 at the Grosvenor Hotel, Shaftesbury, in 142 lots. My cottage(The Old Cottage by the War Memorial) fetched £550 while the main buildings of the estate remained unsold and empty until Clayesmore came along in l933."
The shooting on the estate, in l926 2942 rabbits and 1021 pheasants not to mention 170 hares and 146 partridges were bagged, was good enough to have attracted Edward V11 in his time.
Mitson, David (52-57)