For a mere peasant who could trace his farming ancestry back to generations of subsistence smallholders scratching a living on the badlands of the High Weald of Sussex, an invitation to a Country Land and Business Association (CLA) breakfast at the South of England Show was not an opportunity to be missed. Particularly so, as it involved meeting no less a dignitary than the CLA’s recently appointed director general Bella Murfin.
So, off I trotted in my best bib and tucker without my usual straw hat, smock, braces, breeches and work boots. Why, I hadn’t looked less like a Wurzel for years. This being the CLA rather than the NFU, the guest speaker was none other than Lloyd McNeil, managing director of the Goodwood Estate’s 11,000 acres in West Sussex, which includes diversified businesses that turn over close to half a billion pounds a year.
I’d expected Mr McNeil to look like a proper dandy. After all, he is listed at Companies House as a ‘motorsport director’, and Goodwood is famous for its speed festivals, horse racing, fashion shows, golf courses, smart hotels and up-market hospitality.
How disappointing, then, that he was dressed with no more eccentricity than a slightly overworked provincial conveyancing solicitor. There was no hint of plus fours or tweed. Where were the mustard or deep pink cord trousers one would normally associate with someone who mixes daily with the landed gentry and the international jet set? Not even a rakish fedora or a club tie. In fact, no tie at all.
As he began to speak, my disappointment deepened. Where were the outrageous shooting, horse and car racing anecdotes? Instead, we got a quiet talk defined by common sense, understatement and self-deprecating humour. He’d come up through the ranks during a 25-year career.
How dare Charles Gordon Lennox, the 11th Duke of Richmond, have the sense to appoint this paragon of well-grounded business sense to run his empire? I was hoping for entertaining evidence of effete aristocratic decline. It was enough to make a man choke with frustration on a £16 Goodwood Estate organic beef sausage.
But, to be fair, the message that Mr McNeil delivered was entertaining: Don’t buy farmland to farm but instead buy it for a jape.
Apparently, the estate was purchased back in 1697 to indulge sporting passions, and having a good lark appears to have been the key to its long business success ever since. Cricket rules were invented there. The first horse race occurred there in 1801. Car racing since 1948. The farming, meanwhile, has rarely been particularly profitable and has sometimes even been loss-making.
As I left the show and hung my complimentary CLA car freshener from my rear-view mirror, I set the sat-nav for my own very modest estate. The CLA scent quickly filled the interior. There were the predictable hints of horse manure, cordite, dubbin, mothballs, Silvo wadding, wax-polished floor and freshly-mown lawn. But, unsettlingly, there was also the unmistakable whiff of a modern, industrial-strength cleaning product.
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