The 7th Marquess of Bath, Britain’s most flamboyant and eccentric aristocrat – obituary

Lord Bath’s father, the 6th Marquess, opened Longleat to the public on a commercial basis after the Second World War in an attempt to pay off death duties. Known as the “father of the stately home industry”, he did so with panache, populating the park with lion “extras” purchased from the film Born Free, then adding tigers, baboons, chimpanzees, giraffes, zebras, hippos and sea-lions – not to mention a funfair, pleasure boats, a putting green and tea rooms.

The 7th Marquess adopted his unorthodox lifestyle in reaction against the equally unorthodox views of his father who, unusually for a decorated British war hero, had been a fervent admirer of Hitler. The Nazi leader was, he claimed, “a helluva fella”, and he showed his admiration by amassing a formidable collection of Hitleriana, before switching his interest to Margaret Thatcher.

Notwithstanding a difficult relationship with his father, the 7th Lord Bath inherited his commitment to Longleat – adding the Centre Parcs Holiday Village, a version of Stonehenge and no fewer than seven mazes, including the longest hedge labyrinth in the world, to Longleat’s other attractions. He raised large sums of money from the sale of artworks and other valuables for a Longleat conservation fund.

He also fully exploited the commercial value of his own personality; many visitors to Longleat came not to see the lions, let alone the house, but to glimpse the man they called “the Loins of Longleat”.

Lord Bath was mainly known for his interest in pantheism and sex. He had studied painting in Paris, and from 1969 the covering of Longleat’s walls with his murals was one of his most publicised obsessions. These ranged from the “Paranoia Murals” (which include an autobiographical scene featuring a wolf-like father-figure battling it out with a dragon-like mother over an unborn foetus) to the erotic fantasies of the “Kama Sutra room”, featuring depictions of a variety of sexual couplings, triplings and quadruplings. Lord Bath liked to show visitors around these himself.

Lord Bath was also a collector of women. Downstairs, visitors could marvel at “Bluebeard’s Gallery”, a spiral staircase on whose walls he had mounted a series of three-dimensional portraits in oil and sawdust of all the women he had known (in the biblical sense), with the date of first meeting to the left of each face and the date of painting to the right.

Popular legend had him spending his days in flagrante with a resident harem of young beauties. The reality was rather different, though no less remarkable. Throughout his life, Lord Bath had three or four mistresses – or what he called “wifelets” – at any one time. They came in all shapes and sizes, including a black model, a Chinese artist, a 17-year-old from Sri Lanka, a Wessex housewife and Jo-Jo Laine, former wife of the pop musician Denny Laine. Some lived in cottages on the estate; none ever sued him and only one ever bore him a child.

There was also an official wife, Anna Gael, a Hungarian model whom he had picked up outside a Paris cinema when she was just 15. She lived in Paris and visited Longleat once a month.

Despite all these distractions, Lord Bath himself lived rather a lonely existence in a bachelor penthouse in the attics. The only permanent residents of Longleat, apart from himself, were a kindly married couple who looked after him and his beloved labradors. It would have been nice to have found a soulmate, he admitted, “but I haven’t. And it’s too late now.”

Alexander George Thynne was born on May 6 1932, the second son of Viscount Weymouth, eldest son of the 5th Marquess of Bath. An elder brother had died in infancy. He would change the spelling of his name to Thynn in 1976, believing it to be more authentic.

He traced his bloodline to Tacitus and Charlemagne, but his direct family tree was stranger still. The founder of the family fortunes, Sir John Thynne, a fiercely ambitious Tudor apparatchik, got his hands on a dissolved Augustinian priory, built Longleat, and was nearly executed for embezzlement.

He founded a dynasty that included the first Marquess, who, as George III’s Secretary of State, lost the American colonies; a marquess in Victorian times whose servants were instructed to scrub his wife’s small change every morning; a great-grandfather who once forced two prostitutes at gunpoint to share his wife’s bed; a maternal grandmother whose five marriages and several illegitimate children made her the model for Nancy Mitford’s character “the Bolter”; and an aunt who hoarded food in her cheeks like a hamster.

Alexander’s father Henry, Viscount Weymouth, had been described by his headmaster at Harrow as “moronic beyond reach”, yet got into Oxford, where he was a contemporary of Evelyn Waugh. Alexander’s mother, Daphne Vivian, was a spirited girl who had been “removed” from two schools, once for spearing a geometry mistress in the backside with a compass. As their respective parents disapproved of the relationship, they married in secret in 1926.

As might be expected, their children had an unconventional upbringing. “Frightfully noisy and drunken,” Waugh reported after a weekend at Longleat in 1948. “Daphne keeping me up until 3.30 every night, and the children riding bicycles round the house with loud cries from 6.30. No sleep. Jazz all day. Henry at meals reading the most disgusting parts of Malinowski’s Sexual Life of the Savages (and goodness they are disgusting) aloud to his 18-year-old daughter.”

But young Alexander was not a happy child. As a small boy, he was close to his mother but, after she deserted her husband for the travel writer Xan Fielding, a man 15 years her junior, in the early 1950s, he felt she stopped defending him against his authoritarian father.

It seems that he felt in some way responsible for the break-up of his parents’ marriage: “During the war, when my father was away, my mother was unfaithful, repeatedly,” he recalled. “I did this terrible thing when he came home on leave. I don’t think I meant to be malicious. I was just mischievous. I said to him, ‘Papa, there’s an awful lot of new men you’ve got to meet.’ He wasn’t amused. And after that he started having girlfriends.”

At prep school, Alexander tried to please his father by emulating Hitler. As a school prefect, he punished some boys by trapping them under the floorboards. When he wrote to his father boasting of what he had done, the Marquess reported him to the headmaster. On another occasion, he beat Alexander with a riding crop for spilling some water while washing his dog.

Yet at first Alexander seemed destined to follow a well-trodden aristocratic path. At Eton he was a member of Pop and Keeper of Boxing. Contemporaries recalled him as “tall, handsome, athletic … something of a school hero … totally straight up and down”.

He went on to do National Service in the Life Guards, winning an officers’ welterweight boxing title. He did the Society balls, lost his virginity to a prostitute, then went up to Christ Church, Oxford, where he read PPE and was president of the Bullingdon. When the 5th Lord Bath died in 1946, Alexander Thynne became heir to the marquessate as Viscount Weymouth.

But somewhere along the way he rejected his father’s ambitions for him and developed a philosophy of his own based on free love and pantheism. He grew pigtails and, though in possession of a trust fund, pretended to be impoverished. Having decided that he wanted to become an artist and aesthete, he wrote a novel, which was rejected, left Oxford with a Third and went to Paris to study painting. It was there that he developed his distinctive sartorial style, favouring floral waistcoats, purple velvet caps and bare feet.

In 1964 the 10,000-acre Longleat estate was made over to him by his father, who had moved to another house on the estate with his second wife and daughter. As soon as he moved into the big house, Lord Weymouth set to work on his artistic grand projet, beginning with the Victorian drawing-room used by his grandmother. Eventually, his efforts would cover about a third of the walls of Longleat.

In the mid-1970s the 6th Marquess, alarmed by his heir’s increasingly disreputable lifestyle, decided to split the responsibilities of running the estate, giving his favourite second son Christopher the job of running the house and attractions, leaving Alexander to run the estate.

The two boys had never got on – the more conventional Christopher described his brother’s daubings as “pornographic pizza”. The 7th Marquess’s first act on inheriting the title in 1992 was to sack Christopher as Longleat’s manager and to order his family out of their estate house.

Also in the 1970s, Lord Weymouth founded the Wessex Regionalist Party, unsuccessfully contesting the seats of Westbury in the February 1974 general election and Wells in the 1979 election. He also failed to win the Wessex Euro-seat in 1979. The party was wound up and he joined the Social Democrats in the 1980s.

After succeeding as the 7th Marquess of Bath – “The causes which I advocate are Individualism, Pantheism, Wessex Regionalism and Polygamy and Polyandry within a Polymorphous Society” – he found a home on the Liberal Democrat benches of the House of Lords until the Labour government removed most of the hereditary peers.

For some years before inheriting the title Lord Bath had been beavering away on a 25-volume autobiography. By 2002, when he published volume one (which ends while he was still at prep school), he was said to have written five million words. The series continued with Top Hat and Tails (2003), Two Bites of the Apple (2003) and A Degree of Instability (2005).

Other publications include three novels and a work of philosophy, The World View of Alexander Thynn (2000). He also made a record of his own songs, I Play the Host.

In 1969 he married Anna Gael (whose real name was Anne Abigail Gyarmathy), in an arrangement whereby both were free to take lovers and mostly lived apart. They had a daughter, Lenka, and a son, Ceawlin, pronounced “See-aw-lin”, after the 6th King of Wessex.

Ceawlin Henry Laszlo Thynn, Viscount Weymouth, who was born in 1974, succeeds as the 8th Marquess of Bath.

The 7th Marquess of Bath, born May 6 1932, died April 4 2020