The Dowager Duchess of Richmond and Gordon, who has died aged 90, was for many years the elegant chatelaine of Goodwood House and the 12,000-acre Goodwood estate in West Sussex, where she shared the liberal, tolerant and deeply Christian outlook on life of her husband, the 10th Duke of Richmond and 5th Duke of Gordon.
She became known in particular for creating the Goodwood International Dressage competition, laying the foundations for the development of British dressage into the country’s fastest growing equestrian activity and one in which Britain has gone on to win gold medals in recent Olympic Games.
A great lover of ballet (her eldest daughter Ellinor became a ballet dancer), she was instrumental in promoting dressage to music or “Freestyle to Music”, where the horses paces are set to music to create a “dance”, which is now a component of the dressage competition at the Olympics.
The Duchess was also a trailblazer of the organic farming movement and, with her husband, made headlines in the early 1960s when they adopted two mixed-race daughters.
Susan Monica Grenville-Grey was born on July 26 1932, the daughter of Cecil Grenville-Grey, a Colonel in the King’s Royal Rifle Corps, and Monica, née Morrison-Bell. During the Second World War, when her parents were in Egypt, her father fighting in the North African Campaign, she lived with her maternal grandparents in Tetbury. After leaving school she attended a domestic science college.
She met her husband, Charles Gordon Lennox (then known by his courtesy title of Earl of March), best friend of her brother Wilfred at Eton, in 1947 when he came to stay at her family home in Blewbury, Berkshire, during the school holidays. They were married by the Bishop of Newcastle, Susan’s uncle, at Holy Trinity, Brompton, in May 1951.
Her husband trained as a chartered accountant and in 1957 the couple moved to Rugby so they could both study at the William Temple College, an institution which trained laymen and laywomen to relate the Christian faith to the secular world, where Charles Gordon Lennox became director of industrial studies.
For many years Charles was a member of the Church of England’s General Synod and a Church Commissioner, and he and Susan became actively involved in Capricorn, the society set up by David Sterling as a multi-racial pressure group campaigning for “equal rights for all” in Africa. In 1960, World Refugee Year, Susan took on the care of a family from Albania.
During the 1950s Susan gave birth to a son and a daughter, and she would have another daughter in 1967. In 1960, and again in 1962, however, she and her husband adopted two half-African baby girls – a bold, altruistic gesture at a time when immigration was causing huge national controversy after the 1958 race riots in Notting Hill.
Their decision caused a massive furore, with Susan being chased down the street by the press and both sets of their parents disapproving of the decision.
Naomi, the younger of the two girls (who, as Nimmy March, is now a successful actress), recalled: “Many people considered it outrageous to adopt two black children. My parents were ostracised from society. They stopped receiving invitations – and people didn’t answer theirs.”
The children were mainly brought up at Goodwood House, where the family moved in 1969 after the 9th Duke made over the house and estate to his son, having moved to a smaller house on the estate. Nimmy March was fiercely loyal to her adoptive parents, describing them as “extraordinary and unconventional” and recalling a happy childhood.
“Mum,” she recalled, “was good at bringing me up with a strong sense of self,” and both parents were “terribly good at discouraging one from judging people – on the way they look, the way they wear their hair, the way they dress, the way they speak”.
As a result, when she encountered prejudice from others due to the colour of her skin, “I understood that the racism was very much about them, not me, and I grew up with that absolute belief.”
Her brother Charles (now the 11th Duke of Richmond) recalled of his parents that they were “not dyed-in-the-wool Tories. They were free-thinking and easy-going. There was no pressure to conform. They were very modern and wanted to make the world a different and better place.”
The 10th Duke, who succeeded to the titles on the death of his father in 1989, made his mark as an able and conscientious custodian of Goodwood. The house and estate that had been in his family for more than 300 years, but since the Second World War, when the house was requisitioned as a hospital, it had only been opened up for the horse racing in July and motor racing at Easter.
As well as renovating and restoring the house, he reinvigorated the horse racing, including the “Glorious Goodwood” meeting in late July; offered the house for weddings; reopened the aerodrome and established a flying school. He was also active in promoting business and enterprise in West Sussex.
Susan, passionate about horses from childhood, hosted 21 Goodwood International Dressage competitions from 1973 to 1993. She served as president of British Dressage from 2007 to 2012.
She also developed a passion for sustainable farming methods long before it became fashionable. One of the earliest members of the Soil Association, she kept grain-fed livestock before it was popular. Inspired by Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962), which documented the detrimental effects on the environment of the indiscriminate use of pesticides, she began the process of turning the estate farm over to organic production.
“It was partly that I was horrified by the standard of animal welfare,” she recalled. “Also, I got ill and went to see a brilliant man, [the leading nutritionist] Dr Latto, who told me about the effects of chemicals on the body. He put me on a simple diet of wholemeal bread, raw vegetables, no meat, not much dairy – and told me I’d be fine in six months.” She was.
She became an evangelist for natural food and, working later on with her daughter-in-law, Janet, née Astor (the present Duchess of Richmond), whose uncle, David Astor, had founded the Organic Research Centre, she was successful by 2000 in making Goodwood Home Farm completely organic.
The Duchess took on numerous charity commitments as patron of Compassion in World Farming, Stonepillow and British Hen Welfare, and had close associations with numerous other charities involved in campaigning for the environment, and for child and animal welfare.
In 1994 the Duke and Duchess moved out of Goodwood House to a smaller house on the estate, in favour of their son Charles, Earl of March.
The 10th Duke of Richmond died in 2017. The Dowager Duchess is survived by their four daughters and their son, the 11th Duke of Richmond.
The Dowager Duchess of Richmond, born July 26 1932, died June 13 2023
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