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From black sheep to white knight

When Sir Benjamin Slade was 21 he set off for Australia and among the fond farewells from his family were the words, “Don’t come back.”

“My family thought I was a bit wild,” says Sir Benjamin. “All nonsense of course. Not only did I make three fortunes over there (admittedly I lost two) but when I DID come back I was the one to rescue the family home.”

Venture capitalist, Sir Benjamin, is now multi-millionaire head of the shipping company Shirlstar. The family home was the listed Grade 2 Maunsel House in the wilds of Somerset which in part dates all the way back to the 11th century. The Slades had owned it since 1771 having bought it at auction all those years ago but by 1976 it had fallen into rack and ruin and as it was deemed uninhabitable its rateable value was only £1.

“But despite that someone was inhabiting it - my Aunt Freda - who, when I bought the place in 1978 from a cousin, became my sitting tenant. She paid me £1 a year as a peppercorn rent,” says Sir Benjamin.

In fact, when Sir Benjamin arrived the place was so grim that visitors wishing to go to the loo would find themselves ushered by their host to a patch behind the chicken shed.

“Then I’d give them some loo paper and a shovel and let them get on with it,” he adds cheerfully.

“Aunt Freda did not mind the fact that the ground floor floorboards had all rotted away,” he says. “This was thanks to Uncle Alfred who in previous years had stored sacks of grain on them to pretend it was a barn. (That was to reduce the rates!) Nor did she mind the parlous state of the roof which allowed squirrels to roam round the top floor. I even found a pigeon nesting on top of a wardrobe. Nor did she object to the broken central heating or the fact that every single loo was blocked. As long as she could hunt three times a week and spend the rest of her time on a kitchen sofa with her Pekinese dogs, eating Mars bars and watching lots of water come in, she was fine. But she did seem to mind paying me the £4 she owed for four years arrears! However to make the purchase all properly legal she had to pay up!”

So Sir Benjamin moved in with Aunt Freda living in the rear part and began a huge restoration programme. By the time she died in 1982 quite a lot had been achieved but it took ten years altogether to bring it up to scratch.

“Work is still ongoing but to give you some idea of what needed to be done I had spent about £780,000 by 1984. But the place is now almost complete.”

There were already two Victorian bathrooms - one with a coffin bath - so-called because you have to lift a lid to climb in. This room used to be the linen room and maids would heat their irons in the fire and then press the family’s clothes on the bath’s lid. Sir Ben’s grandfather would bathe here and be served drinks by a maid from behind the raised lid for modesty’s sake. There is also a very rare shower-bath (there are only five in the country) and more bathrooms had been put in during the 1930s. However, they all needed refurbishing which has now been done and a couple more installed.

In addition the roof has been fixed and new central heating installed which Sir Benjamin says, is a “state of the art system which was so efficient it only cost around £3500 a year to run! This was cheap for a place this size but I’ve had to upgrade it so a visiting couple can run two baths on the same evening”. He has also had the floorboards restored, to name just some of the renovations, and the latest improvement is the newly built kitchen area.
“There were lots of kitchens in outhouses at the back - the architect told me to demolish them which I did but it took a long time to get planning permission for the new one.”

To help pay for the enormous cost of it all Sir Benjamin and his partner Kirsten Hughes now let out part of their home for almost any event going, ranging from film shoots and civil weddings to conferences, holiday lets and beer festivals. There are more than a dozen bedrooms available in the house, some with magnificent four-posters and all with en suite bathrooms. There are even more in the cottages in the grounds. As weddings are particularly popular one room had been set aside as the bridal room - “where the bride can get changed, have a weep with her girlfriends and so on” says Sir Benjamin.

“We can even do ghosts if people want them,” he continued. “There’s one out in the park - a woman who can be seen only from the knees upwards. In fact she was seen by an old Ghurkha Colonel who thought she was my Aunt Freda! Her ‘legless’ state is explained by the fact the level of the ground must have been raised since her presumed day.”

Among the many attractions is the Great Bed of Maunsel which is a genuine Elizabethan oak bed discovered old and broken in a shed after years of ignominy. “It cost £4000 just to get it restored,” says Sir Benjamin. “The giant linen sheets cost a fortune too, but you can get seven people into it.”

Another attraction is the restored bandstand brought over from India where people can hold their wedding service and yet another is the rebuilt pergola which can seat 200 guests. “This is on the east side of the garden and perhaps rather too near Peckingham Palace where we keep our ducks and hens,” says Sir Benjamin. “They’ve proliferated - the poultry I mean - and now their ‘Palace’ looks more like the Somme as far as mud goes so we’re moving them to a new site.”

But the main attraction is Sir Benjamin himself who despite his seeming indestructibility is now looking for an heir. “The heir has to prove his pedigree and in the course of searching for him I discovered a huge number of people who are related to me,” he says. “Favourite is Isaac Slade a rock star in the States who sold six million albums last year. In fact there’s a town in North Carolina called Sladesville and as there are a vast number of people in that state called Slade, the town holds a Slade clan party every year. I really must get myself along to it.”