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For over 300 years the Sackvilles have lived at Buckhurst Park in East Sussex. The current head of the family, 75-year-old William Sackville, 11th Earl De La Warr – farmer, pigeon fancier, Poohsticks aficionado – moved to Buckhurst when he was five.
Soon afterwards, a wrecking ball arrived to demolish three quarters of the house – with good reason. With 38 bedrooms, Buckhurst was too big to function in the brave new postwar world.
Maintaining big estates such as Buckhurst can still be a struggle today. In a bid to balance the books Lord De La Warr now runs a pub, a pheasant shoot, a herd of cattle with a 1,000-year pedigree and a wedding business – not to mention his part-time job in the City.
He has found time for politics too; expelled from the Lords as a hereditary peer in 1999 he has tried four times to rejoin as an elected peer. A brush with Rishi Sunak led him to conclude that the Prime Minister was “a technocrat … not a Conservative” and that his manners did not do justice to his public school upbringing.
The eldest son of the 10th Earl, he inherited a fairly drab Buckhurst, its 2,000-acre estate and the De La Warr title in 1988 and has lived there with his wife, Anne, ever since. A keen man of the turf, he was educated at Eton, has worked as a stockbroker and now works part-time for the hedge fund Toscafund.
But his main occupation is finding new ways to keep Buckhurst going: as well as the house, there are the estate pub, The Dorset Arms, 40 residential properties, a pheasant shoot and a farm with 250 grass-fed, pure-bred Sussex cattle.
The house isn’t open to the public, although it can host weddings, and so remains a comfortable private home to the De La Warrs and their cocker spaniel, Violet. It is a pretty, homely house, crammed with books – along with Shetland ponies, which she breeds, reading is Anne De La Warr’s passion. The Morning Room at Buckhurst is reckoned to contain more than 2,000 books.
The estate’s most famous feature is the 500-acre wood better known as the “100 Aker Wood”, the home of heffalumps and woozles made so famous by AA Milne in Winnie the Pooh. Lord De La Warr’s father played there as a child with Milne’s son Christopher, and in 2021 the family bought the original Poohsticks bridge for £131,000. Regrettably, their tenure as custodian of this famous monument was short-lived; when it emerged that making the bridge safe for the public to play Poohsticks on was going to cost £75,000, Lord De La Warr put it back up for sale.
His newest initiative has had more success. In September the estate launched an online shop, Buckhurst Park Produce, which sells joints, steak and mince from the farm in an attempt to reduce the “huge overdraft”. Lord De La Warr says he finds the cows immensely enjoyable – and he is proud of their pedigree.
“We’re almost certain that the pure-bred Sussex descend back to when the Normans arrived in 1066 and found red-brown cattle in the Wealds of Sussex and Kent,” he says.
Earlier this year the chef Marcus Wareing visited Buckhurst for his BBC2 programme Tales from a Kitchen Garden and cooked two pieces of Buckhurst steak. He concluded that they were “absolutely outstanding in every way”, to Lord De La Warr’s delight.
As well as being sold online, the meat from the farm finds its way to The Dorset Arms, the pub that the De La Warrs opened in Withyham, a nearby village, in 2013.
Being both a farmer and a publican is hard work. “Both are extremely stressful,” says Lord De La Warr, “but I get a lot of pleasure out of being a publican.” When asked as a boy what he wanted to do, he said he wanted to run a restaurant, but he admits that it is tough. “We are struggling,” he says. “We are being kept afloat by our rooms.”
What he sees as a chronic lack of support for British farmers doesn’t help. “Everything is about the environment, and it doesn’t always run hand in hand with productive farming,” he says. One scheme prevented the farm from cutting the grass to make hay for the cattle until July 1.
“The reason given was because of ground-nesting birds,” he says, “in particular the lapwing – but we haven’t seen a lapwing here for 20 years.”
As he has got older, he has become more political. When we first met in 2019, he was “trying to get back into the House of Lords”, from which he was removed, with the majority of hereditary peers, in 1999. He has run four times for election to the Lords, but has decided that his age is now against him. A natural conservative and a passionate Brexiteer, he rates few members of the Government and denounces Rishi Sunak as a “technocrat – I don’t think he’s a Conservative”.
He recently saw the Prime Minister at a Conservative do at the Hurlingham Club. “I asked him a question and he couldn’t answer it. His mouth opened and shut, and then he turned his back on me and walked away,” he says. “I don’t think prime ministers should do that sort of thing, given that the motto of Winchester [College, Sunak’s school] is ‘Manners maketh man’.”
He hopes to set a better example on the estate, which in due course he will hand over to his son, Will, Lord Buckhurst, who works in investment management. Among those who work for him and live in his properties, he says, there’s a healthy community spirit – and plenty of steak. “We like to think of ourselves as a happy family.”
From Domesday Book to Canadian army base: the history of Buckhurst Park
The Buckhurst Park estate was recorded in the Domesday Book, at which point it belonged to the de Dene family. In 1140 Ela de Dene married Sir Jordan de Sackville, in whose family it remains.
The current house was started in 1603 and extended in the 1730s by Lionel Sackville, 1st Duke of Dorset, for whom it was a summer retreat from the Sackvilles’ other house, Knole in Kent.
The De La Warrs joined the fray in 1814 when George West, 5th Earl De La Warr, married Lady Elizabeth Sackville, daughter of John Sackville, 3rd Duke of Dorset. George and Elizabeth De La Warr had nine surviving children, the third of whom, Reginald Sackville, 7th Earl De La Warr, inherited Buckhurst. His younger brother Mortimer Sackville-West, created 1st Baron Sackville in 1876, got the far bigger Knole.
While the family have hung on to Buckhurst, in 1947 Knole passed to the National Trust; Lord De La Warr’s third cousin once removed Robert Sackville-West, 7th Baron Sackville, lives in its south wing.
Knole, “reminiscent of Oxford, though more palatial and less studious”, as it was described by Vita Sackville-West, the aristocratic writer and garden designer, strikes rather a different image to Buckhurst. Would its owner swap it for Knole? Probably not.
“I’ve always been there in the evening and thought of it as slightly gloomy, but I went to lunch once in the summer and saw it in its full glory,” he says. “I thought to myself, ‘would I rather be here?’ I’m lucky because ours is now much smaller.”
He says he regrets that the Buckhurst estate was also once much larger. In 1883 the De La Warrs owned more than 23,000 acres, and although 2,000 acres is, for most people, an awful lot of land, an extra 8,000 acres would help on the farming front.
Lord De La Warr’s father, the former Parachute Regiment officer William Sackville, Lord Buckhurst, later 10th Earl De La Warr, did not grow up there. His father, Herbrand “Buck” Sackville, 9th Earl, the first hereditary peer to join the Labour Party, had let the house to the Benson family, who extended it with a wing by Sir Edwin Lutyens. After the Bensons left, the house was requisitioned by the Canadian army and after the war Lord Buckhurst and his wife, Anne Devas, returned to Sussex to make their life at the rather oversized house.