The 10th Earl of St Germans, who has died aged 75, enjoyed all the attributes that the popular press expects of the aristocracy – a distinguished lineage, burdensome inheritance, family tragedy and personal eccentricity that flirted with Byronic dissolution.
A central figure in the dalliance with the counter-culture by members of the peerage that began in the 1960s, Lord St Germans personified a certain brand of rakish hippiedom thereafter. Yet he did not allow his fondness for relaxed social norms to compromise a near-feudal grip on his family estate in south-east Cornwall, whose preservation he helped to assure.
His “Elephant Fayre”, a festival that took place for a number of years on the Port Eliot estate, attracted some 10,000 revellers, travellers and devotees of the New Age, initially free of charge. The festival took its name from the beast that is the Eliot family’s crest, and until the Fayre’s demise in the late 1980s one of its prime attractions was a giant wooden elephant. Its howdah could be reached by a ladder concealed within the elephant’s hollow core.
