Ringwood, Avon Castle 1891 - Francis Frith - Photo!
Earl of Egmont was a title in the Peerage of Ireland. It became extinct with the death of the twelfth earl in 2011.
The Castle itself was converted into flats in 1949/50, most now privately owned. (1949 - Planning permission was granted for the conversion of the Castle into nine self contained flats.)
Lord Belmont in Northern Ireland: Lohort Castle
The11th Earl of Egmont, better known in Alberta as Frederick Perceval, on his land near Priddis, circa 1948 Calgary Herald Archives.
The Stampede’s fascination with British nobility was evident in 1932 when Frederick Perceval, 11th Earl of Egmont was tapped to present the prizes at the livestock revue and children’s show.
Known as the “cowboy earl” Perceval, 18, inherited the title, an estate worth an estimated $1M, historic Avon Castle and a seat in the British House of Lords. The earl chose ranching in Alberta instead.
Perceval purchased 275 hectares of land and built a home outside Calgary, at what is now Macleod Trail and Willow Park Drive. As the city grew, the land was sold and Egmont bought the 2,000-hectare Two Dot Ranch near Nanton. He lived there until his death at age 87 in December 2001.
He loved the ranching life, horseback riding and motorcycles. He was a competitor at the Calgary Stampede, taking part in the chuckwagon races and the wild cow milking contest.
As a young man, he was quoted as saying,“I’d sooner stay in Priddis than go anywhere in the world.”
The Earl of Egmont - Telegraph
THE 11th EARL OF EGMONT, who has died in Alberta aged 87, became one of the Peerage's most romantic figures at the age of 15 when he reluctantly moved from a two-room prairie shack to Avon Castle, Hampshire, on his father's inheritance of the earldom.
Members of a junior branch of the Perceval family which had emigrated to Iowa and then Alberta in the late 19th century, the boy and his widowed father "bached" together on a 600-acre ranch at Priddis, near Calgary.
Wearing chaps, boots and stetsons, they contentedly built up a herd of cattle, chopped their own wood and cooked their own meals. Then on January 12 1929 Lord Beaverbrook, the former owner of a Calgary bowling alley, ordered a Daily Express reporter in London to inform the father of his good fortune.
"This is the first I have heard of it," replied the 56-year-old 10th Earl when he was brought to a telephone station. "I have been out with a bunch of cattle for the past few days and have just got in."
His son Frederick George Moore Perceval, who was born at Calgary on April 14 1914, now had the courtesy title Viscount Perceval; however, he was unimpressed by the change in the family fortunes.
"You taught me to read and write and you taught me to ride and shoot," he told his father. "We've got a nice home here, and I don't want to leave it."
But the shack had pictures of English scenes on the walls, and they had often talked of the inheritance that might one day be theirs. After a sale of their effects in which the boy's two mongrels, Jack and Rummy, made 25 cents each and his saddle pony, Pat, $3.25, they set off.
Already local reporters were so persistent that they decided to depart from a small station outside Calgary. As the pair boarded ship at Montreal the father and son swapped their stetsons for caps.
When they landed in England they found themselves besieged all day and late at night for weeks. Even apart from their unfamiliarity with metropolitan life, the weatherbeaten "cowboy earl" and his son, with their western drawls, were of abiding interest to the press because of their genealogy.
An estate agent worked out that around £300,000 went with the Irish Earldom of Egmont, the Viscountcy of Perceval of Kanturk and the Barony of Arden of Arden, Co Cork, as well as the Barony of Lovel and Holland in the United Kingdom.
The inheritance came through their descent from Spencer Perceval, the Prime Minister assassinated at Westminster in 1812 who was the seventh son of the 2nd Earl.
The new Earl and his son excited a fresh round of press interest when their claim to both the land and titles were disputed by two other equally colourful claimants: a Hornsey baker, who said he had been born in Australia as the son of the sixth Earl's brother, and a retired Lancastrian optician.
Both cases were dismissed in court, but when debts and death duties necessitated the sale of silver and pictures, including a little-known Reynolds and a Beechey, the optician caused a sensation at Christie's by objecting at the top of his voice on the grounds that they belonged to him.
To add to the confusion, the House of Lords did not formally recognise the father's and son's claim until 1939. But they were able to move into Avon Castle, with its private railway halt and 1,300 acres at Ringwood, Hampshire, seven months after their arrival.
By then the Earl was thoroughly bemused by the England he had not seen since the age of six, and his son was firmly for returning to Priddis. Instead, they dismissed the servants and moved into the huge kitchen to re-create their Albertan self-sufficiency.
The gates were closed; the house shuttered; overtures from county neighbours were rebuffed. The new Earl got on well enough with the villagers he met in the pub and local shop, though he didn't care for the way they always called him "sir".
He talked about sending his son to Oxford, but the boy showed no sign of continuing his schooling and was left largely to his own lonely devices.
The young Lord Perceval occasionally played with other boys in Ringwood but was more often to be seen riding alone on his bicycle; later he bought a motorcycle which he enjoyed riding late at night along deserted roads at up to 85 mph.
The Earl continued to be of abiding interest to the press which dubbed him "the loneliest peer in England"; then fate intervened when he was killed in a motor accident in Southampton.
While the villagers spoke up for their kindly, shy neighbour, the Sunday Express's theatre critic, James Agate, excoriated county society: "Doubtless the late earl's accent and manners may, like his boots, have been a shade too thick for the fine carpets of Hampshire. Doubtless he was no master of small talk, because on an Alberta ranch, if you talk at all, the subjects will probably be pretty big. They may be kittle cattle but they certainly won't be tittle tattle."
The local MP wrote in reply that efforts had been made to get to know the lonely peer. But the 18-year-old new Earl did not wait to give local society a second chance. He put the estate on the market and set out for Canada.
On encountering a Calgary journalist on the train at Winnipeg his first questions were about the present owner of his saddle-pony and the date of the annual Stampede.
After kitting himself out with saddle and chaps, the young Egmont set out for Priddis whose population turned out to greet him. Yes, he had liked the racing but not the crowds at the Derby. London was a tiring place where there were lots of shows, though he couldn't understand why he had to pay sixpence for a programme full of advertisements.
"What English people do not realise," he explained, "is that there is a greater spirit of freedom and generosity over here in Canada."
That afternoon, he borrowed a horse and set off for a ride. A few months later, after participating in the Stampede, Egmont married his cousin, Geraldine Moodie, a dental nurse who had been his childhood sweetheart.
The honeymoon involved the usual pursuit by newsmen, who remained fascinated by "the only member of the House of Lords who could rope, throw and brand a steer". The couple had to return home from Victoria, British Columbia, after they had been spotted, and then set off again for Florida.
However, the new countess was made of stern stuff and dealt with prying reporters by leading her husband away firmly by the arm before he had time to provide them with any more colourful copy.
Egmont hardly fulfilled normal expectations of a belted earl when encountered on his ranch in bib overalls and a dusty hat, with six days' beard. He liked his neighbours to address him as "Fred", but they called him "the Earl" behind his back.
Settling down to develop some of the finest stock in the West on the Priddis ranch, Egmont resisted his wife's promptings that they go to England until 1938, after he had rescued their son from a fire which destroyed their ranch-house.
He bought a car in London, toured the country and talked about sending his son to Eton. Instead, he put Avon Castle on the market and returned to Priddis where he built a 26-room ranch-house, complete with solid oak floors that had to be supported by 12 in steel girders in the basement.
When the farm was sold 21 years later to a property company which came in advance of Calgary's spreading suburbs, he told the ever-interested Daily Express that he might consider moving back to Britain, where he still had land at Epsom.
However, he used his handsome profit to buy the 5,000-acre Two-Dot Ranch at Nanton, 40 miles south of the city, which had once belonged to the Earl of Minto, Canada's Governor General from 1898 to 1904.
Egmont continued to keep largely to himself, though he was delighted on one occasion to be introduced to a member of his family in Britain, who was staying on a neighbouring ranch.
When Canada's constitution was patriated by the repeal of the Westminster British North America Act in the early 1980s, a Canadian reporter rang to ask if he would go to England to speak in what was expected to be a controversial Lords debate. The countess answered the phone.
"You can't speak to him now. He's out doing his chores," she snapped, before venturing her own opinion that there was no call for the repeal, anyway. Later, Egmont told a neighbour that he rather wished that he had gone over to take his seat in the House.
Egmont is survived by his heir - Thomas Frederick Gerald, Viscount Perceval, who was born on August 17 1934 - a younger son and two daughters.
- Egmont - Acocks Green History Society: new website
Why did the Earl of Egmont choose to be buried at Acocks Green, given that most of his life had been spent in the United States and Canada?
To answer these questions we have to look at two families, the Percevals and the Baxters.
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