This is from a man who seems to be right up there with a couple of the villains in Animal Wild, Lord Seacroft and Lord Sudeley. Feudalism not only lives, it never went away.
Reginald Plunkett, 1880-1967, was an Anglo-Irish naval admiral and the younger son of the 17th Baron of Dunsany. His brother Edward was well known as the novelist and playwright Lord Dunsany. We have a copy of Selections from the Writings of Lord Dunsany, with an introduction by W.B. Yeats, Cuala Press, Dublin, 1912, in stock. The family name was extended by royal licence, resulting in a quadruple-barrelled surname, just for the hell of it I suppose. Edward inherited the Irish estates, whilst Sir Reginald Aylmer Ranfurly Plunkett-Ernle-Erle-Drax (what, actually, is the point of all these ridiculous names?) got the huge estates in the West Indies, Kent, Surrey, Dorset, Wiltshire and Yorkshire. His parents were distant cousins (of each other, just to be clear), both from families of wealth and influence.
In a neat tie-in with one of this month’s Books Old & New post, Ian Fleming was a friend and named the villain in Moonraker Sir Hugo Drax in his honour. Was it an honour though? In the book, Drax is “a megalomaniac German Nazi who masquerades as an English gentleman”.
The head of the family now is Richard Grosvenor Plunkett-Ernle-Erle-Drax, MP for South Dorset since 2010 and it is this scion who is responsible for the quotation at the head of this post.
So, where did all the money come from? Take a wild guess. Slavery? Yup. Not so unusual for aristocratic families but this one went the extra mile. The Drax family, according to the Black Lives Matter section of the website dorsetuncovered.org.uk, actually “pioneered [my italics] the use of African slaves to cultivate sugar on their plantations in Barbados and Jamaica” and they carried on for longer than any other. These crimes against humanity were then widely copied across the Caribbean and the southern United States. Sir Hilary Beckles, chair of the Caricom Reparations Commission, estimates that 30,000 slaves died on the Drax plantations. As for reparation, Richard Plunkett-Ernle-Erle-Drax simply refuses to engage or discuss, describing it as a “personal and private matter”. The family did not mind receiving compensation from the British government when slavery was abolished however.
Plunkett-Ernle-Erle-Drax (he prefers “Drax”), the wealthiest landowner in the House of Commons, is thought to be worth between £130m and £150m and his Charlborough Estate in Dorset occupies 13,870 acres, only the National Trust owning more in the county. The house and its parkland are surrounded by the “great wall of Dorset” which abuts the road, runs for three miles and is composed of some two million bricks. He still owns the land in Barbados, a farming estate and a grouse moor (no surprises there) in Yorkshire, and a £4.4m holiday let on Sandbanks, Dorset, none of which were originally declared in the register of declarations of interest of members of Parliament. He was also found to have failed to produce accounts for four of his five companies for a number of years. He blamed his accountants, and did put matters right, but directors have to approve and sign company accounts, and he approved them annually between 2009 and 2020. I would think it quite difficult simply to forget hundreds of thousands of pounds worth of financial activity. He owns much of the property empire directly or it is owned by the trustees of a settlement trust set up in his name in 1987, but the main farming business, ACF (Drax Farm) does not have to file accounts at all, since it is not set up as a limited company. ACF (Drax Farm) received at least £7.5m in grants from the EU since 2000. There is a raft of other companies and holding companies, some dormant, just to muddy the waters further. As an MP he is known for his vociferous right-wing leanings and was a vehement Brexiteer.
Now, from behind these physical and financial walls of secrecy, he has, in his wisdom, chosen to speak out about wildlife. Earlier he became highly exacerbated about the case of “a beaver being released illegally in West Dorset” claiming that they cause flooding when the opposite is the case. He then came out with this outright lie about the badger cull: “Culling has proved to work.” It hasn’t of course. All wild animals have to be culled he says, because if that doesn’t happen “their health deteriorates”. What now? “They don’t have any predators in today’s world.” Whose fault is that? “Foxes, deer, badgers. We don’t want to wipe them out, we just simply want them controlled. This is just pure common sense.” Beavers he seems to think should stick to the areas they have been “given” and must expect to be culled if they dare to “break out”. It would be easy to dismiss this claptrap as deranged nonsense, but coming from one quite so powerful, it is profoundly chilling.
On the same day that this f***wit came onto my radar, Protect the Wild recently reported the prosecution of a prolific, serially offending wild bird egg thief who has been responsible over the years for the theft of thousands upon thousands of eggs. He looks a rather pathetic individual and his perverse obsession suggests that he is not altogether right in the head. Far be it from me to draw comparisons between the two.
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