TWINS, FAIRY TALE CASTLES AND MYSTERIOIUS ISLANDS

This is Fort Brecqhou, the mysterious Folly of the Barclay Brothers.  (And this great photo is from Weydonia on Wikepedia.)

I think this fairy tale castle, a stunning combination of Gothic castle and grand palace, built on Brecqhou,  a rocky island in the Atlantic measuring 200 acres (under half a mile),  definitely counts as a first rate modern folly, a flight of fancy brought to life by the whim of two rich men.

It cost the Barclays Brothers 2.3million pounds to buy Brecqhou island and a further 90million, so it is said, to build this wonderful cloud capped tower of a palace. But as with all magic castles, mystery hovers over it and leaves me wondering . . .

I have a passion for islands, and in many ways the Barclays boys, David and Frederick,  have bought exactly the sort of island I would go for.  They didn't  do the boring conventional thing and buy in a hot climate, in the Caribbean like Branson, or the Bahamas like Depp, or off Madeira like Spielberg.  They bought in the Northern clime, in the cold Atlantic.  OK, so Brecqhou is one of the Channel Islands and it's washed by the warm waters of the Gulf Stream. But in winter it's still a mighty chilly place.

But that's what I love about it - imagine it in deep mid-winter, heavy dark clouds looming over its battlements, stormy seas beating around the shoreline, howling wind and rain battering the sturdy modern windows, and inside all  the warmth and comforts of the 21st century.  The kitchen stocked with goodies from Harrods (or better still, Selfridges) food department, great wines in the cellar and chrystal champagne chilling in the huge freezers. How deliciously cosy is that!  Especially for those of us who secretly harbour the Gothic tendency!

But despite my huge affection for the twins for creating something I would love to own and live in, I'm left wondering - why Brecqhou?  Why that particular island?  In many ways, it's not an ideal choice.

The Brothers, Sir David and Sir Frederick Barclay, twins born 10 minutes apart, have bought, run and sold businesses in property, hotels, shipping, leisure, gas and oil and the motor industry, turning over billions of pounds in their extraordinary careers.  Plus turning many millions over to charity.

Not bad for boys who grew up in a family of 10 children, a family which their travelling salesman father brought down from Scotland in the 1930s during the great Depression, as he looked for work.  The twins grew up in a house on the wrong side of the railway tracks in Kensington, West London, which they shared with several other families.Then, in 1947, when the twins were 13, their father died after a routine operation.

At 16 the brothers left school and begun their working life in the accounts department of GEC. But not for long. They left pdq  to set up a painting and decorating business - and the rest, as the cliche goes, is legend - though I would say it's tenacity, brains, talent and a lot of hard work.

Once upon a time, a young David took his mother to tea at the Ritz in London.  He told her that one day he would own the hotel.  And now he does.  And among many other possessions, he and his brother own The Telegraph stable of publications.

The brothers give huge sums to charity, donating £11m to Great Ormond Street Hospital in one year, and handing £3m to Alder Hey children's hospital in Liverpool in another. They were deservedly knighted for services to charity in 2000.

Journos sometimes refer to the Barclays as the Brothers Grimm - a bit unfair, this. Presumably it's because the brothers highly value their privacy. But surely the cleverest of the rich do try and adopt a low profile? There's enough free floating envy and hatred directed at the rich at the best of times, especially in the UK. Blinging it about and shouting how clever you are is never a smart move.

So you don't buy an island unless you want  privacy -  to choose the people you want to be with,  to do your own thing , and just to be yourself, and for a brief moment retreat to the comfort of your own little world.

But strangely, as this photo below shows, Brecqhou is not a very private island.  It is extremely close to another, rather bigger island, Sark. This is a shot of Brecqhou taken from Sark. A strong swimmer could probably make it across the divide between the two islands. (many thanks and credit to lostajy on flickr for this atmospheric photo).

       
David and Frederick Barclay bought Brecqhou in 1993.  As the photo shows, it is separated from Sark by an extremely narrow sound, Le Goulliot Passage, which is traversed frequently by yachts in summer and fishboats all year. So there's a lot of sea traffic constantly in close proximity to Brecqhou all the year round.  There are cameras around the the island's perimeter and there are Bond-style rumours of patrolling guards, possibly armed.  Well, why not? It's a dangerous old world out there.

The island is 20 miles off Normandy and has its own water and electricity supply. General supplies are ferried in by boats, led by the Brecqhou Warrior.

The castle or fort was designed by Charles's fav architect, Terry Quinlan, who did Poundbury, the POW's experimental village in Dorset.
According to the entry in the excellent DiCamillo Companion website on architecture, Fort Brecqhou is the largest house build in Britain in the last 200 years. The entry then goes on:
"The house is a granite-clad castle on a quadrangular plan, built in the castellated Gothic style, complete with circular turrets at the 4 corners. It features giant twisted chimneys of the style developed during the reign of Henry VIII (this chimney style is unique to English architecture). The island was purchased by the Barclay brothers in 1993 for £2.3 million, with the cost of building the house, gardens, and outbuildings estimated at £90 million."

Truly,  Brecqhou is a magnificent honey coloured cliff top fortress.  Mock Gothic with towers, spires, gilded turrets, battlements, and a moat.
Within its thick walls is a Banqueting room 80 meters long, with gold leaf ceiling. And I'm told there's a  hand painted ceiling in the Library inspired by the Sistine Chapel in Rome.
The walls are 3 ft thick granite.
There are 2 swimming pools and a helicopter pad.
There are outbuildings and cottages for the family, and presumably the staff, in the grounds.
And, predictably, rumour says there's an underground nuclear bunker.
Building was finished in 1996 after some 90,000 tons of materials were carried in by boat.

But the island is very close to its neighbour, Sark.  Too close for comfort,  perhaps? And Sark's curious 'house rules'  impinge on Brecqhou. Sark believes in primogeniture, (an exclusive right of inheritance belonging to the eldest son). Has Sark not heard of rights for women and the feminist movement? The  Barclays, like all reasonable people, want to be able to leave their money to their children as they wish. They took the island to the European Court of Human Rights and won, when the Court ruled against Sark's law of primogeniture.

So why did the twins buy Brecqhou, and not some other island unemcumbered by the feudal habits of their neighbour, in whose fiefdom they actually are?

But what could be better could also be worse. Cars are forbidden on Sark. And the big cheese on the island is referred to as the Seigneur - droit de seigneur and all that! Come on, it does rather bring up visions of lowly peasants doffing their caps to the High and Mighty. Definitely not for me. Though recently, thanks to Dave and Fred, his power has been curtailed.
 But,  Ah Ha, hang on a minute. Hey, There's no income tax!
So not everything is bad about little Sark.  

And then there's the famous, or infamous or according to your view, 'Sark Lark'

But let's leave the 'Sark Lark' for the next post.  Personally I think it's all rather jolly,  but then I'm a great believer in the freedom of the individual . . .

The Follies of the Rich

One of the great things about the rich is that they can be as eccentric as they like, because they have the cash, and status, to  indulge their wildest fantasies and fancies. Traditionally, the rich have always been great creators of Follies - the word Folly here being used in the sense of light-heartedness, not in the sense of something ill-advised.  Indeed, the UK is said to have more architectural follies than anywhere else in the world.

Classically, Follies are buildings that have no practical purpose and are there purely for ornamentation. Follies began as decorative additions on the great estates of the late 16th and early 17th centuries and became hugely  popular in the couple of centuries which followed.  Some great estates already had picturesque ruins of monastic houses, for instance, but others lacked any such genuine and atmospheric buildings. So, the fake romantic and theatrical eye catchers begun to appear in the grounds of the big houses.

Below are a couple of examples of traditional follies - both from the grounds of Stowe in Buckinghamshire, courtesy the National Trust. On the left is the Temple of Venus and on the right the deliciously quirky triangular Gothic Temple - both serving no purpose except to please and amuse.

However, some Follies did have a practical use, as in the hunting tower at Chatsworth, shown below.

In the modern world, I guess we could say that Roman Abramovich's Eclipse - the biggest yacht in the world, as we all know - is an example of the Folly of a rich man. It is a magnificent feat of design and construction.  But it's not a Folly I would have fancied. (see my earlier post about hubris).

I'm going to talk about another Folly, created by a couple of rich men, which is much more to my personal taste - but not until tomorrow,  as the witching hour has long since come and gone.

So, tomorrow, let's have a look at the fairy tale residence of the Brothers Grimm - the wild and romantic Fort Brecqhou.

(for anyone interested in modern follies, see The Folly Fancier on my blog list, it's a great blog).

The richest man in the world - or not, as the case may be

In 2008 Forbes placed Warren Buffett as the richest man in the world.  Current opinion appears to place Bill Gates in that position, with Buffett coming in second.

Buffett, now in  his late seventies, has just given 37 billion dollars to the Bill and Melinda Gates Charitable Foundation.

As he is currently in the news because of the very good recent interview with Evan Davis, I thought I'd give him a brief mention.  Brief, because it's very rare for me to find a man of great wealth as excruciatingly boring as I find Buffett.  He's a rich version of a dull man from the suburbs of Omaha, Nebraska, who appears to have been driven from his early youth to acquire huge sums of money, without seeming to know what to do with it when he got it. And when he gives it away, as my second para shows, he doesn't give it to a personal cause of his own, but to other people who do know what to do with it.  For some reason, he seems to be regarded as a bit of a saint.

Buffett's profession is investments,  that's all he does; he does it brilliantly, but it's all he does. He doesn't make, produce or create anything, except money.

Bill Gates, on the other hand, changed the world. That's why his photo is up here and not Buffett's.

(This great shot of Gates, all youth and geekiness, is from the seattleworld blog site.)

There's a good piece by Jeremy Warner in the Telegraph about the Davis/Buffett interview. As Warner points out,  Buffett says he doesn't like the greed fuelled ways of Wall Street, but, as a little research shows,  he still invests in the Wall Street big beasts such as Salomon Brothers and Goldman Sachs.  Buffett says he thinks derivatives are  'financial weapons of mass destruction", yet it's clear that over the past year he has in bought extensively in these markets.

Buffett very nearly run into trouble with the regulators over sharp practices in his insurance subsiduary General Re, wholly owned by Berkshire Hathaway, Buffett's holding company.  One unnamed associate said that "with a history as complex as Buffett's, there's bound to be an indictment in there somewhere".

In the Evans interview, Buffett reprised his often expressed view that the rich should pay higher taxes and not grumble about it.  He doesn't seem to acknowledge that the basic objection, of rich and poor alike, is not to the concept of taxes - most people agree on the need to fund things like the health services, education etc. - but to having large chunks of their hard earned money taken off them by incompetent politicians who've never worked in a real job in their lives, and have no idea of how to handle the money efficiently when they get it.

Buffett also believes in not leaving money to his three children. That about sums up Warren Buffett to me.  The man from Omaha is just not my kind of rich man.

Next post will be about two rather different rich men. They're not currently in the news, but I'm going to do a piece on them anyway - because I'm really rather taken with them.

Egghead Central or the Hadron Collider at Cern

Temporarily branching off at a rather sharp angle, this post was sparked off by an article in The Times a couple of days ago on the troubles at the CERN accelerator in Switzerland. 

As an experimental outfit Cern and its Hadron collider is phenomenally expensive to run, requires a huge input of wealth, and has been running for years.  And it has, potentially,  awe-inspiring power to change our world.

So, we have my two favourite words, wealth and power.

Without falling into conspiracy-theory-land, this article led me to ask - whose is the ultimate controlling hand or hands behind Cern?  Where does the power lie to control and, maybe, manipulate, Cern?  

We know it is a joint exercise with many European countries involved, all of whom contribute varying sums to it:  we know there are observers from other countries:  and in-put by scientists from just about every country in the world.

We know Cern, is big and impressive. Left is an aerial photograph (courtesy of the Cern website) of the 17 or so miles of tunnel through which the experiments are conducted.  This concrete lined tunnel runs underground for 17 miles, at varying depths of 50 - 175 metres, beneath the Franco-Swiss border near Geneva.

  In trying to answer my own question, the only information I find at a brief gallop through the web deals almost exclusively with the science side of Cern, basically physicists doing their own thing.  There are the rash of more imaginative sites, with their talk of fascinating things such as ULF (ultra low frequencies) and UHF (ultra high frequencies) used to control weather, and the human system itself (that is scary.)   But however accurate or inaccurate, these sites are still science based.   It's all good stuff, but it's not what this post is about.  This post is about people, and specifically people who wield power. We don't want to wander off into Dan Brown territory.

(Not that I have anything against Dan Brown, you understand. Respect to any writer who can sell as many copies as Danny boy can - and keep their private life moderately private.)

But back to my basic point.  Cern is an organisation which needs huge sums of money to survive, and has the potential to wield real power. It's funded and run by a large,  diffused group of people and countries, of whom most members are non scientists and probably do not fully understand what is going on. 

In any organisation run by groups and committees,who are loosely joined and consist of many disparate interests, there tends somewhere in that set up to be a power base.  It may not be obvious.  It may be quite small. But with such huge sums of money invested, and possible world changing technology involved, surely Cern is not solely in the hands of uninformed politicians and physicists playing their wonderful, glittering games. 

Who takes the ultimate decisions as to which experiment gets the most money?   Who has the power to suggest or veto whatever is decided on?  Where and who are the people, (as opposed to the scientists) the big names, who have control over Cern? 

Am I missing something here?  Am I asking a naive question, perhaps? 

It's just that  I have observed that within every big impressive project involving lots of money and the capacity to influence the way things are, there is always a small group of ambitious, clever men, anxious to get a handle on the goodies.

Well, it's late, and before I lose my credibility entirely, and descend into the script of a Bond movie, I will close down for the night, but leave one question open:


Are there lurkers in the shadows behind the big Daddy Hadron Collider? 

Cherchez le pouvoir . . .

introducing Oleg Deripaska

The reason for the delay in putting up this post is that the story of Oleg Deripaska is a hugely complex one, and indeed his present position is very complicated. He has large borrowing debts, and is also embroiled in several legal disputes, at least one already going through the courts. He has enemies.

But let's start with the official background.  Deripaska is the head of the largest producer of aluminium and alumina in the world, Rusal.  Below is an excerpt from his company's website:

"Having raised his initial capital by trading in metals, Oleg Deripaska acquired shares in the Sayanogorsk Aluminium Smelter and became its Director General in 1994. In 1997, Mr. Deripaska initiated the creation of the Sibirsky Aluminium Group, which was Russia’s first vertically integrated industrial group. It brought together Russian leading aluminium and alloys producers and three years after its inception the Sibirsky Aluminium Group became one of the world's top ten producers of aluminum products. The Sibirsky Aluminium Group was renamed Basic Element in 2001.

In 2000-2003, Mr. Deripaska was Director General of Russian Aluminium (RUSAL), which was set up as a result of the combination of aluminium smelters and alumina refineries of the Sibirsky Aluminium Group and the Sibneft oil company. In 2007, RUSAL, the SUAL Group and alumina assets of Glencore International AG merged to create United Company RUSAL, the world's largest aluminium and alumina producer. Oleg Deripaska became Head of the United company in 2009."


This cool professional description of Deripaska's rise conveys nothing of  his climb out of  poverty and obscurity  to fight his way through a virtually lawless world of great danger - in which his life was frequently on the line - to finally survive and emerge one of the wealthiest and most  powerful men in Russia.

Deripaska's life story so far is the stuff of a great book - a page-turning thriller that, turned into a work of fiction, would look just that, fiction.  But it all happened. Frederick Forsyth, Ken Follet, Robert Harris,  Jeffrey Archer, where are you?

Oleg Deripaska is, in some ways, the most interesting of the Russian oligarchs.  The majority of them, generally speaking, are essentially money men.  Deripaska is an intellectual.  But an intellectual who rose to become, at one point, the richest man in Russia - tho' he's slipped a bit in the present financial climate.

He was born in  1968 and  grew up in a small rural village in  southern Russia with his widowed mother, and sometimes his grandparents when his mother, a clever woman and herself an engineer, was working in another city.  He graduated with honors in physics from Moscow State University in 1993, and in 1996 he got an economics degree from the Plekhanov Russian Academy of Economics.

But he soon saw that theoretical physics was not going to get him very far in the chaotic world of post Communist Russia. He tried his hand as a metal trader. And it was under the tumultuous reign of Boris Yeltsin that Deripaska begun his abrupt, and some say violent,  rise to wealth and power. Though in the chaotic conditions of a society in meltdown, it's clear that anyone who did  not defend themselves violently would simply not come out alive.

Among all the battles for control of state assets in 1990s, none were more violent and bloody than the so-called "aluminum wars" when organized-crime gangs hired by competing interests assassinated dozens of people, in the fight to control the smelters of the aluminium industry.   Executives, politicians and reporters were run over, shot, had their throats cut or died in mysterious air crashes. The worst fighting was said to be around the Krasnoyarsk plant in Siberia. They called it the "Wild East". Out of this bloodbath of corpses and bits of body parts, Deripaska emerged the winner. Maybe because he was a lot brighter than the physical heavies battling around him,  kept a very cool head, and held his nerve.

Deripaska himself says he owes his success to a lot of hard work. He certainly owes much of his success to great courage, boldness and brains.  One of his business associates is quoted as saying many people underestimated Deripaska. "He is one of the most intelligent people you've ever met,' he says, "and it's matched by ambition."

Early on, Deripaska understood that success in this new Russia would come from a mixture of  force, poltical influence and personal connnections. In 2001, he married Yeltsin's granddaughter.  He is very close to Putin, they go ski-ing together. Though rumour says there has been a little coolness of late - though it's possible that is just for public show.

And in 2004, Deripaska became pals with Lord Mandelson and the heir to the Rothschild dynasty, Nat, both of whom holidayed on his yacht.

Lord Mandelson himself has denied that, as the EU Trade commissioner, he gave trade concessions of up to £50m. a year to Russia's then richest man.  During his commissionership, there have been two cuts in EU aluminium import tariffs which have benefited Rusal by tens of millions of pounds a year.

  But these are complicated areas of negotiation and as David O’Sullivan, the European Commission’s director-general of European trade, has said: “Decisions regarding these cases have been taken in full transparency and are firmly rooted in EU law and in the interests of EU companies."

Balzac had a word for it

"Behind every great fortune lies a great crime."

That phrase is often attributed to Balzac, but in fact what Balzac actually said was:

"Le secret des grandes fortunes sans cause apparente est un crime oubli, parce qu'il a t proprement fait."

which, translated, is:

"The secret of a great success for which you are at a loss to account, is a crime that has never been found out, because it has been properly executed."

This might perhaps be applied to many rich men or woman, of course.  But it's particularly linked with sudden and dramatic acquisition of great wealth.  The modern-day example of this is the rise of the Russian oligarchs.

But surely, when great wealth is acquired in situations where the laws of the country have broken down and anarchy reigns,  the normal laws of polite civilised liberal behaviour cannot really be applied.  For instance, it's easy to criticise from an expensive  property in liberal old Hampstead,  and take that greatly favoured piece of real estate known as 'the moral high ground', when you have legitimately earned your money from one of the noble professions, and/or most likely inherited some of it, too.   For such people it must be difficult to put themselves in the place of men with no professional background, no family with money, with nothing in fact but their brains, who started off from zero in the violent and chaotic conditions of post Communist Russia.

Lev Cherney, brother of Michael, another successful man we will meet later, who came up the hard way,  said to my mind perfectly reasonably:

"Very often the most likely to succeed in these stormy oceans are not the picture-perfect, clean-shaved, deep-tanned, well-built and fashionably attired yachtsmen under the immaculate white sails - but unpleasant-looking ugly skippers in command of a pirate ship."
He added: "One should not be appalled. These are the laws of intial capital acquisition, applicable everywhere."

Note the last sentence.  "These are the laws of intial capital acquisition, applicable everywhere."

In other words, he agrees with Balzac.

So, next post, let's look at a striking example of someone who has soared close to the sun from a standing start  - and ask, will he yet burn his wings?  I'm talking, of course,  about that well known friend of Nat Rothschild and  Lord Mandelson, the  aluminum King himself, Oleg Deripaska.

More next time . . .