The Duke of Buccleuch - Obituary - The Telegraph

The 9th Duke of Buccleuch and 11th Duke of Queensberry, who died yesterday aged 83, was Scotland's grandest aristocrat and the largest private landowner in Europe.

The 9th Duke of Buccleuch: his was the only Leonardo in private ownership

Laid end to end, the walls and fences that bounded his 280,000 acres would have stretched from Drumlanrig, his castle in Dumfriesshire, to San Francisco. The management of such a demesne was, as the Duke maintained, "every bit as much a business as running a chocolate factory or a chain of shops".

Yet such abundant means inevitably aroused envy, speculation and the disapproval of the Left. The Duke seemed a natural target for Labour politicians, and Jack Straw ventured before the 1997 general election to ask how he could possibly represent the common man.

The Duke genially replied that he could teach the future Home Secretary, whose career was almost exclusively confined to the closed world of Labour politics, "a little about life with a capital L".

Buccleuch had served as an ordinary seaman in destroyers during the Second World War, had been an MP for 13 years and had championed the increasingly neglected countryside while representing an Edinburgh constituency. He was closely involved in numerous charitable and regional bodies.

Although one of only 24 non-royal dukes, he was a member of a larger minority group, the disabled, as he had been in a wheelchair since breaking his back in a hunting accident. As for the charge that he was out of touch with ordinary people, the Duke maintained that the management of his estates brought him into contact with the 1,000 people who lived on them.

Each year his lands produced some 127,000 sheep, 13,500 cattle and 50,000 tons of timber, and his sensitive stewardship brought him several countryside awards and much admiration from his fellow landowners.

For good measure, he personally supervised the introduction of his own malt whisky, Spirit of Douglas. This was intended to help tourism in south-west Scotland, but he gave most of it away to friends, designing the packaging to suggest an antiquarian book so that a clergyman or temperance society director could have "the odd snifter" without anyone suspecting.

Journalists hazarded wildly that the Buccleuch estates, which run in an almost unbroken line across southern Scotland, were worth upwards of £300 million, but the Duke was swift to counter the notion that the extent of his property implied Gulbenkian riches: "It is seldom realised that one acre of windswept hill, typical of my family estate, is worth about as much as the space occupied by a wastepaper basket in a Fleet Street office."

The ducal coffers were further strained by the cost of maintaining the family's three houses, the upkeep of which was exacerbated by the cost of opening them to the public; the 17th-century tapestries at Drumlanrig were particularly susceptible to the effluvium of human breath. Keeping the castle open to its 40,000 visitors each year cost him £100,000 more than if he had kept it shut; in the depths of winter he contented himself with a two-bar electric fire in his study.

The Duke divided his time equally among his houses, driving between them in a Volvo painted in the black and gold Buccleuch livery. The autumn was spent at Drumlanrig, a 120-room pink sandstone castle with 17 turrets and four towers; it housed a Holbein and Rembrandt's Old Woman Reading; and the hall is dominated by a chandelier weighing nine stone.

At New Year, the Buccleuchs moved down to Bowhill, in the Borders, essentially a large hunting lodge which had been extensively remodelled in Victorian times. The 100-room house, sited in wooded country between the Ettrick and Yarrow rivers, holds portraits by Gainsborough, Reynolds and Van Dyck.

In the spring, they travelled on to Boughton, Northamptonshire, an 11,000-acre estate that included five villages. The house, originally a monastery, was turned in the 1660s into a complex replica of a French mansion; there are seven courtyards, 12 entrances and several acres of roof. Among its art treasures were 40 Van Dyck oil portrait sketches. The only Leonardo still in private hands, The Madonna of the Yarnwinder, which used to accompany the Duke on his annual progress around the houses, was stolen in August 2003 from Drumlanrig by two thieves posing as tourists.

A fourth Buccleuch house, Dalkeith Palace, just outside Edinburgh, is now occupied by Wisconsin University.