Neil Primrose’s paternal grandfather, the 5th Earl of Rosebery, is reputed to have said that he had three aims in life: to win the Derby, to marry an heiress, and to become prime minister. He succeeded in all three. Primrose, the 7th Earl, had altogether more practical interests, including unusually, perhaps even incongruously for a peer of the realm, electrical engineering.
He did however enjoy, for a time at least, the fruits of his grandfather’s providential marriage into the Rothschild family, in particular Mentmore Towers, described by Pevsner as “the most conspicuous and significant aspect of Victorian architecture in Buckinghamshire”, and above all its contents, notably of fine art.
Much of the estate was sold by the 6th Earl in 1944, but the mansion, its grounds, formal gardens, several farms and the estate village remained to be inherited by Neil Primrose, his second son. He had succeeded as heir apparent with the courtesy title “Lord Primrose” in 1931 on the death at the age of 21 of his elder half-brother Ronald. Much of the National Portrait Gallery’s collection, with others, was stored for safekeeping at Mentmore during the war.
When the 6th Earl died in 1974 and Primrose succeeded to the earldom, the executors began negotiations with Harold Wilson’s Labour government, offering Mentmore and its collection for £3 million in lieu of death duties (now more cosily called “inheritance tax”) to preserve the house and contents for public access, as with other National Trust properties. Three years later, even after Wilson was gone and the notably sunnier James Callaghan had become prime minister, the offer was refused and Mentmore and most of its contents were put up for sale at public auction by Sotheby’s.
The ten-day “sale of the century”, opened at Mentmore by the urbane Sotheby’s chairman, Peter Wilson, began inauspiciously. The public address system failed. To Wilson’s evident perturbation but relief, the new earl mounted the rostrum in the marquee, rummaged among the wiring and used his skills as an electrical engineer to fix the problem in short order. Although the sale was a loss to the public in general, and the house went a year later to the Maharishi International College, it netted £6 million (equivalent to £50 million today). The government’s perceived mishandling of the offer proved to be something of a turning point. The National Heritage Memorial Fund was set up in 1980 as a fund of last resort.
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Neil Archibald Primrose, grandson of Queen Victoria’s last Liberal prime minister, was born in London in 1929 to his father’s second wife, Eva Bruce, daughter of the 2nd Lord Aberdare and former wife of Algernon Strutt, the 3rd Lord Belper. She had divorced him in 1922 on grounds of “desertion and misconduct”, commonly referred to as “ordinary hotel evidence”. His father, the 6th Earl of Rosebery DSO MC, a Grenadier Guards officer who captained Surrey County Cricket Club, served as secretary of state for Scotland in the closing months of Churchill’s wartime coalition government. When Ronald, Neil Primrose’s half-brother by his father’s first marriage to Dorothy Grosvenor, daughter of the first duke of Westminster and renowned beauty, died, rather than take the usual heir apparent’s courtesy title “Lord Dalmeny”, to avoid confusion he took the alternative courtesy title of “Lord Primrose”.
His various half-siblings being all adults, Primrose was in effect an only child. This and his schooling, and the war, all made for singularity in his outlook and interests, not least in his enthusiasm for all things electrical and mechanical, and especially for Meccano, the model metal construction system.
He was first sent to Sandroyd preparatory school in Wiltshire, aged eight, and then when war broke out in 1939, with the help of J Pierpont Morgan Jr, the banker and a family friend, crossed the Atlantic to Millbrook School, which had only recently opened at a farm outside Stanford, New York, and was notable for having its own zoo. Four years his senior at Millbrook was William Buckley Jr, the future conservative writer and public intellectual, who described him as an “uncontrollable brat”. At Millbrook, Primrose acquired a lifelong taste for pizza, Pepsi Cola, American white sandwich bread, and Minnesota Spam, as well as for agriculture generally and all things scientific.
On return to England in 1944, his father sent him to Stowe rather than to Eton, his own and his late son’s old school. Stowe, another relatively new foundation (1923), aimed at being modern, concentrating on the individual, and without the arcanery of fagging and such like.
After Stowe, Primrose did his 18 months of National Service in the Royal Electrical and Mechanical Engineers, yet another recently formed organisation and not one normally attracting the favour of titled officers or other ranks (his death leaves just one earl with REME service). After this, in 1949, he went up to New College, Oxford — “new” this time being something of a misnomer, having been founded in 1379 — to read physics. Here he developed an interest in stage lighting for the Oxford Union Dramatic Society, and after graduating struck out professionally in lighting plays, exhibitions and films, and at Edinburgh, where his parents helped set up the International Festival, including the Fringe. In 1954 he was responsible for lighting the Homage to Diaghilev exhibition at the Edinburgh College of Art, commemorating the Russian arts promoter and ballet impresario, Sergei Diaghilev. Sir Roy Strong, former director of the Victoria and Albert Museum, recalled how, “As a schoolboy in the drab world of the early 1950s, I remember being swept away by the glamour of it all.”
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Having worked for Strand Electrical, the stage, television and film lighting company, Primrose then founded his own lighting companies: On the Spot, and later, in Edinburgh, Northern Light.
In 1961 he emulated his Diaghilev success in the memorial exhibition to Jacob Epstein, at Waverley Market during the Edinburgh Festival, then the 1964 Shakespeare exhibition at Stratford for the 400th anniversary of his birth. In later years he delighted in arranging the lighting and fireworks spectaculars on New Year’s Eve at Dalmeny House on the Firth of Forth — the family had moved back there after selling Mentmore.
In all this he was encouraged, and more, by Alison Mary (Deirdre) Reid, the daughter of a distinguished surgeon and student at the Ruskin School of Art in Oxford, whom he had met at the Oxford Playhouse and married in 1955. Countess Rosebery survives him, along with their four daughters and very latterly a son: Lady Lucy, Lady Jane, Lady Emma and Lady Caroline; and Harry, who reverted to the courtesy title “Lord Dalmeny”, and who succeeds to the earldoms of Rosebery and of Midlothian and several other titles created for his great-grandfather and former earls.
The Roseberys divided their time between a London house in Bayswater, and Dalmeny, the Scottish estates, being the original base of the family. The titles too had been historically of the Scottish peerage, and therefore not entitling the holder to sit by right in the House of Lords, only as a representative elected by his fellow Scots peers, until the creation of a barony in 1828 to allow the fourth earl to sit by right, and Midlothian in 1911. Rosebery sat in the Lords by right of the latter earldom until 1999, when reform introduced representative election of all hereditaries. He did not feel the deprivation keenly. According to Hansard, he made no “contributions”, oral or written, in his 25 years as a titular member.
Instead he became a progressive forester and farmer, planting five million trees, improving the tenantry cottages, rebuilding the sea defences, planting a wind farm and building a biomass heating system. The Rothschilds had always had a scientific bent, if somewhat startling — a cousin, Miriam, was a world-acknowledged expert on fleas and pheromones — and Rosebery delighted in technological answers to hitherto seemingly non-technological problems. Burly and bearded, he was entirely “hands-on”, still adept with a chainsaw in his 80s, and still actively managing the estate in his 90s, meeting his staff every day at 8am, an almost 21st-century re-creation of an 18th-century improving Norfolk gentleman farmer.
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He and the countess opened the ground floor of Dalmeny to the public, displaying furniture, Sèvres porcelain and paintings retained from the Rothschild collection. There had been something of a scare when experts from the National Gallery had visited Mentmore and informed him that they did not consider his Rembrandt to be authentic. Long before the Fake or Fortune? television programme pointed the way to prudence, however, Rosebery calmly asked them to put it in writing, the countess remarking that “experts always change their mind”. When the Rembrandt Commission came to study the picture a decade or so later, they did.
It was as well that another of the Rosebery paintings had not been similarly doubted. When in 2014, their son, Lord Dalmeny, was facing a costly divorce, Rosebery was forced to put one of his family’s most prized possessions under the hammer in London: JMW Turner’s 1835 oil painting, Rome, from Mount Aventine, described as “one of the greatest masterpieces of British art left in private hands”. It had been bought by the 5th Earl of Rosebery for £6,000 in 1878 and had remained in the family since. It sold for £30 million. Rosebery said the decision to sell the “magnificent picture” was “in order to maintain the estates for which we are responsible, and to safeguard their future”. His son dubbed the painting Rome, from Mount Alimony.
The 7th Earl of Rosebery and 3rd Earl of Midlothian, electrical engineer, was born on February 11, 1929. He died on June 30, 2024, aged 95
