James Robert Bruce Ogulvie was born on 29 February 1964, at Thatched House Lodge on the edge of Richmond Park, a man who would spend his entire life a few dozen places from the British throne and do everything in his power to make sure almost no one knew it. His mother was Princess Alexandra of Kent, granddaughter of King George V and first cousin to Queen Elizabeth II, which placed him, in the plain arithmetic of blood, as a second cousin to the present king. Yet there is no title before his name, and there never has been. He answers to Mister.
He undertakes no royal duties, draws nothing from the public purse, and lives largely in Scotland, running a small subscription magazine about the luxury trade that he founded in 1996, working as a photographer, and keeping as far from the London orbit as his family will allow. The absence of a title was not his own decision. It was made for him a full generation before his birth, by his father, in a single act of refusal in the spring of 1963 that the newspapers of the day found charming and modest. What the newspapers did not know was that the same modesty would harden into something permanent, that a scandal was waiting in his father’s future that would end a career and lay a long shadow across the whole family, and that the boy not yet born would grow up inside that shadow and in the end be grateful for it.
Angus Ogulvie was born on 14 September 1928 in London, the second son of David Ogulvie, the 12th Earl of Airlie, and Lady Alexandra Coke, a daughter of the third Earl of Leicester. In the arithmetic of the British aristocracy, a second son is a man born beside the inheritance rather than into it. The earldom, the seat, the title, all of it was destined for his elder brother. Angus would carry the family’s blood and its manners and its connections and none of its rank.
So he did what able second sons of his class had always done: he was schooled at Eton, went up to Trinity College, Oxford, where he read philosophy, politics and economics, took his degree in 1950, was commissioned for a spell into the Scots Guards, and then went into money. He joined the Drayton Group and became a director there in 1956. At the height of his career he sat on the boards of more than fifty companies at once, a spread of influence across the City that made him, entirely on his own account, a figure of genuine weight in British business. Then, on 24 April 1963, he married a princess.
His bride was Princess Alexandra of Kent, born on Christmas Day 1936, the only living granddaughter of King George V, sixth in line to the throne at her birth, and one of the most genuinely liked members of the royal family. The wedding was held at Westminster Abbey and was not a quiet family affair. It was a national event carried by the new machinery of television to an audience estimated at 200 million people around the world, one of the great royal spectacles of the decade. By every ordinary expectation, a title should have followed.
When a commoner of standing marries a princess, the crown has a long habit of smoothing the difference away with a peerage, lifting the husband to a rank that sits more comfortably beside his wife’s. The queen was ready to make him an earl. All Angus had to do was accept it. Instead, he did something almost no one could remember a man doing before.
He turned it down. It was not a hesitation or a negotiation over which title to take. It was a plain refusal of the whole idea. He would not be made an earl.
He would not take the grand apartment in a royal palace that could have been arranged. He wanted, as nearly as a man married to a princess could manage it, to go on being an ordinary working man with an ordinary working name. The couple instead took a lease on Thatched House Lodge, a handsome but modest house set inside Richmond Park, a property of the crown but a private residence rather than a palace. Here was a family that lived on crown land and yet kept the door shut against the crown’s ceremony.
They were of the family and they were not quite in it. The refusal had one consequence that reached far beyond Angus himself. Because he took no peerage, his children were born with no titles at all. Had he accepted the earldom, the son who arrived the following February would have come into the world as a lord, and the daughter who followed would have been a lady.
Instead, they were born plain. James Ogulvie is a commoner not by his own decision but by his father’s. The choice to be nobody was made before the boy existed, in a quiet word of refusal to a queen, and he inherited it the way other children inherit a house or a name. The press of 1963 treated the refusal as the most attractive kind of humility, and there is every reason to think that reading was honest.
In 1963 the modesty cost him nothing and won him a good deal. By the middle of that decade, Angus Ogulvie stood at a peak a second son of a Scottish earl could scarcely have dreamed of. He had a seat on the boards of more than fifty companies, a wife who was sixth in the line of succession, a wedding watched by 200 million people, a house in a royal park, and a title politely declined. It was the summit of his life, and he did not know it was the summit, because the ground that would give way beneath him was a company he had already joined and a man he was about to bring in to run it.
The company was Lonrho, a name stitched together from the words London and Rhodesia, for it had begun life as the London and Rhodesia Mining and Land Company, a modest colonial concern with interests in the soil and minerals of Southern Africa. Angus took a seat on its board in the early 1960s, around the time he was marrying into the royal family, and for the best part of a decade he sat there as a director, one boardroom among the more than fifty that carried his name. What made it fateful was the man he helped bring in to run it. His name was Roland Walter Rowland, though the whole world came to know him as Tiny.
Rowland was an outsider, a self-made operator of restless ambition and few patient scruples about the settled way of doing things. Under his command Lonrho stopped being a small colonial holding and became an engine of expansion, driving hard across the African continent, buying and building and dealing at a pace that left its rivals standing still. For the directors who had backed him, Angus among them, the decision looked for a run of good years like the cleverest thing any of them had ever done. But an engine that runs that hard runs hot.
In 1965 a white minority government in Rhodesia declared itself free of Britain, and the world answered with sanctions. On 11 November 1965, the government of Ian Smith issued what became known as the Unilateral Declaration of Independence, breaking away from the crown in order to preserve white rule. It was treated in London as an act of open rebellion. Trade with Rhodesia was banned.
Sanctions were imposed and then screwed tighter, first by Britain and then by the United Nations. To trade with Rhodesia, or to help others do so, was to break British and international sanctions, and sanctions busting was among the gravest commercial charges that could be laid against a company in those years. It was defiance of the declared foreign policy of the British state. Now set beside that the one fact that made Lonrho’s exposure so much more dangerous than any ordinary company’s.
On its board, for the best part of a decade, had sat the husband of Princess Alexandra, a granddaughter of a king, a working member of the royal family. A contemporary account of the affair caught the official anxiety exactly. The view taken in the Foreign Office, it was said, was that sanctions busting was all very well for oil companies and banks, but it was not very wise where a member of the royal family was concerned. The danger was never really about whether Angus Ogulvie had personally shipped a cargo or signed a forbidden contract.
Nothing in the record says that he did. It was about proximity, about a name and a face from the innermost royal family being attached in the public mind to a company accused of trading with a regime the whole nation had been instructed to shun. For a man who had refused an earldom precisely in order to keep his life plain and his name his own, it was the worst entanglement imaginable. By 1973 the men who ran Lonrho had turned on one another, and the fight spilled out of the boardroom and into open court.
A faction among the directors moved to remove Rowland, and Rowland fought back with everything he had. A boardroom quarrel kept behind closed doors harms no reputation, but a boardroom quarrel dragged into a court of law is conducted in public on the record, with the press in the gallery and every buried arrangement liable to be read aloud for the newspapers to print in the morning. What the daylight showed was not pretty. It emerged that Rowland had been the beneficiary of a scheme of benefits set up for him through agreements signed and sealed far from London in the discrete privacy of the Bahamas, out of reach of the eyes in Britain that might have asked awkward questions.
For Angus Ogulvie, sitting on that board through the very years these arrangements were being made, the exposure was calamitous. He was a director of the company whose secret workings were now the daily talk of the City. The careful separation he had built between his private, plain, self-chosen life and the roar of public affairs was collapsing, and it was collapsing in the most visible way imaginable. He had refused a title in order to keep his name clean of borrowed grandeur.
Now that same name was chained to the ugliest company story of the decade. On 15 May 1973, the prime minister rose in the House of Commons and gave the whole affair a name that stuck to it forever. Edward Heath, a conservative leading a conservative government, might have been expected to throw some shelter over a great British company. Instead he did the opposite, in the plainest words he could find.
This, he told the House, was the unpleasant and unacceptable face of capitalism. In a single line, Heath had lifted the Lonrho affair out of the business pages and set it down in the very center of national life. Two days after the prime minister spoke, on 17 May 1973, Angus Ogulvie resigned from the board of Lonrho. It was the act of a man trying to put distance between himself and a fire that was plainly out of control.
But a resignation in the middle of a public scandal is a double-edged thing. He had sat on that board for the best part of a decade, and no letter of resignation, however promptly written, could reach back through time and unsit him from the chair he had occupied. The charge that would eventually be laid against him was never that he schemed and never that he stole. It was that he had sat there, that he had held a director’s chair with a director’s duties through years in which things were done at that company that a diligent director ought to have questioned and did not.
The government did not let the matter drop with a resignation. It sent inspectors from the Department of Trade into the company’s accounts, men armed with the authority to open every ledger and read every agreement, and somewhere at the end of their work lay a report, and the report would name names. The uncertainty stretched out across the middle of the 1970s, an open question hanging over his name and through him over the family he had married into. He could not intervene in a government inquiry, and the palace would not have dared to try.
All he could do was wait. On 7 July 1976, the report landed, and one word in it did the damage that no denial could undo. His conduct as a director, the inspectors found, had been negligent, and not merely negligent, but negligent to an extent that merited severe censure. Those were the words.
Not fraud, not theft, not conspiracy. Negligence meriting severe censure. The inspectors did not find that Angus Ogulvie had personally broken sanctions, and the report carried no finding of personal dishonesty against him at all. What it found was that he had failed in his duty as a director, that he had not exercised the care and oversight that his position demanded, in particular over payments and arrangements that a diligent director ought to have known of and questioned and disclosed and had not.
It was a failure of attention, not a crime of intent. But the word censure, once it is written into a government report beside a man’s name, does not trouble itself with such fine distinctions in the mind of the public. To be severely censured by inspectors of the crown is to be branded. For the husband of a princess, for a man whose name sat one marriage away from the throne, it was catastrophic.
Angus contested a great many of the inspectors’ conclusions. But an argument against a published government report is a fight conducted after the verdict is already in every newspaper, and no amount of contesting the findings could unprint the word that had already gone round the world. A man is welcome on fifty boards because his presence reassures. A man who has been severely censured by government inspectors reassures no one.
Within days of the report, Angus offered up the directorships one after another, sixteen of them at once, in a single sweeping act of withdrawal from the world that had made him and had now un-made him. Some of the companies refused the offer, unwilling to lose him or unwilling to treat him as the report had treated him. But the meaning of the gesture did not depend on whether every resignation was accepted. He was withdrawing from the City, accepting in the most concrete way available to him that the working life was finished.
He had been a confident and capable man at the center of things. He became a diminished one, his confidence broken, the affair sitting on him like a weight he could not set down. In 1978, the Director of Public Prosecutions confirmed that there would be no criminal proceedings arising from the Lonrho affair as it touched Angus Ogulvie. In the plainest legal terms, he was cleared.
But a clearance of that kind could not reach the wound that had actually been made. Nobody had said Angus Ogulvie was a criminal. The inspectors had said he was negligent, and no decision not to prosecute could unsay that, because negligence of that kind is not a crime to be tried and acquitted. It is a failing to be judged, and it had already been judged in public two years before.
The law cleared him of the thing he had never been accused of. The thing he had been accused of stood exactly where it was. A man who could not undo one report spent the rest of his life building something the report could never touch. Angus turned his energy in a wholly different direction, away from boardrooms and balance sheets, and towards causes that asked nothing of a man’s commercial reputation and a great deal of his time and heart.
He gave himself to charitable work, in particular to the cause of young people trying to make their own start in the world, the very thing he had once done himself as a second son making his own way. He lent his effort to conservation and to the care of the natural world. In 1988 he was made a Knight Commander of the Royal Victorian Order, becoming Sir Angus Ogulvie, an honor in the personal gift of the Queen that recognized precisely the service he had given rather than any rank he held. Later still, in the middle of the 1990s, he was admitted to the Privy Council.
And yet it would be too neat to say that the honors undid the censure, because they did not. He had rebuilt. He had not been made whole. James Ogulvie grew up entirely inside the weather of his father’s disgrace, in a home where one parent went out to the applause of the country and the other stayed back under a cloud that the country had put there.
He was a child of nine when the prime minister named the affair in the Commons, a boy of twelve when the report brought down its censure, a young man of fourteen when the Director of Public Prosecutions declared there would be no charge. Whatever a childhood like that teaches a watchful boy about titles and public life and the price of standing in the light, James was learning it year by year from the inside. He went to Eton, as his father had done, then north to the University of St Andrews to read the history of art, then took a business degree at Cranfield. He spent time in the City with the stockbroking firm of Barclays de Zoete Wedd and with a shipping agency in Edinburgh, learning trades and acquiring skills.
Then in 1996 he founded Luxury Briefing, a subscription magazine covering the luxury goods trade, and became its publisher and its editor. Alongside it he built a working life as a photographer, and he settled largely in Scotland, well away from the London orbit. On 30 July 1988 he married Julia Rollinson at the parish church in Saffron Walden in Essex, a proper wedding but not a state occasion. The couple had two children, a daughter Flora born in 1994 and a son Alexander born in 1996, and James raised them as he had been raised, without titles and without royal duties.
The throne might technically have made available to a man fifty-ninth in its line a great deal. He asked none of it for himself and none of it for his children. When Angus Ogulvie died at the end of 2004, he left his son a strange inheritance, not a title, but the absence of one. He had been diagnosed with cancer, and after months of illness he died on 26 December 2004 at Kingston Hospital, aged seventy-six, and was laid to rest in the royal burial ground at Frogmore in the new year.
He and Alexandra had been married for forty-one years, the whole span from the abbey to the hospital, from the wedding watched by 200 million people to the quiet passing of an old man who had spent his last decades making up in good works for a word he could never erase. And this is where the strange inheritance comes clear. Angus Ogulvie had wanted more than anything to be an ordinary man judged on his own merits, and the wanting of it had cost him terribly because the world would not let a princess’s husband be ordinary and had broken him for the attempt. But the very refusal that started it all, the title handed back in 1963, meant that his children were born free of the machine that had ground him down.
James inherited no title, and so he inherited no duty, and so he inherited no cage. The thing his father had reached for and been punished for reaching for, an ordinary life, his father was able by that one early refusal to simply give to his son. James Ogulvie is nobody in the royal sense because his father wished so hard to be nobody and was not allowed to be and paid for the wish and passed on to his son the very thing he himself had been denied. The son is living the life the father wanted.
He is living it because the father fell. And the secret that joins the two of them is simply this, that the price one generation pays in the glare can buy the next its whole life in the shade.