“We Need Never Be Worried about Money Again”
On 26 January 1921 two trains collided in Wales on a length of single track between Welshpool and Newtown. Among the victims was a fifty-one-year old railway director, Lord Herbert Vane-Tempest, the current beneficiary of the Garron Tower estate and first cousin of the late Lord Randolph Churchill. Since Lord Herbert remained unmarried and heirless, his grandmother’s will ordained that the whole estate should jump across to the eldest surviving Churchill male: Winston.
Lord Herbert’s grandmother, and Winston Churchill’s great-grandmother, was Frances Vane, the Marchioness of Londonderry. Her husband, the third Marquess, was an Anglo-Irish aristocrat who had served in the Napoleonic Wars and the suppression of the 1798 Irish Rebellion. From each of her parents, Frances had inherited property in County Antrim. In 1850, at a cost of £4,000, she built a summer residence north of Carnlough, which she named Garron Tower.
To prevent her estate from being broken up, the marchioness’s will established a strict order of precedence to the estate among her heirs. Since her eldest son had already inherited the Londonderry fortune and his eldest son would in turn do likewise, the marchioness left her own estate to her younger grandchildren: first, her eldest son’s second son Lord Herbert Vane-Tempest and his heirs; failing whom, her eldest son’s third son Lord Henry Vane-Tempest and his heirs; failing whom, Lord Randolph Churchill and his heirs, because he was the son of her daughter, another Frances, who had married the seventh Duke of Marlborough.
All very complicated, and the chances of Lord Randolph or his heirs ever succeeding appeared at first
