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Picture maker Andy and I are sitting in a bright, shiny new Bentley
in ultimate luxury being driven through glorious Devon countryside
en route for Exeter’s St David’s railway station. Let me tell you
why.
We had been invited by Peter de Savary – whose Bentley it is – to
view his latest venture Bovey Castle, situated some 19 miles from
Exeter abutting the grandeur of Dartmoor National Park.
Aside from a little local breakdown in communications which saw Andy
at one entrance to Woking Station and me at the other, South West
Trains gave us a trouble-free ride and we arrived smack on time at
St David’s, to be met by Stuart Wells. Stuart is employed at Bovey
Castle as Teaching Golf Pro. but, since the 18-hole golf course was
being extensively reworked and not scheduled to open for another
week or so, he kindly filled in as chauffeur.
Bovey Castle – the word ‘castle’ is a misnomer: it is actually a
large country house – dates from the early years of the last
century. 1906, to be precise. It was built by Viscount Hambledon,
the son of W.H. Smith whose legacy we all know from the many High
Street shops which bear his name. W.H. Smith himself was also First
Sea Lord of the Admiralty – not a lot of people know that.
Mr Smith spared no expense in creating a true ‘gentleman’s seat’.
The fine stonework on the exterior is equalled by the many
oak-panelled withdrawing rooms, large open fireplaces, broad
stairways, and magnificent Great Hall, all of which have been
restored to their true 1920s opulence.
The centrepiece is the splendid Cathedral Room. At some stage in its
life the height of the room had persuaded the then-owners to put in
an extra floor, thus making two rooms, one above the other. This
floor has now been removed and the room returned to its former
glory, showing off the main feature, a beautifully crafted 30-foot
high stone fireplace, to its true effect, and also revealing a fine
minstrel’s gallery.
I was given a complete tour of the hotel, which interweaves the
1920s theme throughout, with many contemporary posters discreetly
hung. This theme is encapsulated in the main dining room, designed
in the style of an original art deco Palm Court, with beautiful
hand-painted chinoiserie wall coverings.
My eyes were inevitably drawn to occasional glances through the
windows, which gave me superb views of the beautiful, sunlit Devon
country. The lure of the great outdoors was too strong to ignore and
I wangled a quick tour in one of the golf buggies, driven by
ex-Guards officer Freddie Cartright. (Needless to say, that was the
only time in the whole day that it rained. Well, I did say it was a
hard and trying life!) Freddie has the task of making sure that
everything, apart from the hotel itself, works. When you consider
that this includes the golf course – and a new clubhouse now being
built – 11 miles of salmon and trout river fishing, a trout lake, an
equestrian centre providing lessons and trekking, clay pigeon
shooting, falconry, tennis courts, archery – the list goes on and on
– you will realise that Freddie has his hands full.
The driving force behind it all, of course, is Peter de Savary –
“Everybody calls me PDS,” he told me. “I don’t really like the name
Peter.”
Happily married to Lana, from Charleston in America’s South
Carolina, PDS has five daughters, two being from his first marriage
– Lisa, who has provided him with his first grandchildren; Nicola,
who is a doctor; Tara, 17 and at boarding school; Amber, 16, who is
an up-and-coming dressage rider who has already represented her
country, and Savanna.
Comfortably seated with him in a small, oak panelled study, I wanted
to know something of his early days, trying to find out what makes a
really successful man.
“I was born on a farm in Essex in 1944, during an air-raid,” he told
me. (Remember that the Second World War didn’t end until 1945.)
PDS’s father was a farmer, occupying land in the quaintly-named
Dengie Manor, part of the historic Dengie Hundred. His parents split
up when he was about a year old, his mother eventually remarrying a
man who worked for Shell Oil. A move abroad by his step-father – who
is still very much alive today – took the family to the jungles of
Venezuela in South America to explore for oil.
“We went by boat from Liverpool to Halifax, Nova Scotia. Then train
to New York and banana boat to Venezuela, then the journey into the
jungle,” PDS reminisced. “But I was sent back to boarding school in
England when I was nine. I left there, with one Scripture ‘O’ level,
on my seventeenth birthday.”
PDS then went out into the world to seek his fortune, as they say,
in Canada, working free-lance as a gardener and landscaper.
“Thinking about it now,” he told me, “that’s probably what gave me
my love of landscaping, which I still have to this day.”
In fact PDS – who does not play golf, although he has every
intention of learning when time permits – has built in total seven
golf courses if we include Bovey Castle. It is true to say that his
current enterprise has been in existence since 1920, but the work
presently nearing completion is fairly extensive. “Of all the
courses I have been involved with I love this one the most – it has
such character,” he told me. “It has three distinct elements.
Firstly there are the holes played near the house with the views of
the formal gardens and the lake. Then there is the wild moorland,
and finally the ones played by the riverside.”
PDS is very much a hands-on operator. Upon his return from Canada he
took a job managing a saw mill on Exmoor and is, I am sure, quite
capable of undertaking pretty well any of the myriad artisan tasks
at Bovey Castle should the need arise. Indeed, he told me, some
large troughs had to be moved the other day and there was nobody
about to do the moving, using a forklift truck. Up jumped Mr de
Savary and expertly completed the job.
I was still interested to know what it was that enabled PDS to take
the huge leap from being a jobbing gardener to reaching the heights
he has achieved today. “The key, I suppose, was the desire and
ambition to be creative, and to be able to make my own decisions.
This urge, when I was around 25 years old, made me take the plunge
into persuading investors to back the ideas I had. I worked all the
hours there were, and I was lucky.”
“I have been involved in the import/export business for years,” he
went on. “I shipped wheat, flour, cement, steel, and so on. At one
stage I owned 13 shipyards around the world. I became interested in
real estate – although I do not see myself as a developer – but I do
love to take ugly or run down sites and create something to be proud
of out of them.”
A measure of PDS’s determination and attention to detail came out in
our conversation. His first hotel project, in 1976, was the 5-star
Luxury Resort Hotel just outside Cairo, in Egypt. “I remember,” he
said, “showing the housekeepers how to clean the loos to the
standard I wanted. I just got down on my knees and did it, and they
respected me for doing it. You can only talk with confidence and
authority once you have actually done a job.”
Nowadays, PDS enjoys spending a great deal of his time seeking,
throughout the world, suitable sites for creating something unique
and memorable. This quest has already been fulfilled in such
locations as Carnegie Abbey on Rhode Island, Skibo Castle in the
Highlands of Scotland, the Cherokee Plantation in South Carolina,
and The Abaco Club on Winding Bay, Abaco, in the Bahamas. Wherever
possible, he likes to recapture and recreate a location which has a
natural beauty, not to redevelop into something which bears no
relation to what existed before.
Bovey Castle is just such a project. When first erected by the
Viscount, Bovey had every luxury possible in those early days of the
twentieth century. Sadly, over the years – the Castle was owned,
prior to purchase by PDS, by British Transport Hotels and had
suffered from a severe lack of investment – the cracks began to
show, literally.
Today, it is almost bursting with pride and excitement to see what
the future holds.
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