The Times - UK (2020-10-14)

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Guinness supported nuclear power


Although Sir John Guinness’s favourite


reading was the Rev David Knowles’s


four-volume history of England’s mo-


nastic and religious orders, his personal


ambition was to write a guide to fish and


chip shops from London to Norfolk.


He and his wife, Valerie, lived at Wol-


terton Manor House, an unheated,


16th-century mini-Hampton Court


near Fakenham, ten miles from the


north coast of East Anglia. Icicles used


to hang from the bedroom ceiling, and


a visitor reported that the table silver


was coated in coal dust.


Yet he became one of Britain’s fore-


most art experts and, as a senior civil


servant, was an early proponent of nu-


clear power. He said he was happy to eat


mussels caught off the Cumbrian coast,


near the Sellafield reactor, and in 2000


he proposed buying weapons-grade


plutonium from former Soviet coun-


tries and converting it into fuel. “The


radiation per annum from Sellafield is


the same as a passenger receives during


a return flight to Tenerife,” said Guin-


ness, a part of the banking rather than


brewing side of the Irish dynasty. His


directness earned him high ratings


from Margaret Thatcher, and he


basked in his peers’ description of him


as “the archetypal mandarin”, not


necessarily a compliment.


“He had a mind like a chess player,”


ing egos in the companies and the
banks, and an obsessive business and
industrial press. His position was
always precarious because of his devo-
tion to nuclear power. When the energy
department was subsumed into the
trade department in 1992, he quit
Whitehall to chair the privatised British
Nuclear Fuels Limited (BNFL).
Guinness pinned his reputation on
the thermal oxide reprocessing plant
(Thorp) at Sellafield. He predicted it
would make a profit of £1.8 billion in its
first decade, but it worked at only half
capacity and instead lost £1 billion.
Guinness resigned in 1999.
By then he was involved in art. In
1995 he chaired the reviewing commit-
tee on the export of works of art, and a
decade later he chaired the expert pan-
els of the Heritage Lottery Fund and
National Heritage Memorial Fund. He
bemoaned a lack of government money
to prevent important art leaving Brit-
ain, arguing that “we must press the
Treasury hard”.
John Ralph Sidney Guinness was
born in 1935, the younger son of Cap-
tain Edward Guinness, a partner in the
Guinness Mahon bank, and his first
wife, Martha Letière (née Sheldon).
John was educated at Rugby and Trini-
ty Hall, Cambridge, then learnt Russian
on National Service with the RAF.

As a prelude to a career with
Guinness Mahon he began in the City
in 1960 with Union Discount, because
its business was to cash bank IOUs at a
discount. Before long he landed a job
with the Foreign Office aid desk.
Guinness was twice seconded to the
Central Policy Review Staff, first from
1972 to 1975 under Lord Rothschild,
whom he worshipped. On his fourth
day there, Rothschild said: “I’m having
an argument with the prime minister
about how one buys a nuclear reactor.
I’ve fixed you up to see some people at
the CEGB: there’s no hurry, I don’t need
the answer until 8pm.”

In 1967 Guinness married Valerie
North, a descendant of Lord North, the
prime minister who was widely blamed
for Britain’s defeat in the American War
of Independence. They had met when
he was part of the British delegation to
the UN in New York. She worked in art
publishing and became a nursery
school teacher. One of her pupils was
James Jagger, son of Sir Mick Jagger
and Jerry Hall. Valerie died of a brain
haemorrhage in 2014. They had three
children: Lucy, Rupert and Peter, who
died aged four in a car crash in 1978.
He and Valerie shared an enthusiasm
for vintage cars. In 1977 he bought and
restored a 1900 Clément-Panhard
4½hp two-seater voiture légère, regis-
tration AH 48. They drove it in several
London to Brighton rallies before sell-
ing it in 2008 for £78,500.
His favourite film was Kind Hearts
and Coronets. “Sir Alec Guinness is the
most distinguished person with the
name of Guinness,” he said. “I only wish
I could prove we were cousins.”

Sir John Guinness, civil servant and art
connoisseur, was born on December 23,


  1. He died after a long illness on July
    27, 2020, aged 84


said an electricity firm’s chief executive.
“Completely unreadable.” That did not
save Guinness from being excoriated
by a House of Commons energy select
committee report in 1990. As the senior
Department of Energy official, he tried
to excuse a lack of nuclear energy
costings by claiming that they were
requested only when the question of
privatising nuclear power arose.
“We doubt whether a more bizarre
justification for governmental miscal-
culation has ever been laid before a
select committee,” noted the report.
Electricity privatisation was Guin-

ness’s main legacy. Thatcher was deter-
mined that, unlike gas and telecommu-
nications, the electricity and water in-
dustries should be broken up so that
they could compete with one another
for resources, if not customers. The
Central Electricity Generating Board
(CEGB) was split into National Grid,
National Power and PowerGen.
Drawing on family contacts in the City,
Guinness guided the process through
successive secretaries of state, compet-

He said he was happy to


eat mussels caught near


the Sellafield reactor


Sir John Guinness


Mandarin admired by Margaret Thatcher for his views on privatisation and connoisseur not only of art but also fish and chips


Cherrie Hatton Hall learnt in 1962 that


she would be giving riding lessons to


Princess Anne, who was a pupil at


Benenden School in Kent. “I was called


to see Miss Clarke, the head mistress,”


she recalled. “She said that the police


officer on guard would come down each


time Princess Anne came to ride and


that we may have problems with the


press and so on, and she said, ‘Whatever


you do, don’t drop her because she’s got


brittle bones’.”


The first royal lesson coincided with


a church fête, an event in which Hatton


Hall’s Moat riding school was involved.


“Princess Anne came to help,” Hatton


Hall wrote. “Our bus got stuck in the


ditch going into the field and of course


she was the first one out to push it out.”


The princess was a conscientious stu-


dent, but Hatton Hall recalled that the


future Olympic equestrian had much to


learn. “Before, I think she had just got


on and ridden at home with her groom,


not being told how to ride, and this was


a different sort of schooling.” On


another occasion, Hatton Hall had to


emphasise that “halt means halt”, even


to a princess. Anne’s request to wear


spurs while riding because “uncle


Dickie [Mountbatten] says I should”


was firmly discouraged.


Virginia Leng, who became the world


eventing champion and winner of four


Olympic medals, was another pupil.


Riding and royalty were Hatton


Hall’s world. A scion of Anglo-Irish


aristocracy, she had been presented at


Court in 1948, married an army officer


and taught riding to the international


social elite. Yet when widowed at 42 she


exchanged her jodhpurs for a


Franciscan habit, embracing a life of


poverty, chastity and obedience. The


Franciscans are an order that


maintains a working life and Hatton


Hall became an instructing judge on a


diocesan marriage tribunal. Then, at


the suggestion of an imaginative super-


ior, she took up the reins once more,


this time at the Riding for the Disabled


Association (RDA) centre in Cranleigh.


Between judging top-flight dressage


the three-day event team at the
Olympic Games in Stockholm, but fell
lame and did not compete.
Eventually there were tensions with
her father and the Hatton Halls left to
set up their own establishment, Moat
riding school, just down the road. An
accommodation was reached where
Benenden Riding Establishment
trained adults and the Moat took child-
ren. Thus it was that Princess Anne
became a pupil. Increasingly Hatton
Hall was becoming known in the wider
horse world and in 1961 she was made a
fellow of the British Horse Society, a
rare accolade. Her husband, an alcohol-
ic, died in 1972.
The stress of running a business, the
trauma of being estranged from her
parents and the misery of being a young
widow were too much and in 1974 she

entered the novitiate. Later she told
how “having been in charge of a busi-
ness for 20 odd years and married”, the
change of pace came as a shock. There
were no books in her cell, she had the
bare minimum of clothing and her life
was one of obedience. In time she was
able to return to examining for the
British Horse Society, doing so for 20
years clad in her nun’s habit.
During a year at Beda College in
Rome she was not permitted to drive.
She studied pastoral theology and
canon law and, having made her final
profession in 1981, became an “office
boy” for the diocesan tribunal office at
Archbishop’s House in Southwark, re-
calling that the archbishop was very
kind “because I was off for quite a num-
ber of days, either to meetings or run-
ning round after people or horses”.
In 1971 Princess Anne was appointed
patron of the RDA, becoming president
in 1985. She oversaw a presentation to
Hatton Hall in 2001 in which the “gal-

loping nun” was named life vice-presi-
dent of the RDA.
Hatton Hall’s memoir, The Galloping
Nun, was published in 2013, while her
“fire and brimstone” lectures earned
her the nickname among her nephews
of “the Penguin”, after the austere Sister
Mary Stigmata in the film The Blues
Brothers (1980). One of them said that
when she was with horses, it was as if
she had a magic wand: “She could
identify a problem down to one little
muscle, and then through patient exer-
cise the problem would melt away.
Cherrie spoke the language of equus
fluently.”

Sister Cherrie Hatton Hall, nun and
riding instructor, was born on August 15,


  1. She died on September 23, 2020,
    aged 90


She appeared on T-shirts


on a black horse and her


veil flying in the wind


Sister Cherrie Hatton Hall


Equestrian judge who taught Princess Anne to ride and was nicknamed the ‘galloping nun’ after swapping jodhpurs for a habit


Hatton Hall was said to have a magic touch with horses


competitions she travelled the world,
teaching riding instructors how to
bring self-respect and joy to mentally
and physically disabled adults and
children. In Singapore she appeared on
posters and T-shirts riding a black
horse with her white veil flying in the
wind, leading to her being known as
“the galloping nun”.
Charity Mary Kendall was born in
Southsea, Hampshire, in 1930, the
daughter of Charles Kendall, an officer
in the Royal Artillery, and his wife, Cara
(née Pelly), who was from Ireland. She
had a younger brother, John, and two
much younger sisters, Juliet and Alex.
They were largely raised by Coco, a
friend who lived with the family. They
moved to Alton, in Hampshire, where
the children had their first pony, Tom
Thumb, and then South Kensington,
where Cherrie’s earliest schooling was
at the Convent of the Assumption in
Kensington Square. On the eve of war
her father bought Great Nineveh, a
100-acre farm in Benen-
den, Kent.
In 1946 Cherrie was sent
to stay with a Swiss family
in Lausanne. There she
learnt to ski, took riding
lessons and played ping-
pong with American sol-
diers. By then her Catholic
faith was important. “Since
those days, I have always
got up very early in the
morning and used that time
for prayer,” she wrote.
She spent time riding in
Ireland and back in Britain
created the Benenden Rid-
ing Establishment with her
father at Great Nineveh.
Life became a whirl of cross-country,
showjumping and dressage. She
watched the equestrian events at the
1948 London Olympics, rode at Bad-
minton in 1953, hunted near Baghdad
with the Royal Harithea, and enjoyed
an extended stay on an uncle’s ranch in
Washington state.
In 1951 she met Nigel Hatton Hall

when he helped to
push her car out
of the mud after
Mass one Sunday.
He was aide-de-
campe to General
Sir Alec Bishop, a
postwar regional
commissioner
for North Rhine-
Westphalia. “The
story goes that I
put my hand out of the window with
sixpence to give him and said ‘Thank
you, my good man’,” she wrote.
They were married at Brompton Or-
atory in 1955 and were both involved in
Benenden Riding Establishment,
which drew wealthy clients from
around Europe. The following year her
horse Bright Prospect was selected for

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