Robert Heber-Percy

Robert Vernon Heber-Percy (5 November 1911 – 29 October 1987), known for much of his life as "the Mad Boy", was "an English eccentric in the grand tradition".

Early life Heber-Percy was born in 1911, the fourth and youngest son of Algernon Hugh Heber-Percy (1869–1941), JP, of Hodnet Hall, Shropshire, and Gladys May (d. 1956), MBE, daughter of William Edward Montagu Hulton-Harrop, JP, DL, of Lythwood Hall, near Shrewsbury, Shropshire, and of Bardsley, Lancashire. Algernon Heber-Percy was a lieutenant in the Shropshire Yeomanry, and served as aide-de-camp to the Governor of Queensland, private secretary to the Lieutenant-Governor of British New Guinea, and was Hereditary Seneschal of Montgomery Castle. He was a descendant of Algernon Percy, 1st Earl of Beverley, of the family of the Dukes of Northumberland.

He was raised at Hodnet Hall, He was educated at Stowe School, and commissioned (reaching the rank of lieutenant) into the King's Dragoon Guards in a "brief but hectic" career.

As a sideline, he and a carpenter friend went into business as undertakers; he was particularly fond of the company's annual conferences, as they "invariably provided him with a fund of good stories".

During the Second World War, he was sent as a Secret Service emissary to the Balkans and Arabia.

In 1942, he married an already pregnant Jennifer Fry, only child of Geoffrey Fry. They had a daughter, Victoria, born in 1943. The marriage was dissolved in 1947. Victoria Gala Heber-Percy married the composer and musical inventor Peter Zinovieff, and they had three children, the eldest being the writer Sofka Zinovieff, who inherited the entirety of her grandfather's estate, including Faringdon House.

Death In 1985, he married Dorothy Lygon, the fourth daughter of William Lygon, 7th Earl Beauchamp, whom he had known for over fifty years; this relationship "cheered his later years, when he was lame from a stroke and several brushes with death" but they "parted amicably" a year later. His ashes were scattered around the lake at Faringdon House.