West de Wend Fenton

Family and antecedents Fenton was the son of Major William de Wend Fenton, who in 1941 bought the estate of Ebberston for £5,000. Fenton’s own later account of his antecedents was that he was partly Jewish, partly Polish and partly Dutch:A tribe wended its way from the other side of the Urals into Europe, settled in Poland, then in Germany, and at the end of the 18th century Michael Wend came to England from Holland and put a "de" in front of his name. His son married an heiress, a Miss Fenton. Fenton was educated at a number of schools, including (briefly) Eton.

Desertion from the Foreign Legion As a young man, Fenton, who had served in the Scots Guards and King's Shropshire Light Infantry, was impelled by a romantic disappointment to join the Foreign Legion but soon came to regret his decision. As Nicholas Mosley recounted, Michael Alexander, Lady Marye Rous, and Mosley himself:…set off for Sidi Bel Abbès, in Algeria, a Legion headquarters on the edge of the Sahara. We discovered where West was stationed, and the whereabouts of a cafe legionnaires frequented in the evenings. By this time, the journalists and a camera man, who were following in another car, had decided that my presence ruined the romance of the story, so I came home. Michael and Marye found West in the cafe and agreed a plan. Michael contacted the captain of a Polish boat in Oran, who agreed to take West to Europe for a bribe. Michael picked up West, drove him by night to Oran, and West returned to England, where he lived happily, if eccentrically, ever after, and married the girl who had jilted him.

A full account of the escapade was given in Alexander's book, The Reluctant Legionnaire.

Marriage and later life Having married Margaret Lygon, the woman for whose sake he had joined the Legion and with whom he eventually had four children, Fenton lived for some time in Greece and ran idiosyncratic tours to the Soviet Union before settling permanently at Ebberston. His obituary

Fenton died on 6 July 2002.