‘Gloriously’ eccentric Longleat Safari Park owner Lord Bath dies from coronavirus
The 7th Marques of Bath and famously eccentric Longleat Safari Park owner has died after testing positive for coronavirus. Alexander Thynn, 87, died at the Royal United Hospital in Bath yesterday. He had been admitted on March 28. The Viscount of Weymouth was a common figure on television and known for his flamboyant sense of style, as well as his numerous ‘wifelets’ who he had living in cottages around his vast Wiltshire estate. Longleat Safari Park said in a statement: ‘It is with the deepest sadness we have to announce Lord Bath has died at the age of 87.
Lord Bath – then Viscount Weymouth – was educated at Eton and Oxford, where he was president of the famous Bullingdon Club. He married Emma Gael in 1969 and had two children, but in a 2010 Guardian interview he also acknowledged that he had ‘an eight-year-old but I don’t see enough of her’. According to several reports, he had decorated walls in his house with erotic murals and had affairs with as many as 70 women, many of whom where given accommodation on the lands of Longleat in Warminster.
Lord Bath was involved in politics, and stood in the very first European parliamentary elections in 1979, representing the Wessex Regionalist Party which he helped to found. After inheriting the Marquess seat in 1992, he then sat as a Liberal Democrat in the House of Lords but lost his seat when Labour reforms excluded most hereditary peers. Thynn had been a keen painter and had studied art in Paris in his youth. His son, Ceawllin Thynn, who also holds the title of Viscount Weymouth, took over the management of the estate and the safari park in 2010 and had planned to evict many of those living on the grounds, as well as remove many of the erotic pictures depicting scenes from the Kama Sutra that adorned the countryside manor. This lead to Lord Bath boycotting his son’s wedding to the model and socialite Emma McQuiston, MailOnline reports.
