The Steeple Times asks author, songwriter and music producer Terry Ronald: “What’s on your mantelpiece?” (more…)
Tag: shooting
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The right decision
It is right that Oscar Pistorius has been convicted of culpable homicide
This morning Oscar Pistorius was convicted of culpable homicide – the South African equivalent of the UK’s manslaughter charge – and one charge relating to a restaurant shooting. That he showed no emotion as he was convicted is telling. (more…)
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A Glorious Roller
Rolls-Royce hunting vehicle for sale for £198,000
Today marks the start of the grouse season and whilst the BBC gave far too much airtime to those who are anti this fine sport, we very much join with those celebrating the Glorious Twelfth. Suitable for someone heading off to the moors is an amazing Rolls-Royce that was built as a hunting vehicle for the King of Morocco in 1980. (more…)
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Confusing a castle
Confused.com founder puts castle on market for £1.5 million less than she spent on it
“Wild haired” Kate Armstrong, the Australian founder of Confused.com, bought the medieval Scottish castle Cassillis House in Ayrshire from the Kennedy clan in 2009 for £3 million. She spent four years and £3.5 million updating and improving it but is now selling it at a loss for just £5 million. (more…)
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Perfectly British
An opportunity to create your own version of Downton Abbey in the Cotswolds
For a mere £27 million you can currently purchase a 6-bedroomed mews house in Reeves Mews in Mayfair. Alternatively, a buyer with the same sum to hand could splash out on something a little grander, a 774.32 acre Cotswold estate complete with a mansion, two entrance lodges and eleven cottages. (more…)
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Lady Lucan (AKA “Fie”, née Anne-Sofie Foghsgaard)
This Danish cracker shoots competitively worldwide and runs a bespoke shooting agency named Fie’s Club. In June 2014, the Financial Times’ ‘How To Spend It’ described Gordonstoun educated Anne-Sofie Lucan as having “an unpronounceable [Danish] surname that “through some linguistic quirk her speech is utterly unaccented”. They went on to add that “she seems to lead her life in a perpetual state of euphoria so much so that even the hardened dysphoric cannot help breaking into a broad smile in her company”. The first ever female to win the City Shooting Championships and fluent in five languages, Lady Lucan also cuts a great body double for Katy Perry at parties. -
From the ashes
One of England’s finest estates comes to the market for £25 to £30 million
The scene of the tragic deaths of the Conservative MP Michael Colvin and his wife Nicola in 2000 in a fire, Tangley House, near Andover in Hampshire subsequently had to be demolished. A new house was constructed on the site in 2005 by a property developer named Harry Marriott and now he’s put it on the market complete with 505 acres of land (more…)
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Rolled by the Queen
A Land Rover formerly owned by the Queen comes to auction
The Queen is a well-known lover of Land Rovers and is often seen driving them on her various estates. Now, with the forthcoming auction of 2002 Defender 110 TDS County that was previously used on her Sandringham estate at the Historics at Brooklands auction on 8th March, any ardent royalist has the opportunity to acquire one of her vehicles. (more…)
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Mary The Elephant (AKA ‘Murderous Mary’)
Considered the “largest living mammal on the planet” at the time and owned by Sparks Circus, Mary was a 5-tonne elephant who could play 25 tunes on the horns without missing a note. When an inexperienced drifter named Red Eldridge was hired to handle her in September 1916 in Kingsport, Tennessee, the elephant grabbed him with her trunk and stomped on his head. Eldridge died and in revenge the townsfolk demanded that the poor elephant be killed. Shooting failed so thus, in front of 2,500 people, Mary was hanged from a railroad derrick. A true indication of how depraved humanity can truly be. -
Marina Oswald Porter (born Marina Nikolayevna Prusakova, Russian: Марина Николаевна Прусакова)
Russian born and the wife of John F. Kennedy’s killer, Oswald Porter met Lee Harvey Oswald when he defected to the Soviet Union in 1961. The couple settled in Dallas, Texas in 1962 and after the murder, she married her neighbour Kenneth Porter in 1965. Helena Bomham Carter played her in the 1993 television film Fatal Deception: Mrs Lee Harvey Oswald and in 2013, on the fiftieth anniversary of the shooting, the understandably reclusive Oswald Porter sold her first husband’s wedding ring for £68,000 at auction. The lot was accompanied by a letter that stated: “This is the only item of Lee’s that has been returned to me, and it took almost 50 years… I’m remarried for many years now, raised my children and have been blessed with grandchildren… At this time of my life I don’t wish to have Lee’s ring in my possession because symbolically, I want to let go of my past that is connecting with Nov. 22, 1963”.