Wanted: U.S. heir for English country estate

Wanted: U.S. heir for English country estate

NORTH NEWTON, England -- Wanted: Heir for $13 million estate, including 13th-century manor house, in bucolic Somerset. Must be able to pay $140,000 annual upkeep and meet incidental costs of, for example, repairing the driveway ($70,000) and fixing the stables ($1 million).

Also, "he can't be a drug addict," said Sir Benjamin Slade, the owner of the estate and its manor, Maunsel House, which has been in the family since 1772.

"He can't be a communist. It's politically incorrect to say so, but he can't be gay, because he may not produce any children."

The problem, said Sir Benjamin, who is 59 and childless himself, is that none of his army of relatives is willing to take on the property when he dies. So he is searching for an heir in America, where some Slades settled in the 18th century.

"Americans have more energy and a better work ethic," he said, sipping tea in his sumptuous library. ("There are no bookcases, because my family was illiterate," he said.) Paintings of ancestors plastered the walls; a fire roared in the hearth; a leak dripped steadily from the ceiling.

Running even a comparatively small estate requires not only money and energy, but also the putting aside of one's natural distaste at allowing strangers to traipse through one's house. Sir Benjamin rents out Maunsel House for weddings, conferences and house parties. Most of the bedrooms are reserved for paying guests; he and his companion, Kirsten Hughes, live in the back.

Other aristocrats operate cafes, shops, garden paraphernalia centers, theme parks and wildlife sanctuaries on their estates, or simply charge the public to look around.

"The old money has always got some business on the side," Sir Benjamin said.

But even the best-run estates are finding it harder to compete with the siren calls on Britons' leisure time. Some of Sir Benjamin's friends, he said, are down to only 50,000 visitors a year, from more than 100,000 in better times. Also, things fall apart. The beautiful Victorian wallpaper in one bedroom at Maunsel House is torn and stained. The stair carpet is frayed.

"This window unfortunately fell out onto the lawn," Sir Benjamin said, gesturing into a bathroom.

Many huge old houses in Britain are run by the National Trust, which takes over properties and opens them to the public, letting the former owners remain rent-free. But Sir Benjamin practically burst a button on his natty green tweed jacket when the subject came up.

"They are absolutely the most awful people," he said.

He told a cautionary tale about a friend who donated his castle to the National Trust, only to be banished to a drafty upstairs apartment.

Sir Benjamin has a ready store of scandalous stories about his ancestors, to whom he refers in the first-person plural. Many of his tales have to do with the Slade habit of losing money in inheritance-related disputes. The hardest fought of these, perhaps, was between a set of male Slade twins in the 19th century, only one of whom could be the heir.

"The problem was that no one knew who popped out first," Sir Benjamin said. The ensuing suit -- Slade v. Slade -- cost a fortune in legal fees, adding to the family's woes.

Sir Benjamin, who has a head of snowy hair and a prosperous-looking, ruddy complexion, was not supposed to inherit the baronetcy or Maunsel House, which belonged to his uncle. But the uncle died, childless, when Sir Benjamin was a teenager -- along with, in the space of four years, Sir Benjamin's father, mother and older brother -- leaving him as the sole heir. When he took possession of Maunsel House, it was a ruin, his surviving aunt confined to just two rooms.

"She lived on Mars bars and Milky Ways," he said. "She drank for Somerset. She had about 18 different driving offenses -- hit and run, driving over a policeman's foot. When she died, she left 22.50 pounds, and she didn't leave it to me." Once, Sir Benjamin said, the aunt set the house on fire, hoping to collect insurance, only to have the fire fizzle out because of the pervasive dampness.

Annoyingly, not one of Sir Benjamin's vast array of British relatives seems eager to inherit. His nephew, Lord Rotherwick, is Sir Benjamin's legal heir, but he already has a grand house, Sir Benjamin said; he would probably sell off Maunsel House.

Other relatives have been ruled out as too uninterested in their roots. "If you ask any of them, 'Who was your grandmother?' 'What did Sir John Slade do in the Peninsular War?' they have no idea."

Sir Benjamin feels it is too late to produce a suitable heir of his own.

He got the idea for the heir hunt when an American television company, researching a program about Britons' American relatives, got in touch.

"So I said, 'While you're in America, could you find me an heir?' " Sir Benjamin recalled. So far, he said, the company has come up with thousands of American Slades ("I don't know where they got them -- Google, I suppose") prompting sacks full of letters from people who think they are his relatives.

The idea is to winnow the field to a handful of viable prospective heirs, with methods including DNA tests. "I think we should dig up one of those Slades down in Devon," Sir Benjamin said, referring to his dead ancestors. "You just dig up a bone and away you go."

The television company is now hoping to turn the search into an "Apprentice"-style reality program, in which potential heirs would live at Maunsel House and undergo a series of challenges, with Sir Benjamin eliminating them one by one.

He is looking forward to ejecting the losers with his own aristocratic catchphrase: "You're disinherited."