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Lady Dagley rings the changes

Miles Kington
Sunday 06 September 1992 23:02 BST
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LORD DAGLEY, ninth baron, had lived at Dagley Leisure Theme Park all his life, as had the eighth baron before him and the seventh before him, and probably a lot more barons before them, though Lord Dagley was vague about anything before 1900. He was very strong on heritage, but not on history.

Of one thing only was he sure. As long as there had been Dagleys at Dagley Park, so long had there been a leisure theme park there. Down through the generations the mighty estate had passed - with its miniature steam railway, its priceless collection of baboons, the ancestral adventure playground, the old boating lake, the gift shop, the safari circuit - and so it would continue to pass . . . .

'Don't you ever get bored by all this leisure and heritage and theme park stuff, Dumbo?' his wife said to him suddenly one day as they stood, side by side, ready to welcome a coachload of pensioners from Stevenage New Town. (Lord Dagley had been called Dumbo by his family ever since he was eight, and had attempted to pronounce his own title, with that result. It was not an unapt nickname.)

'No,' Lord Dagley said. 'Why should I?'

'Because,' his wife said, 'if you hadn't been born into the leisure business, you wouldn't have considered it as a career.'

While Lord Dagley was puzzling this one out, he stole a look at his wife. Lady Dagley was a fine figure of a woman. In fact, she was now a fine figure of a woman-and-a-half, thanks to all those pre-dinner glasses of wine. Lady Dagley was, in the words of the immortal Gilly Potter, not just a titled lady but a barmaid in her own right.

That is perhaps unfair. She had not been a barmaid so much as a catering manager. Still, she had definitely been pulling a pint in a marquee at a country fair when Dumbo first clapped eyes on her. Not many of us can remember the first words we addressed to our beloved. Dumbo could. They were: 'A pint of wallop, please, sweetie, in a straight glass if you don't mind.'

After marrying Dumbo, Lady Dagley had fitted well into the aristocracy. There is little difference, after all, between being an aristocrat's wife and a superior catering manager. But she had always felt there must be more to being Lady Dagley than supervising the tearooms or making suggestions for the car park extension. There must be something more uplifting . . .

After the old age pensioners had smiled and shaken hands, and some had bowed and scraped, she turned again to Dumbo and said: 'There must be more to life than running a glorified fairground. Couldn't Dagley be more than just a theme park?'

'Such as what?' Lord Dagley said.

'A stately home,' said Lady Dagley. 'Why couldn't we do away with all the sideshows and exhibitions and razzmatazz, and simply have Dagley as what it was meant to be - a dear old stately home.'

'I don't understand,' Lord Dagley said. 'It has always been a leisure theme park.'

'Oh, for heaven's sake, Dumbo. Long before this place was a leisure theme park, it was a real stately home. Surely even you must know that. People lived here. There were no visitors. No sideshows. No charging for admission. There was no one but the family. And pictures. And orangeries and fountains and things. And parties.'

Lord Dagley could hardly imagine it. 'Parties? Like the parties that we throw for the management consultancies at weekends?'

'No, no. Real parties, for people to enjoy themselves at.'

'And what did the family do for a living?'

'Nothing. They had enough money to live on. They just had a good time. And now, after years of running the theme park, we do have enough money to give up all this ridiculous razzmatazz and go back to being gracious and independent . . .'

'But this is terrible]' Lord Dagley said. 'What would happen to all the old family retainers who for so long have maintained the estate? The ones who for generations have run the Heritage Scroll Stall, and the Olde Englyshe Pancake Stalle and the Lakeland Railway?'

(Is Lady Dagley serious? Will Dumbo be forced to be a stately aristocrat and give up the family theme park tradition? Don't miss the next episode])

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