IT WAS FRIDAY MARCH 17, and the Portuguese mountain rain had been falling from the heavens all morning on our 60-mile walking pilgrimage to Fátima when my phone pinged. We were in the Valeda Mata, still three days’ march from the shrine, on a barren goat track miles away from any village, let alone a cafe or bar. “Gus left early this morning,” said the message from his wife Maria. “He is no longer in pain and is enjoying soufflé suissesse up above.”
Fittingly, it was St Patrick’s Day. I had seen my old friend, and best man at my wedding in 2014, just a few days before at London Bridge Hospital, before setting off on my Fátima Camino which I had dedicated to our Lady of Fatima to cure his laryngeal cancer. Alas, Gus died two days before I arrived. Instead of throwing a wax replica of his lungs into the furnace-like pyre where pilgrims pray at the shrine, I sellotaped a photo of my friend to a large wax candle and prayed for his newly anointed soul.
Last September Gus had been given the all-clear and was looking forward to a new chapter of his life. But after a bout of pneumonia the cancer returned, and there was little the doctors could do. He was stoical and full of life and jokes to the end. He died aged just 57, leaving a large army of friends and family (Maria is Spanish) who will be paying their respects to a deeply loved man at his memorial service at the Brompton Oratory on September 20.
But whilst the Turf Club (where the reception will be hosted) is where Gus could regularly be found enjoying a long lunch, the news that Gus’s funeral day included a Catholic Requiem Mass at the Oratory was less expected, since he was only received into the Church several hours before he died.
He was anointed by Fr Rupert McHardy in hospital after I had asked Gus, heavily sedated, whether he wanted to “see a priest”. He nodded and then said very clearly: “Yes, I would, thank you very much for asking.” Gus was always fastidiously polite, even on the rugby field. One old friend from Trinity College, Dublin, recalled an example of Gus’s unique and fearless character. Gus was scrumming down against the Irish Prison Service for Trinity College’s 3rd XV. Gus was prop and was punched in the face by his opposite number, a beefy-looking prison warden with a neck like Popeye. Gus popped his head out of the scrum, looked the warden in the eye and said in his characteristic drawl: “Was that really necessary?” The scrum had to be reset as everyone burst out laughing.
If the above sounds very Brideshead (a novel that Gus loved), his deathbed conversion was not – to myself at least – so unexpected as Catholic culture and a sense of faith, as well as being immersed in the beauty of religious art and music, not to mention the suffering and mysteries of life, were always part of who Gus was. He was married in a Catholic service in Madrid; his wife was Catholic; his older brother Fabrizio converted; and later in his life he learned that he had a half-brother who, for a period of time, was a Jesuit priest, although Gus wasn’t aware of his father Gerald’s Jesuit love child until shortly before his wedding.
In his homily at his Requiem Mass, Fr Rupert made clear that despite his “bon viveur” reputation, religion was always important to him. “He cared deeply about religion and especially church ceremony. And this is one reason why today this Mass has traditional aspects to it, especially some Latin … I cannot speak about Gus’s conversion in detail but it was sincere and childlike – and given what I had been told – was quite unexpected.”
Fr Rupert added that Maria found in Gus’s wallet prayer cards for the Camino de Santiago and our Lady of Guadalupe. Although much worn from years inside the wallet, on the Santiago card is a heading “Vigordel Camino” explaining the pilgrimage.
Despite being born into a wealthy South American family (his mining-baron grandfather Moritz Hochschild is known as the Oscar Schindler of Bolivia for rescuing thousands of Jews from the Holocaust, and his mother, Annabella Drummond, was from the Cadland coastal estate in Hampshire, giving him Scottish heritage), Gus’s life had never been easy, not the least as he was packed off to Spartan Gordonstoun whilst his parents went through a painful and public divorce in the 1970s.
The Gospel chosen for Gus’s Mass was the Sermon on the Mount, where the Beatitudes, said Fr Rupert, remind us that “there is more to life than ease and pleasure; that growth and strength come sometimes through pain and suffering”. This was certainly the case with Gus, whose boulvardier exterior probably hid more pain (especially as the youngest of three boys when his parents divorced) than he liked to admit, perhaps even to himself. “Today we must try not to think of these moments of pain,” added Father Rupert. “What we must now do is to look at those many good points in his life, in his journey of life, which we can draw strength and inspiration from for our journey. We owe this to Gus – and we owe it to his beloved daughter most especially who is so young and will rely on you to tell her about her father.”
Gus was a commanding officer of my generation, blessed with great charisma, kindness and a passion for children (paintings by his five-year-old daughter, Isabel, were pinned to his hospital room wall) as well as a love of food, wine, cooking and writing (and, alas, smoking). He wrote Irish limericks as well as a Kundera-style comic novel set in Poland, The Countess and the Bear, which earned praise from Julian Fellowes and is being privately published. He tried being an actor and worked as the Annabel’s magazine wine critic, with assignments ranging from visiting Château Haut Brion to being given a supercharged V8 Range Rover to drive across France in search of the holy grail of eau de vie, the Distillerie Artisinale Cazottes – where Mark Birley’s favourite poire was made. His later career was as a successful energy consultant including working as a civil servant advising the government and Downing Street on energy policy and later as a partner at PA Consulting.
In his last few days, close friends gathered at his hospital bedside. As I sat by his bed, and gave him a pilgrim’s rosary from the Catedral de Santiago, we laughed about how we had first met back in the mid-1980s, when we found ourselves sharing a gardener’s caravan together after an 18th-birthday party in Warwickshire. We went on to share a flat (one double bed, with pillows as bolster) in Dublin when he studied history at TCD in the late 1980s.
Few who met Gus could forget him. When I asked him to be my best man, he smiled and said, “Delighted to assist, but I must warn you I’m an old hand.” Turned out Gus had served as best man at least 10 times before.
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