English Duchess to hold MMA event in real Hogwart’s castle
Sometimes as a journalist you receive an assignment so bizarre that you have to double-check it’s not April 1. Can…
Sometimes as a journalist you receive an assignment so bizarre that you have to double-check it’s not April 1. Can you pop up to Alnwick Castle and interview the Duchess of Northumberland about cage fighting? Cage fighting? Are you sure? Yes, the 52-year-old wife of the 12th Duke is a practising martial arts enthusiast who’s hosting a televised cage fight next month in the 100,000-acre grounds of her 1,000-year-old castle.
Wonderfully, though, the story is absolutely true. I’d have failed here if this was just a garden for garden-lovers, the Duchess tells me. My job is to provide a venue for people who want to do all kinds of things. And this is for 16- to 30-year-old men who wouldn’t normally come to a garden.
You’ve got a community on your doorstep who don’t have enough to do on a Thursday, Friday or Saturday night. They’re crying out for things like this. I want to blow people away, to take them out of their everyday life, to come in here and think, ‘S—, that’s unbelievable.’
Born Jane Richard, the daughter of an Edinburgh stockbroker, she met Ralph Percy, second son of the 11th Duke, when she was 16 and Ralph was 17. They married five years later and moved to Northumberland, living in a house in the castle’s grounds. When her brother-in-law died in 1995, her husband inherited the title and they moved into Alnwick Castle, perhaps best known to a modern generation as the backdrop for Hogwarts in the Harry Potter films.
Initially unhappy in her new role as Duchess, she was persuaded by her husband to renovate 12 acres of walled garden. More than a decade – and $55,000,000 – later, one wonders whether the Duke regrets that decision (he hasn’t, according to his wife, been around the place for four or five years). For the garden today is less English stately home, more Disney bling, including myriad water and lighting effects, the largest treehouse in the world, a glass pavilion for wedding hire, and a Poison Garden, which, with the permission of the Home Office, contains cannabis, opium poppies and catha edulis, know to clubbers as miaow miaow.
Alnwick Gardens, she points out, is a charitable trust, annually attracting more than 800,000 visitors and generating about £50 million each year for the region. In one year alone, 100 farmers applied for planning permission to open B&Bs. It even won the loo of the year award a few years back. That’s a great thing, she enthuses. If you have a good loo, it shows you care.
Perhaps, given such a backdrop, the decision to host a cage-fighting evening doesn’t seem so bizarre after all. The Duchess hosted a similar event, a couple of years ago, to the delight of some and the fury of others, including a number of volunteers who threatened to resign.
I thought, do me a favour and resign as quickly as possible, she says. Because this is going to happen.
The Duchess, who has been boxing for years as well as learning to fight with sticks, has seen cage fighting only on television, but she has some strong views about its merits. Have you seen Alex Reid – Jordan’s guy? she asks. Well, it’s that. Boxing. A bit of kick-boxing. All sorts of martial arts but within a cage.
You’re not just given a knuckle-duster and told to kill your opponent. There’s an art to it. It’s incredibly disciplined. And that discipline is the same thing you get in the Army.
It’s too easy for someone in London to say, ‘Typical, off she goes again with her cage fighting.’ But let them come to the North East. They don’t understand the communities up here. We have our own problems and we deal with them our own way.
The cage-fighting evening, on October 21, featuring the Northern Free Fighters and Team Shotai Kai, will raise money for Help for Heroes. The Duchess is disappointed that she is going to miss it; she’ll be on holiday in Thailand with her daughters (who have worked variously as motorcycle mechanics, racing drivers, gunmakers and tennis coaches).