The last known feudal lord in the world is leaning back against a disused door, cheerfully bashing out the chords to Stuck in the Middle With You on an e-piano for his subjects. They have a special name for him around here, the Seigneur of Sark Christopher Beaumont has told me: “They call me Fingers.”
I have come to the weekly Wednesday night jam session at the Old Hall — one of four pubs that the roughly 500 people who live on this two-square-mile lump of rock in the English Channel have available to them — where a classic cast of Sark characters has assembled.
There’s the burly lad they refer to as the “King of Sark” Peter Plummer — so-called because he does the crucial job of driving the “tractor-bus” that hauls people up the harbour hill when they land on the island — who’s in an “I’M WITH THE BAND” T-shirt and chugging a pint of beer. There’s the island’s “seneschal”, or judge, Victoria Stamps, a six-footish-tall computer engineer who, astonishingly, moved here after reading my last story. There’s a man who looks uncannily like Bill Murray from the eyes up, and uncannily like Gérard Depardieu from the nose down, who works in crypto and says he lives in Sark not because it’s a tax haven but because “it’s the last bit of Britain that’s still civilised”. (As a self-governing “royal fief” Sark is part of the British Isles, though not a part of the United Kingdom.)
And then I spot him. The man who splashed me across the pages of the Sark Newspaper four weeks in a row after my last visit to the island in 2019, labelling me a “blogger and sometime journalist”, is tucking into a charcuterie platter at the bar.
Kevin Delaney, who only puts out an online version of the paper these days but who still looks after the estate of the Barclay family on the island, looks a little shocked to see me. I had already emailed him, asking if he’d be willing to speak to me during my visit, and he had told me he was “not minded to discuss anything related to the estate at this moment in time” but that, a little ominously, he would “await the publication of [our] article with interest”.
Like the last time I met him, Delaney is very friendly and likeable. He suggests that we pop outside to chat so as to hear one another over the deafening sound of “The Seigneur and his Serfs”, as Beaumont would like the band to be called, who have moved on to Honky Tonk Woman by the Rolling Stones. I remind Delaney of all the rude things he said about me in his paper. “Oh you weren’t the one I said should be flipping burgers?” Yes, yes, I was. He chuckles a touch awkwardly. “None of it’s personal, I promise ya.” (He grew up in Elm Park in the eastern suburbs of London, and calls himself a “plastic cockney”.)
My previous visit, before I had my run-in with Delaney, was meant to be focused on the energy crisis then facing the island. The reason this time around is more directly related to the Barclay family. I’m here to find out more about an ambitious plan to purchase the land and properties on Sark that are owned by the estate of the late Sir David Barclay — of Barclay brothers fame — and which his youngest son, Alistair Barclay, has been trying to sell.
Two factions on the island had been at war for a long time: those who opposed the Barclays — frequently trashed in the Sark Newspaper — and those who supported them. Delaney tells me that there has been a “thawing” since the last time I was here. He characterises the climate on the island back then as “Lord of the Flies meets Animal Farm”, whereas nowadays it’s more like “McGuinness and Paisley”. “The Troubles — as I call them, being of Irish origin — have been parked up,” he says.
The 34-year-old Alistair is facing the threat of bankruptcy after Investec Bank began proceedings against him in December over an unpaid debt. (FT readers may well remember that Alistair was accused in the High Court, during the family’s bitter infighting, of bugging the conservatory of The Ritz in order to secretly record his uncle, Sir Frederick).
Knight Frank has been appointed to sell the land on Sark. So far no sale has been made.
Alistair Barclay said by email: “the future of the Sark Estate is not up to me as it rests with the trustees of my late father’s estate. Investec is a personal issue and totally unconnected.”
Meanwhile, the Seigneur has spied an opportunity and formed a partnership with Swen Lorenz — whose career unusual career has taken him to the Galápagos Islands and Uzbekistan and involved him selling a handbook for a tidy £1,400 on how to move to Sark. They are directors of the Sark Property Company, which has been set up to try and buy the estate, comprising 20 per cent of the island’s land area, four hotels, 80 houses and 20 commercial properties. (Brecqhou, the island next so Sark where the Barclay Brothers built their mock-Gothic castle featuring monogrammed drainpipes, is excluded.)
Lorenz is talking to investors and hopes that SPC, which is using Savills Guernsey in its bid, can raise an initial £25-35mn to buy the estate and for working capital. It will then target a further £25-50mn to start improving the Barclay estate (some of which is in less than pristine condition) and to buy further land on Sark that they’ve identified — with SPC eventually owning perhaps 30-40 per cent of the island.
Anchoring the investment is Puerto Rico-based hedge fund manager Harris Kupperman, who met Lorenz after reading his investing newsletter (another Lorenz project) and who visited Sark last summer.
Kupperman — who was quoted by Forbes in 2022 as saying it would be “perfectly good” to invest in a Ponzi scheme if it was still inflating and was profitable to own — says he is planning to put in roughly “4 or 5” million (pounds or dollars). He typically hunts for undervalued assets with limited downside and the potential for big gains, and tends to take a contrarian approach, one that has rewarded him handsomely — his fund was up almost 900 per cent since 2019, as of a month ago.
“What is happening with Sark is very much what we do,” he told Alphaville. “I totally understand what he [Lorenz] is trying to accomplish. If he can execute then I think it’s going to be a very good business. A lot of people would like to live on Sark but can’t.”
But the bigger plan is for an IPO on the London Stock Exchange, which Lorenz hopes could give SPC a market cap of around £200mn.
Unlikely as it may seem, this could end up being one of the bigger London listings in recent years — seven IPOs have raised a total of just £472mn so far this year, a long way from the £16.7bn raised from 125 IPOs for the whole of 2021, according to LSEG data. It would be welcome relief for a market that has been rejected by Cambridge-based chip designer Arm in favour of New York, while Flutter and CRH have migrated across the Atlantic and WE Soda last year pulled its London IPO.
Delaney says the idea that Barclay Junior hasn’t been able to find any buyers is a “misrepresentation”, though he says he has “a lot of time” for both Lorenz and Beaumont, and that he finds them “honourable, honest and very personable”.
Bromance and bad Barclay Bros wine at the Seigneurie
There are no cars allowed here but there are bicycles, a few horses and carriages, and many tractors. The previous evening, I walk through the rain with the personable Lorenz along muddy “roads” lined with pink campion and Queen Anne’s lace, to Beaumont’s grand 16th century 12-bedroom home, the Seigneurie. A wood fire is burning in a hearth, between two carved Indian sepoys. Above the fireplace is the Beaumont family’s coat of arms, which reads erectus non eratus — upright but not proud.
Two buckets of wine on ice await us. One, gifted by Delaney, is a sparkling white made by Barclays-owned Sark Vineyards using the methode champenoise. The Barclays razed their vineyards and abandoned many of their properties on the island after most of the candidates they backed in the island’s first democratic elections in 2008 failed to get elected. Most of the 28,000 bottles produced now lie in cellars below one of the Barclay pubs, the Bel Air. In the next bucket is a sparkling wine from Kent, “in case the other one is undrinkable”. Lorenz pours out the wine while Beaumont and I settle down by the fire.
It’s clear that the pair of them get along very well, and not just as business associates, in spite of their differences. The 67-year-old great-grandmother, the Dame of Sark Sybil Hathaway, was famous for having refused to evacuate the island when it was invaded by the Germans in 1940. Now, the Seigneur is trying to get a company run by a German to buy a fifth or more of his island.
For Lorenz, Beaumont’s involvement was crucial. “Speaking as the company, we want Christopher’s family to be firmly in ownership of the estate, because they’re in a way the guarantor of the long-term future of Sark,” he says in his rather posh accent, finessed by spending “12 years living in SW3”, he explains.
Having Beaumont on board was important for getting investor backing, too. “The idea of finding investors to back us with tens of millions’, and eventually triple digits of millions’, worth of asset purchases and investment programmes for Sark — to get anyone to back you with such an idea I instinctively knew that you had to have the Seigneur on board,” Lorenz says. “And that’s why in our first meeting, when we set off on this journey three years ago, we had his son there, Hugh — we wanted to have the next generation there to show the long-term stability.”
Hugh, 27, who will become the Seigneur when Christopher dies, works in private equity in London. “We’ve instructed him to go away and earn as much as possible as quickly as possible,” Beaumont says, swigging back some Barclay wine, which he describes as “a bit coarse”. He explains that you don’t make much money when you become the Seigneur. The stipend is £44,129.46, and is officially “recompense for relinquishing a feudal right”, he tells me.
Isn’t that a reasonable amount given that there is no income tax here and Beaumont has no mortgage on his 12-bedroom towered mansion, I ask? “God no!” he covers his face. “You’ve no idea of the cost of living around here.” Beaumont says he pays around £15,000 in oil per year and another £15,000 in property tax for this house.
He also has a mortgage to pay on a house on the mainland. And, to be fair, he does also have to pay the king £1.79 a year in feudal rent — the equivalent of one-twentieth of a knight’s pay (the original contract didn’t account for inflation).
The Barclay wine is, as the French might say, pas terrible. (When I ask Delaney about it, he says “I’d rather take it down the harbour hill and pour it into the sea than get anything less than £50 a bottle for it,” which strikes me as optimistic.) But by 7.30pm we’ve finished both bottles and we stumble out of the Seigneurie to walk through the mud to Nova’s Bistro, one of about ten restaurants that are open at this time of year, none of which open during the winter.
After a tractor roars past us, puncturing the blissful quiet of the car-free island as tractors rather often do around here, I ask Beaumont whether he feels like Sark is really his. He pauses. “Well it doesn’t feel like my island but it bloody well ought to,” he replies. “People have forgotten that it is mine; it’s very annoying.” I suggest that it’s a hard time to be a hereditary feudal Seigneur. “It’s a hard time to be a hereditary anything.”
Over a plate of exquisite Sark crab linguine at Nova’s, I ask Lorenz why he is getting, so he tells me, so much interest from investors. “The truth is there are many undervalued investments in the world,” he acknowledges. “But there’s definitely an element of there being a certain fascination with small islands, and Sark’s unique history and its geographic location . . . It helps if you can explain an investment in one or two sentences. We say: you’re basically buying real estate on a run-down island at distressed level prices, and we’re going to turn it around.”
“As my mother would have said, there’s a nasty smell about him”
When I ask people around Sark what they make of the proposed IPO, the most common answer I get is: “what’s an IPO?” The second most common response is that they would prefer not to comment at all. “It’s a small island and all have to get along with one another” — that kind of thing.
The braver islanders tend to be split between those who think the island urgently needs investment and more tourism and people, and who therefore welcome Lorenz and Beaumont’s plans, and those who are a little suspicious about their motives.
Paul Armogie, Speaker of Sark’s parliament, Chief Pleas, which he describes as a “parish council on steroids” and which comprises only 30 members, including the Seigneur and the seneschal, strikes me as more the latter than the former.
“I absolutely understand that Sark needs investment and it’s blinking obvious that those (Barclay) properties need to be loved and invested in,” Armogie tells me. “But is the Sark Property Company the right vehicle to provide the best solution for Sark? You could say it’s sort of out of the frying pan with the Barclay brothers and into the fire with the unknown new owners.”
Armogie and others raise concerns about the transparency of the ownership structure of SPC, as well as over foreign high-net-worth investors suddenly having a big influence on the island. And there are further concerns around whether the plans for Sark could erode the island’s heritage and distinct identity, and whether local residents could be priced out.
Lorenz brushes off these kinds of criticisms, and says he wants to preserve Sark’s unique identity, but not everyone trusts him.
“I haven’t done my due diligence on Swen other than — well, having worked in hospitality for 40, 50 years there’s just, as my mother would have said, there’s a nasty smell about him,” says Armogie, who used to run the Stocks Hotel on the island. “I’m really not sure where he’s coming from. I’m not sure his true motives are the motives that he will tell you about.”
Another person who is suspicious but who would rather not be named is a City analyst in London who used to work at Master Investor, the publication and trade show put on by Jim Mellon, the Isle of Man-based financier and Leave.EU donor. Lorenz worked there for two years.
The analyst describes Lorenz as “a reasonable person to deal with” but worries that his “scattergun approach” to investing will not lead to a real commitment to Sark, and points me towards various things on the internet that concern him. “On his blog he’s got a post [on] how you turn your blog into a multimillion dollar business, and then there’s a YouTube video he’s in called ‘Investing In Russia For Massive Profits’.
“These are not the ramblings, the musings of someone who should be in charge of a company that’s trying to buy up such a big chunk of Sark.”
Lorenz said there are “lots of disgruntled ex-staff members” from his time at Master Investor after he “laid off virtually the entire staff.”
His blog “explores subjects outside of the mainstream, which is one of the reasons why I am able to mobilise investment capital for something as unusual as investing in Sark,” Lorenz told FTAV.
“Christopher and I have been tirelessly repeating that we are open to meet and engage with anyone about anything,” he added. “No one else on Sark does that. We are the single most transparent entity on Sark”:
We are pursuing something that is commercial, but also puts the Sark community at its heart, and anyone who wants to have a dialogue is welcome to engage. No plan is going to be universally popular, but I think we’ve got the balance right.
What everyone agrees on is that the Barclay properties that were abandoned in 2008 urgently need to be repaired and restored.
On my last morning, I go to take a look at some of the deserted properties. The most impressive is a huge villa on the edge of the cliffs, with a spectacular view of the sea and of Brecqhou. Its location is stunning but it is in a state of total disrepair, stuffed full of old furniture, with more smashed plates on the ground outside it than at a Greek wedding.
I pass by the smashed windows and suddenly hear an alarm going off. Memories come flooding back of being woken by a phone call in early January 2019 and hearing a gruff and faintly menacing voice saying “It’s David Barclay here”, warning me to leave his family out of my story. I run over the smashed plates and through tall weeds and nettles, scratching and stinging my legs as I go. I get myself on to the tractor bus with the King of Sark and get the hell off this wonderful and weird little island.
Further reading:
— FT.com/Sark
https://www.ft.com/content/2721f9f1-224c-48bd-8327-e1c9844acfc3
