Preface

Who Does Own Britain? - A Typical

'Great' Landowner

HIDDEN DEEP IN the history of the United Kingdom is a great and secret book. It was
published in four volumes and runs to over 2000 pages. Within its pages are the names
and addresses of those who owned, at the time of the book's compilation, the most valu-
able treasure of this country, its land. The book is now more than 120 years old, yet its
pages are the only way to trace the present ownership of as much as one third of the
acreage of England and Wales. In this sense, the book is more important and more valu-
able than the Land Registry of England and Wales, which costs more than £200 million
a year to run and which cannot provide any indication of who owns vast swathes of the
land in the two countries. 1
And this is very easy to illustrate. Five miles north of Henley-on-Thames in the rich,
if densely populated, countryside of Oxfordshire, is a true treasure, Stonor Park, the home
of Lord and Lady Camoys. The estate and house have their origins in the last decade of
the twelfth century and are steeped in history. Martyrs hid here and the Catholic faith in
England owes much of its survival to the fidelity with which the Stonor family protected
its priests from persecution over the centuries. The house is lined with family portraits
and out in the grounds is a replica stone circle, recreated on the site of the prehistoric
original. The present head of this ancient family is Ralph Thomas Campion George
Sherman Stonor, the 7th Baron Camoys, who, until recently forced to retire due to ill
health, had been the Queen's Lord Chamberlain for three years. As such he was head of
the Queen's household, her right hand man and in effect Chairman of The UK Royals,
pie. And no man better qualified for the job! An aristocrat married to the daughter of a
major Suffolk landowner, Sir W.S. Hyde Parker Bt, Camoys attended Eton, the landowners'
school, and is a former managing director of large chunks of Barclays bank, Barclays
BZW - chunks that have turned out to be an expensive failure for the bank. 2
At Stonor Park the public may now stroll through its long history on most Sundays,
bank holidays and other days by arrangement, for a small charge. 3 However, should any
member of the public become curious about who actually owns Stonor House or its lands,
and approach the Land Registry to find out, they will encounter a curious response. For
the standard fee, currently £7.20 payable in advance, the enquirer will be told by the
Land Registry on a small piece of headed notepaper, that

With reference to your recent aplication for office copies (form 109) of the
above property [Stonor Park], I am afraid that your application cannot
proceed as the property is not registered.

The secrets of who owns Stonor and the extent of the estate are contained within its own
walls, in its own records. They are not available to the public. Calls to the house are
politely deflected. However, if the curious enquirer knew that something called The Return
of Owners of Land (also known as the Second, or 'New' Domesday) existed, and that a

A TYPICAL 'GREAT' LANDOWNER 3

 copy was probably in his or her own local reference library, admittedly perhaps locked
up in the 'cage', as the confidential areas in most local libraries are known, then he or
she could go and find out who owned Stonor and the exact extent of its land, down to
the last perch. Or the last perch in 1872, at any rate.
For The Return of Owners of Land, in England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales, commis-
sioned by Parliament as a result of a debate in the House of Lords on the 19 February
1872, and published in four volumes between 1874 and 1876, is our lost book, a social,
historical and present treasure that the academic and social historians of the UK have
mostly ignored for 120 years. In that book the enquirer would have found that the 3rd
Lord Camoys of Stonor Park in Henley-on-Thames owned 4500 acres in Oxfordshire,
worth in rental value £5000, the modern equivalent of £350,000 pa. 4

Name of Owner Address of Owner Extent of Lands Gross Estimated Rental

A. R. P.* £ s.
Camoys, Lord Stonor Park, 3,510 2 4582 4
Henley-on-Thames

•A =Acres, R =Roods, P = Perches

In 1872 the 3rd Lord Camoys also owned 900 acres in Buckinghamshire worth £1000
(modern equivalent £70,000), 300 acres in Staffordshire worth £1321 (£92,470), 810
acres in Leicestershire worth £1268 (£88,760) and 230 acres in Warwickshire worth £240
(£16,800). Gross annual rental was an assessed figure, similar to the way houses are
assessed for Council Tax in the modern era. At that time, most taxable incomes came
from rents, and income tax at the time was 4d in the pound of 240 pence, about the
equivalent of 1.6p nowadays. Valuations were based on rentals, which were not always
paid,5 but on the basis that they were, Lord Camoys was drawing the modern equivalent
of £618,030 a year from his lands and paying £9800 in tax on that income.
The same information is unavailable today. While the Ministry of Agriculture pays out
hundreds of millions of pounds in agricultural grants each year, it refuses to identify the
recipients of these public funds. 6 The public in turn cannot check who owns agricultural
land because up to 50% of it is unregistered and the rest is registered in ways that make
searches difficult or impossibly expensive. Since 1925, the law has required any land trans-
action in England and Wales to be registered at the Land Registry. But the 1925 law was
introduced on a rolling basis, starting in London where some titles were already regis-
tered under an earlier Order in Council, and finally arriving in fourteen districts across
four counties in 1990, 65 years later. A significant number of the large estates described
in the 1872 Return made no transactions in that period, or if they did, sold off land,
leaving the core of the estate 'untransacted' and thus unregistered. Many of these large
estates are, in any case, in trust, with the current heirs merely tenants for life. A good
example of this is the £1 billion St John's Wood estate in London, the property of the
Eyre family. The entry in the last Burke's Landed Gentry (1965 edition) describes Mary
Francis Elisabeth Eyre as the joint life tenant of St John's Wood with her sister, Alethea
Fanny. Both were deceased by 1965 but the subsequent tenancies had not been notified
to the BLG. When the tenants die they are simply replaced by their heirs, but the trust
and its unregistered land simply carry on, untaxed by death duties.
However, in the interval between 1925 and 2000 about 99% of all domestic dwellings,

4 WHO OWNS BRITAIN

homes and flats have been sold or inherited, according to the Land Registry, meaning
that the main assets of the majority of people in the country are registered in the Land
Registry. Those properties do not attract any state subsidies and no longer receive a tax
break by way of mortgage tax relief. The owners of most of them pay a tax assessed on
the value of their residence called the Council Tax. Yet any unregistered landowner can
check on almost any ordinary householder, with ease and for the Land Registry fee, £7.20.
In the 1870s, had an enquirer been driven further by curiosity, he or she could have
gone to the Parish Records at Henley and seen the tithe maps,7 which would have shown
the precise dimensions and location of the Stonor estate. Today, all that is available is
that little note from the Land Registry, saying that they can tell you nothing. The tithe
records are either destroyed, as they have been in many counties, or locked up in all but
inaccessible archives. Lord Camoys is thus ensured a level of financial privacy not avail-
able to most of the rest of us. We cannot know what mortgage there is on Stonor Park,
a fact easily determined on any dwelling listed in the Land Registry. We cannot know if
Lord Camoys is likely to be enjoying a tax break by the fact that the estate is in a trust.
And we cannot find out, as he can about most of us, exactly how much land he still
owns, or how much of the 1872 estate exists and attracts agricultural grants.
All these advantages were deliberately conferred on the already privileged by a manip-
ulation of the law which created the modern Land Registry, an act of deception which
was made operational even as the 1872 Return was being air-brushed out of the historic
and administrative record of the UK, to the extent that is hardly known about by anybody,
including those in positions of power and influence today. Much more than a simple
cover-up, it is an on-going conspiracy even in an age when such a term is frequently and
wilfully over-used. A special interest group, the landowners, a group inextricably bound
up with the Conservative Party that has been the dominant political influence in Parliament
for most of the past 120 years, saw to it that information, such as that disclosed in the
Return, would never again be available to the public. It is perhaps the most astonishing
case of calculated civic deceit ever performed on a whole country.
This book is about that conspiracy and its consequences.

A TYPICAL 'GREAT' LANDOWNER 5