Philip Beresford thought the Duke of Devonshire might have dropped dead from shock, so long was the silence on the phone.
At the time a young City reporter at The Sunday Telegraph, Beresford had telephoned to check the numbers the newspaper had compiled on the duke’s assets for the first-ever list of Britain’s richest people. After a butler passed the phone to the duke, Beresford politely asked if he was correct in thinking that His Grace’s wealth in land and art ran to £500mn.
“There was a silence, and I could hear an intake of breath,” Beresford recalls. Then a bellow: “The Sunday Telegraph is doing this? It sounds like Bolshevism!”
The project was quickly shelved after similar pushback from the profiled. It wasn’t until Beresford moved to The Sunday Times several years later that the list finally came to life. “I look back now and it was completely cobbled together,” Beresford says of the first ranking, published in 1989. But it was an instant hit. “Circulation soared 18 per cent — absolutely unheard of. It blew all their minds.”
Beresford is long retired but his creation is still going strong, and is far from the only wealth-enumeration game in town.
