It was clear that huge economies would have to be made; the question was how to make them without diminishing the sources of revenue needed to maintain what was left. The 11th Duke and his Duchess counted their assets: they were both 30, young, energetic and, untrammelled by conventions now out of date, were prepared to do something different. Time was on their side, and Chatsworth, hitherto more a place just to visit, proved to be the key to the future.Immediately, much had to go. Good farmland in Ayrshire bought cheap in the First World War had to be sold, the pretty houses built by the fifth Duke in Buxton, even land in the High Peak bought by Bess of Hardwick, were sold. Claude Lorrain’s Liber Veritatis, bought by the second Duke, the Memling triptych, Holbein’s life-size sketch of Henry VIII and Rembrandt’s Philosopher, the sixth Duke’s head of Apollo and the greatest of all Anglo-Saxon manuscripts, the Benedictional of St Ethelwold, from the Compton family, and 141 early printed books went to the national collections.The great thing was to do it slowly: “We were in constant contact with the Inland Revenue and our strategy was to note how long they took to answer our last letter and then reply in a day less, so that nobody could accuse us of dragging our feet.” In the end, it took 17 years to reach a conclusion.

The final touch came to him while waiting at Bedford station – to part with Hardwick itself. Almost as Bess had left it, lovingly restored by the sixth Duke, it was now handed over to the National Trust. He was delighted with the trust’s care for it: “No words of praise are too high for them.”There remained Chatsworth. Always a public attraction, visited once by Jane Austen, 80,000 visitors a year came to it in Paxton’s time Even in 1949, 105,000 had come.

What would make it irresistible, their agent, Hugo Read, suggested, would be if the family returned and lived in the house. The private rooms could be converted to make a modern habitable home, while the public could permanently enjoy the state rooms, the grounds and other delights.The Duke was doubtful, the Duchess not: gradually an army of cleaners, craftsmen and women, builders and engineers, went to work, aided by the foresight of previous generations who had stored and not disposed of much that was needed to furnish both parts adequately In the autumn of 1959 the family moved back in. The Duchess rearranged the rooms now open to the public in new splendour, and the public was duly encouraged, coming in ever-increasing numbers.All this might have easily filled life to the exclusion of everything else: not so for the Duke. He had, “through the indulgence of my father”, bought his first racehorse in 1948, and from 1963 Bernard van Cutsem, met before the war and a close friend since, became his trainer.