Peter Fitzwilliam

Peter Fitzwilliam owned one of the largest houses in Europe and died in a chartered aeroplane with Kathleen Kennedy. He inherited the earldom in 1943 and with it Wentworth Woodhouse in Yorkshire - a house with a facade six hundred feet long and, by repute, more than three hundred rooms - and the coal beneath it, which had made the family one of the richest in England for two centuries. He had been a wartime commando who ran motor gunboats to Sweden to bring out ball bearings, and was decorated for it. He was married, a gambler and a racehorse owner, and by 1948 was attached to Kathleen Kennedy, the widowed Marchioness of Hartington and daughter of the former American ambassador. Her father was flying to Paris to prevent a marriage that would have meant a divorce. In May 1948 they chartered a small aircraft from Paris to Cannes, insisted on flying through a storm the pilot had advised against, and hit a ridge in the Cévennes. The coal was the other story. The Attlee government nationalised the mines in 1947 and the National Coal Board opencast-mined the park at Wentworth to within yards of the house, in what was widely read as an act of class politics - Manny Shinwell was accused of saying so. The earldom passed to a cousin and was extinct within thirty years. The house survived, subsiding on the workings beneath it, and was sold in 2017 to a preservation trust for a fraction of what it had cost to build.

• Lived: 1910 CE – 1948 CE
• Nationality: English
• Roles: aristocrat