Edward Double-Barrel – the land agent
Join us for a funny, irreverent look at some of the characters that make the British countryside what it is. Our tongue-in-cheek guide puts characters such as the retired Major, the “perfect” next-door farmer and the young tearaway under the microscope. Here we meet Edward Double Barrel – the land agent who lives in the big house
The land agent is called Edward Double-Barrel. Edward to his friends.
He’s a big-wig in a Home Counties office of a leading firm of agents. He “pitches up” for long lunches and courts contacts charmingly. Not that he needs to court them – local landowners wouldn’t dream of taking their business elsewhere. Most of them were at school with him, after all, or knew him from Ciren.
Edward drives a Discovery with labradors in the back. He knows where the best wheat land is, which ground is ripe for development, the precise route of the proposed “A” road. He’s on the parish council, the school governors, an RICS committee or two.
Home is the listed Georgian house where he was born, eldest son of the late Sir Charles Double-Barrel, a man with a lot of letters after his name. The place, he says, costs a fortune to run, has dry rot in the west wing and is a “bugger” to heat.
Edward owns lots of pairs of brogues – almost as many as he has middle names. He refers, not to his family but to his lineage and uses the word “absolutely” a lot.
He has two sons away at school and, when they come home, looks disapprovingly at their clothes, before shaking hands with their chums and saying: “I knew your father.”
Edward owns lots of pairs of brogues – almost as many as he has middle names. He refers, not to his family but to his lineage and uses the word “absolutely” a lot.
At weekends, he dons his oldest brogues and cords to potter around the grounds.
“Absolutely lovely,” he says of the walled garden, before dispensing instructions to the gardener, Ted, who – according to Edward’s wife Ginny–- is a “absolutely priceless.”
Over supper, Edward reminisces about his spell in London. Head office was fine, but it was a bit too much residential agency work, rather than estate management. Town was fun, he remembers, but he was jolly glad to get back to the country.
Nowadays there’s nothing he loves more than remonstrating with ramblers (nothing short of hooligans, most of them) or having a day’s shooting. Between drives he talks politics, using names such as Cameron and Osborne as if he’d met them. Which of course, he has.
He’s certainly not sure about this new Labour chap, Miliband. A bloody communist. Some of the noises he’s making on taxes are jolly worrying. It’s like so much of this country, he says over a glass of good claret. Gone to pot. The rot set in the minute Thatcher left office.
Bring back National Service, that’s what Edward says, that would stop the youngsters rioting and wandering the streets in their hoodies.
“They’re afraid of hard work,” he declares, slumbered – cigar in mouth – in his Chesterfield, exhausted after another hectic week of long lunches and dinner parties.