Telegraph obituary

[Sheilbh]

Count Robin de la Lanne-Mirrlees
Count Robin de la Lanne-Mirrlees, who has died aged 87, was a Ruritanian figure whose career encompassed soldiering, serving as a Herald in the College of Arms and helping Ian Fleming to write a James Bond novel in which Mirrlees himself appeared as a character.


Robin de la Lanne Mirrlees with Princess Margarethe of Wurttemberg at the premiere of The Long Memory at the Leicester Square Theatre. 22 January 1953 Photo: TOPFOTO
6:20PM BST 25 Jun 2012

In real life he was the laird of the Hebridean island of Great Bernera and claimant to a principality in Dalmatia. In fiction, however, Mirrlees was Sir Hilary Bray, Bt, a genealogist with the College of Arms whose identity Bond assumes to trace the criminal mastermind Ernst Stavro Blofeld in On Her Majesty's Secret Service.

In 1960, when Fleming was researching the heraldic background for the book, Mirrlees was Rouge Dragon Pursuivant at the College. After agreeing to collaborate with Fleming, he was featured in the novel under the heraldic pseudonym Sable Basilisk . The association was commemorated in a privately produced book, Sable Basilisk, which contained notes and correspondence between Mirrlees and Fleming from their spell of joint research.

Mirrlees' influence on Fleming ran deep. Mirrlees claimed descent from an ancient Basque family, whose members were said to be born without earlobes. Fleming gave this unusual deformity to Blofeld . It was probably also Mirrlees who came up with the Bond family motto: "The World is Not Enough", later used as the title of a film in the 007 canon.

Robin Ian Evelyn Grinnell-Milne was born on January 13 1925, son of Duncan Grinnell-Milne, a much-decorated First World War fighter pilot who was shot down and taken prisoner, only to escape and rejoin his squadron, and whose memoirs, An Escaper's Log, are considered a classic account of derring-do.

Robin's godfather was the 11th Duke of Argyll. His parents divorced in 1927 and his mother subsequently married Major General William Mirrlees. In recognition of this, and of his mother's aristocratic Basque forebears, he later changed his name to Robin de la Lanne-Mirrlees. Hope Mirrlees, the writer of fantasy fiction, was his step-aunt.

After being educated at the English School, Cairo, and in Paris, he went up to Merton College, Oxford. During the Second World War he served in the Royal Artillery in India, rising to the rank of captain.

Post-war he embarked upon a rococo career, entering the College of Arms in 1952. In his capacity as Rouge Dragon Pursuivant of Arms in Ordinary, he was in attendance on the Queen at the Coronation. In 1959 he was invested as a Knight of Honour and Devotion of the Order of Malta. From 1962 until 1967 he served as Richmond Herald of Arms.

Less formally, Mirrlees was a well-known debs' delight; among the glamorous young women to be seen on his arm was Fiona Campbell-Walter, who later married Baron Thyssen, the wealthy industrialist and art collector.

During his time at the College of Arms, Mirrlees became increasingly fascinated by the nobility of his maternal ancestors – they had styled themselves Counts – and in 1964 the Republic of San Marino granted him this title.

In 1968 he took steps to put his title beyond dispute by securing confirmation of it from Umberto II of Italy who, as a former reigning monarch never having abdicated, retained the power to confer nobility. More controversially, Mirrlees also claimed that, in 1967, King Peter II of Yugoslavia, to whom he was an honorary aide-de-camp, created him Prince of Incoronata, on the Dalmatian coast. In 1975 he was also recognised by the Lord Lyon King of Arms as feudal Baron of Inchdrewer, after the dilapidated 16th-century fortress, Inchdrewer Castle in Banffshire, that Mirrlees owned.

Later financial problems would prevent Mirrlees from restoring the castle to a proper state of repair. But until then he was an even more prolific acquirer of houses than of titles. Apart from Inchdrewer, he owned a house in Holland Park, Ratzenegg Castle in Austria and a villa at Le Touquet.

Yet his real home was the island of Great Bernera, home to 250 people off the west coast of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides, which he bought in 1962. In an era when Scottish lairds were much demonised, Mirrlees was a popular landlord, only raising the rents once in 41 years (necessity forced him to do so again in 2003). Yet his benevolent feudal rule was not entirely free of disputes with the locals. In the late 1990s he provoked opposition when he proposed to open a drying-out clinic for alcoholics on the island which he wished to call a "personal rediscovery centre".

Mirrlees's later years were clouded by the huge financial losses he suffered through Lloyd's. He managed to pay off more than £2m worth of debt by selling several of his properties, including his London house, his Austrian castle and a small island off Great Bernera. But he suffered a further setback in 2003 when burglars raided his Le Touquet villa and made off with £250,000 worth of antiques, all uninsured. Mirrlees said at the time: "As a Buddhist I have not allowed myself to become too attached to material things, but I am extremely angry."

His adopted faith was the cause of another row with locals on Bernera when he opposed Sunday ferry services on the grounds that one day per week should be reserved for reflection (among the recreations he listed in Who's Who were fox-hunting and mystic philosophy).

Indeed, Mirrlees was never shy of courting controversy. Despite his royal connections he conceived a violent dislike of the Prince of Wales, whom he described in 2003 as "an absolute disgrace". In 2005, on the grounds that "any old fool can be a prince", he sent a circular letter round his acquaintances announcing his assumption of his Yugoslav title Prince of Incoronata, though many authorities disputed its validity.

Mirrlees's last campaign was against doctors' ties. This resulted from his own experience of hospital infection. In February 2004 he was admitted to Hammersmith Hospital following a stroke. There he contracted the "superbug" MRSA, and was convinced he had been infected by bacteria on doctors' ties. He demanded that the neckwear should be banned. Following his hospitalisation he lived in a care home on Great Bernera, while continuing to display the spirited eccentricity that had distinguished him throughout his life.

He was married, very briefly, to a former nurse. From a long relationship with Duchess Margarethe of Wurttemberg, a granddaughter of Tsar Ferdinand I of Bulgaria, he had a son, Patrick Grinnell-Milne de la Lanne-Mirlees, who in 2006 became the mayor of Delmenhorst in Lower Saxony.

Count Robin de la Lanne-Mirrlees, born January 13 1925, died June 23 2012

[Scipio]

Wow.  What a noble fruitbat.

[Richard Hakluyt]

Great obit 

[Martinus]

A fox-hunting "buddhist"? I hope he burns in hell. Or better yet, gets reincarnated as a fox.

[grumbler]

Thanks for sharing this.   The world has lost a true eccentric.