Duke of Richmond: ‘In Britain we completely indulge our dogs’

TheDuke of Richmondis in a hurry. It’s a sunny spring afternoon at the historic Goodwood Estate, and his glossy black Mini Cooper is kicking up dust as it flies down the road between immaculately manicured emerald lawns. Awaiting his arrival, I watch the scene from a first-floor window in the Kennels, an 18th-century compound crafted specifically to house his ancestors’ foxhounds in ultimate luxury. Nowadays, it serves as a deluxe clubhouse for the members of various Goodwood associations, including their canine companions (who can join for £65).

“It’s a very grand building, you know – the most luxurious dog house in the world,” the Duke (also known as Charles Gordon-Lennox) proudly boasts when he arrives, plonking himself down in a lovingly battered leather armchair. Surrounding us, portraits of distinguished doggies adorn stone walls, and artfully designed kennels nestle seamlessly among tasteful furniture; the entire property is an upper-crust ode to the British obsession with dogs.

We are meeting to discuss Goodwoof, a lavish dog festival that is due to take place at the Kennels on May 16 and 17. “We’ve got pet masseurs flying in from LA to massage the dogs,” the Duke says in his distinguished vocal fry, clearly amused. “There’s dog yoga and pilates, a place to dance with your dog that we call Ministry of Hound, and instead of Norland nannies – the fancy nannies for your children – we have Gnawland Nannies for VIP guests. We’ll take your dog away for a bit and give you a rest.”

He laughs, well aware of how absurd this all sounds. “The puns are terrible and endless. We keep coming up with these potty things, but anyway, it’s fun.”

Since taking on the management of the family’s country pile in the 1990s, the enterprising Duke has turned it into a multimillion-pound events compound – an aristocratic playground of sorts, playing host to, among other things, the Goodwood Festival of Speed, a pulse-racing car rally, and Goodwood Revival, a classic car and vintage fashion showcase.

This is the fifth year of Goodwoof, and the Duke says they are expecting more than 13,000 canines. I suspect it will require a lot of doggy bags. There will also be a dog-and-owner fashion show, Chien Charmant, with prizes provided by Hermès for “the best six legs”.

“There’s no dress code at Goodwoof, it’s outdoors. But we’d rather people made a bit of an effort. I’ll definitely wear a suit,” he says. Known for his dapper tailoring, “casual” is not a word in the Duke’s sartorial vocabulary, though he apologises for being underdressed today (his crisp suit jacket, shiny cufflinks and the gleaming chunk of silverware on his wrist say otherwise).

The events list continues: there’s “Barkitecture”, a kennel design competition among world-renowned architects, co-curated byGrand Designs’Kevin McCloud. (The theme this year is “dogs in space”, in honour of the late photographerMartin Parr’s rather eccentric collection of Russian space dog memorabilia.)

Then there are tarot card readings,children’s book readings by Michael Morpurgo, and vets and trainers available to get Rover on his best behaviour. If you keep your eyes peeled, you might also spot the Princess of Wales’s brother,James Middleton, cycling round the grounds with a basket full of pups. He and his black spaniel Ella are regulars at the event.

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If it all sounds like circus pageantry, then so be it; the Duke is the Savile Row-suited ring leader. With human birth rates on the decline in Britain and dog ownership on the up, ourcanines have become like furry children, and it seems we’re content to spoil them accordingly; the UK pet care market is now a multi-billion-pound industry.

Despite the theatrics, Goodwoof continues a proud history. “We wouldn’t do anything at Goodwood that isn’t authentic,” says the Duke. “The house was started because of the fox hunt.” Up until now, he’s been leaning back and experiencing the full support of the chair, his legs loosely crossed, and I do get the sense I’m meeting him in the comfort of his own home. But as he switches gears from levity to legacy, he tents his fingers authoritatively: “Anyone serious in London society would have been hunting at Charlton, a mile away; the first Duke of Richmond bought Goodwood House because of that.”

But it was the third Duke who really started spoiling the hounds in 1787 when he built the Kennels. Famously, 100 years before the main house had central heating, he had it installed in the elaborate dog house to the tune of £6,000 – that’s approximately £1.2m today. Described as plates of iron heated by fire, the system was essentially an Aga for dogs. A “Daga”, if you will.

Today, instead of a warm bed and immortalisation in a grand oil painting, hounds get a custom water bowl that comes with membership to the Kennels and access to state-of-the-art beds like the one byrenowned architect Norman Foster, the brain behind the Gherkin and the Millennium bridge. “I think he spent a fortune making it,” the Duke tells me with a conspiratorial smile. We’re standing with our heads cocked, contemplating a geodesic tortoiseshell of a kennel crafted in the finest cherry wood. It was a runner-up in the Barkitecture competition of 2022.

The Duke himself grew up with lurchers (“fantastic for hare hunting”) and kept rescue dogs during his younger years in London. But these days, he continues the family history of keeping spaniels with eight-year-old cocker Lito: “She’s a working cocker, but poor thing, she hasn’t been trained at all. We feel bad about that.”

Her sidekick is Winston, a yappy dachshund. “He was bought in Covid and is actually my daughter’s dog, but now she’s away working in London, so we’ve got him. In Britain, we completely indulge our dogs. They’re like members of the family.”

His commitment to these words was put to the test recently, when Lito needed a life-saving operation. I ask how much it cost, and he puts his hand to his brow. “Thousands and thousands,” he sighs. “We thought we had pet insurance, and then didn’t. But there wasn’t a moment of hesitation.”

Even the aristocracy isn’t immune to the shock of unforeseen veterinary fees, it seems. The difference, of course, is that for some ordinary dog owners thebill can prove prohibitive, which might explain why shelters are now seeing a rise in pet abandonment. Arecent study, published in the journalAnimals, found that in the UK and Republic of Ireland, the number of stray dogs entering shelters jumped from 16,310 in 2021 to 23,287 in 2023, and the rate of euthanisation in that group rose from 1.9 per cent to 6.3 per cent.

Acknowledging this crisis, the Duke has made Battersea Dogs & Cats Home Goodwoof’s official charity partner. Money raised from the auction of the “Barkitecture” kennels will go directly to the group, while the Duke will also marshal a morning parade of rescue dogs, kicking off the festivities by journeying from Goodwood House to the Kennels.

Perhaps the image of the Duke leading an oompah band and a lineup of dachshunds through the woods – as he did at last year’s Goodwoof – is a slight evolution from the aristocrat thundering by on horseback, preceded by a pack of foxhounds. But if there’s one thing the British upper crust is willing to let its stiff upper lip relax into a smile for, it’s the dogs.

byVenus Vivaldi

in

May 10, 2026

Duke of Richmond: ‘In Britain we completely indulge our dogs’

TheDuke of Richmondis in a hurry. It’s a sunny spring afternoon at the historic Goodwood Estate, and his glossy black Mini Cooper is ki...

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I rang my wife from the balloon to say, ‘We’re probably not going to make it’

It was the last great aviation challenge: the race to circumnavigate the world in a balloon. Louis Blériot had flown a plane across the English Channel in 1909; Charles Lindbergh had made his heroic solo flight from New York to Paris less than two decades later; Neil Armstrong had won the space race for the United States bysetting foot on the Moonin 1969. Yet this quieter feat of derring-do had remained stubbornly out of reach ever since ahot air balloonfirst carried people up, up and away in 1783.

There were good reasons – the 25,000-mile voyage depends upon the winds. To cross vast oceans and continents in a balloon, it is essential to reach the jet stream, at an altitude that requires a pressurised gondola capable of providing protection from extreme heat and cold; breathable air; and life-support systems. The advent of satellites and detailed wind mapping made navigation possible, yet a balloon still had to carry a cluster of heavy fuel tanks to stay in the air for three weeks, with its aeronauts suspended below in a pod not much larger than a Mini.

By the 1990s, competition was hotting up, and the prize was being fought over by pioneers with deep pockets.Sir Richard Bransonwas determined to claim it, as was renowned US aviator and former commodities trader Steve Fossett. The tale of how it came to be achieved by a comprehensive boy from Bristol and a brainy Swiss whose grandfather had been the model for Prof Calculus in Tintin is one of the great adventure stories of our time – and it’s told in a new film,The Balloonists, by British directorJohn Dower.

Thedocumentary’s central characters make the perfect odd couple. Bertrand Piccard was born into a family of frontier-expanding explorers: in 1931, his physicist grandfather, Auguste Piccard, became the first human to reach the stratosphere, ascending almost 10 miles in a hydrogen balloon; in 1960, his father, Jacques, was the first to dive to the floor of the Mariana Trench, nearly seven miles deep in the western Pacific. As a boy, Bertrand had been at Cape Canaveral to watch Apollo 11 take off – “You feel the ground vibrating, you feel the air vibrating,” he tells me now. “You see this rocket starting very, very slowly, and you think, ‘I’m witnessing the most extraordinary adventure of humankind.’” The youngster dreamt of an adventure of his own.

Yet the man who helped him realise that dream 30 years later was not even his first – or second – choice as co-pilot. Brian Jones had joined Piccard’s team only after an initial attempt to circle the globe in 1997 with co-pilot/engineer Andy Elson had ended with Piccard’s Breitling Orbiter ditching in the Mediterranean after just six hours. (“I thought that I could never be as ridiculous in my life as at this moment,” Piccard says.) Jones, who was the chief flying instructor for UK Ballooning, was brought in by Elson, a friend and fellow West Country lad, to advise on survival drills and preparations should their second attempt also fail. When Orbiter 2 was, indeed, forced to ditch in Myanmar, Elson left the team and Jones took over as project manager for Piccard and his new co-pilot, the American Tony Brown. He also agreed to double as a back-up pilot.

Jones’s practical organisational abilities hid a well-tested capacity to cope in high-risk situations. By 16 he was flying gliders in the Air Cadets, before joining the RAF, where he became a loadmaster on Hercules C-130 transport planes and, later, a helicopter winchman. In 1975 he was on the Hercules sent to Cambodia to evacuate British embassy staff from the surrounded capital of Phnom Penh, ahead of its inevitable fall to the communist forces of the Khmer Rouge.

“It was just a single trip,” Jones recalls, with typical RAF understatement. “We did what the Americans called ‘the Khe Sanh approach.’” This steep, high-speed combat landing, designed to evade small-arms fire, involved “coming in very high until the piano keys on the runway disappeared below the nose”. Then, the pilot would point the plane almost vertically at the ground and drop the flaps and landing gear, “and you would fly down fast until you collided with the ground”. The embassy staff were waiting to rush out to the plane – “We landed and stayed on the runway, then flew straight off.” Jones later took part in similarly daring missions in Cyprus andSouth Sudan.

Ballooning was a passion that had gripped him in later life, yet when it came to the redesigned Orbiter 3, he was determined to focus less on the race than “on the technical challenges of trying to build a balloon that could make the trip”. Managing weight was essential. The pressurised pod below the balloon was just 5.4m long, 2.8m wide and 1.9m high – barely tall enough to stand up in – and packed with equipment. There was room for only a single, curtained-off bunk, so the crew of two would take rest on rotation: one would try to sleep, while the other sat at a desk charting the balloon’s progress and direction. Piloting is the art of ascending or descending to catch (or avoid) specific wind currents, while also conserving fuel, aided by communication with ground control, which included two specialists, also working in tandem, who would monitor the winds and the weather. The balloon could not turn in any direction by itself or generate forward thrust.

It was an expensive project. “The build itself cost about £1m. And I suspect that the sponsors put as much in again, in terms of marketing and all the rest of it,” notes Jones. There were delicate geopolitical considerations, too. One of Piccard’s great coups was being granted permission to fly over China (whereas Branson was told he would have to fly over the Himalayas and land in Tibet – a hazardous prospect – before an intervention by diplomats persuaded the Chinese to relent, on condition that he leave their airspace as soon as possible). Piccard reports that Beijing told him, “Because you’re the only one who respected us, we’re going to help you.” However he still had to promise that if the balloon strayed above the 26th parallel, he would land. “I committed to do it, and we would have obeyed,” he tells me.

All the challengers were now locked in a gripping head-to-head battle to be first. Attempts – and failures – had been accelerating since the 1980s and by the late Nineties they were coming thick and fast. There were four serious attempts in 1998 alone, the final one by Branson, who managed to get up in the sky again in his Global Challenger balloon before the Orbiter 3 was ready. “Bertrand was, for a Swiss, oddly of a Latin temperament, saying ‘We need to go, we need to go!’” Jones recalls. Brown, a former Concorde pilot, was not convinced. “He was very much [of the mind], ‘It doesn’t fly until I’m ready to fly,’” Jones says.

Even after Branson was forced to ditch in the Pacific off Hawaii on Christmas Day 1998, the clock continued to tick. Elson – by now leading his own charge in a balloon sponsored by Cable & Wireless – was already airborne by mid-February 1999. Tensions continued to run high in the Orbiter camp, culminating in Brown and Piccard having an explosive argument in a restaurant, witnessed by Jones. “Tony felt that I was the diva in the team,” says Piccard in the film, “but it was my project.” The row ended with Brown bowing out, putting Orbiter 3’s back-up pilot into the hot seat.

As a father and grandfather, Jones felt he had to clear it with his wife, Jo, first. She was a pilot herself, he explains, so she knew that if the balloon had to ditch in the remote Pacific, he and Piccard probably wouldn’t survive. He remembers waking her up that night after getting back from the restaurant. “She said, ‘There’s only one thing that really worries me,’” he recalls, noting their shared sense of humour. “‘How will you get back if the world really is flat?’”

At 8.05am on March 1 1999, the Orbiter 3 launched from the Swissalpine village of Château-d’Oex. From then on, the trials kept coming. Piccard’s urgency to catch Elson by flying higher and faster soon had Luc Trullemans, their weather expert on the ground, instructing them to descend or expect the balloon to be pushed towards the North Pole. Then came the flight over the Sahara and the tricky navigation around Yemen – where they learnt that Elson’s balloon had been forced down in the Sea of Japan. The Orbiter flew on over the Arabian Sea, curving towards China and the narrow track just 31 miles wide that would allow them to remain in the jet stream without going above the 26th parallel. Amazingly, they were able to fly 1,120 miles in an almost straight line, Piccard remembers. “It was magical.”

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As they reached the Pacific, though, to avoid the weather that had forced Elson to ditch, Trullemans told them to veer south, adding another 2,000 miles to their journey. There would be nothing below but the empty ocean – this was the real danger zone, because of the time it would take any rescue mission to reach them if they crashed. Then the unexpected happened: they lost contact. On the ground, they feared the worst; in the balloon, they were flying blind. “We lost communication by satellite for two days, because we were very close to the Equator when the satellite was exactly above the envelope of the balloon,” Piccard explains. Finally, the antenna re-emerged from the balloon’s shadow and communication was restored.

By then something else had gone seriously wrong. “Our heating system had failed, and it was incredibly cold,” remembers Jones. He had gone to bed to get some rest and keep warm. “I woke,” he says, “and I was breathing really heavily, as if I’d done a race. I didn’t quite know why that would be. I thought, ‘Maybe I’m coming down with something,’ and I opened the curtain to look at Bertrand, and he was slumped on the desk.” Piccard, he recalls, “had his head down on his arms and was clearly not very well”. Jones’s crisis training kicked in: “Not knowing what the problem was, I put an oxygen mask on Bertrand and one on myself. And very quickly, I started to feel better.”

After putting Piccard in the bunk, Jones set about checking all the systems in turn. On the ground, there was concern that it might be a lung issue or that some form ofchemical contaminationwas being released within the capsule. But the rapid improvement seen in both men on supplemental oxygen suggested carbon monoxide build-up as a possible cause. “The doctor said we probably only had a couple of hours left,” Jones says. He replaced every filter he could find. It turned out that, invisibly, one of them had iced over. Disaster was averted.

Their final challenge came after they had cleared the Pacific and set a course for the Atlantic over Mexico. As they crossed the Caribbean, Jones recalls, the ground controller told them: “You guys have used three quarters of your fuel, you’ve only gone two thirds of the distance. We think you should land in Puerto Rico.”

“You have to understand that I’m not a daredevil, I’m an explorer,” Piccard says. “I hate a random risk. But when we had not enough fuel to make it to Africa, we said: ‘We don’t care. We’ll try.’ Because the worst that can happen is to ditch in the Atlantic and be rescued by a boat.”

Yet, in the absence of a strong wind, the only way forward was to burn more fuel in order to ascend, in the hope of catching a high-altitude jet stream. “It was terrible because every push of propane in the burner hurt me in my stomach,” Piccard says. “But without doing it, we would have ditched in the southern Atlantic.”

He was on the satellite phone to his wife as they climbed. He says: “I was crying. I was saying, it’s the third attempt. We’re probably not going to make it. We haven’t found the good winds. Then, in the last 100m that the balloon could reach, the [wind] direction changed 26 degrees to the left. It was a miracle that my wife and I shared.”

He and Jones watched the speed read-out rise steadily from 60 to 120 knots, approaching an astonishing 140mph. At last, they knew they would make it. The Orbiter finally touched down on a desert stretch in western Egypt on March 21, after 19 days, 21 hours and 55 minutes in the air. The record was theirs.

They look back now with the knowledge that their friendship allowed them not only to reach their goal but to enjoy it. “I thought it was beautiful to live in the sky for three weeks,” Piccard says. “In this capsule, eating, drinking, going to the toilet, sleeping, brushing our teeth, washing ourselves. We were in a little flat up there, suspended under a balloon in the wind.”

After the acclaim and the awards, Jones went back to his old life. Now 79, having failed the aviation medical exam needed to fly in 2019, he says he still likes to “give talks, play golf and just enjoy home life”. Piccard, meanwhile, says that the achievement was a tribute to everything that his illustrious forebears had taught him – “To never accept when people say it’s impossible”.

In 2016, he became one of two co-pilots to complete the first circumnavigation of the world in a plane powered only by solar energy – the Solar Impulse – and later this year will, at the age of 68, attempt to do the same in a plane powered by liquid green hydrogen, produced withrenewable energy. As he likes to say: “It’s not the sky that is the limit, it’s the fuel.”

Both men remember the message that Piccard was sent by Dick Rutan, the American aviator who had made his own unsuccessful attempt at the ballooning record in 1998, wishing them luck before they took off. “Remember,” it said, “the only sure way to fail is to quit.”

The Balloonists is in UK cinemas from May 22

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byVenus Vivaldi

in

May 10, 2026

I rang my wife from the balloon to say, ‘We’re probably not going to make it’

It was the last great aviation challenge: the race to circumnavigate the world in a balloon. Louis Blériot had flown a plane across the...

Read More

Taylor Swift Breaks Silence On Ex-Vegas Performer’s ‘Showgirl’ Lawsuit With Scathing Statement

With a legal feud on her hands,Taylor Swiftis not backing down.

A legal battle is brewing between the 36-year-old singer and a formerLas Vegas showgirl.

Swift’s legal team released a strong-worded statement, tearing into the performer’s lawsuit and dismissing it as a blatant attempt to cash in on the singer’s name.

Taylor Swift is not backing down as she has a legal feud on her hands

Image credits:Christopher Polk/Getty Images

Maren Flagg, who performs as Maren Wade, filed her lawsuit in March, sayingTaylor Swift’s latest albumtitle “The Life of a Showgirl” infringes on her trademark for the phrase “Confessions of a Showgirl.”

The lawsuit said Flagg had spent the last decade building a career around her “Confessions of a Showgirl” brand. Flagg also asked for Swift to be immediately blocked from selling related merchandise while they battle in court.

Filed in the United States District Court in California, Flagg’s lawsuit said the two titles “share the same structure, the same dominant phrase, and the same overall commercial impression.”

“Both are used in overlapping markets and are directed at the same consumers,” the lawsuit added.

Swift’s legal team called Maren Flagg’s lawsuit a blatant attempt to cash in on the singer’s name

Image credits:marenwade

Swift’s defense team slammed Flagg as well as the lawsuit in a brief they filed Wednesday.

“This motion, just likeMaren Flagg’s lawsuit, should never have been filed. It is simply Ms. Flagg’s latest attempt to use Taylor Swift’s name and intellectual property to prop up her brand,” said the singer’s lawyers.

They said Flagg is attempting to “broadly lump her cabaret show” and Swift’s album “together as ‘entertainment services.’”

The lawyers said it was “absurd” to compare Swift’s chart-topping album with Flagg’s cabaret shows, which they said were mostly conducted at small venues.

Image credits:taylorswift

Flagg “performs, if at all, in small intimate venues, such as a: ’55+ active community,’ ’55+ golf resort’; ‘RV & Golf Resort’; ’90 seat cabaret-style venue’ that offers dinner; hotel; and private supper club.”

They said her website also has no upcoming performances listed.

The lawyers said Flagg had never used “The Life of a Shiwgirl” in her social media promotion beforethe album announcement.

But soon after Swift unveiled her album, Flagg began reframing her branding vocabulary in her social media promotion, they said.

Flagg never used “The Life of a Showgirl” in her online promotions before the album announcement, the lawyers said

Image credits:marenwade

“Since the album announcement, plaintiff has reframed her brand around the album, flooding her social media accounts with posts attempting to align herself with Ms. Swift and the album,” said the brief filed on Wednesday.

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“Following the [album] announcement, plaintiff used the phrase or posted generally about Ms. Swift or the album over 40 times on her branded Instagram and TikTok accounts,” they said.

Image credits:marenwade

Flagg not only didn’t show concern about the album after its announcement but even spent several months “centering” her brand on “‘The Life of a Showgirl’s’ name, artwork, music, and lyrics to promote her little-known cabaret show,” the lawyers continued.

They also claimed that Flagg announced a brand new podcast “mimicking” the pop icon’salbum artwork, logo, title, and taglines, just four days after Swift made the announcement.

A look at Flagg’s Instagram and TikTok shows her lip-syncing to the pop icon’s songs and adding hashtags related to her album

Currently, Flagg’s TikTok and Instagram timelines include posts of her in her showgirl get-up, lip-syncing to Swift’s songs.

The hashtags in her posts include: #thelifeofashowgirl #TS12 #taylorswift and #swifties

Swift’s lawyers pointed out that Flagg’s TikTok and Instagram pages were “flooded” with “40+ advertisements for her brand using Ms. Swift’s music, trademarks, and other intellectual property without permission.

“Each of these advertisementsconstitutes actionable infringement,” they added, “and TASRM [TAS Rights Management] will be pursuing appropriate remedies for that.”

Image credits:taylorswift

Flagg’s attorney, Jaymie Parkkinen, said in a statement toBillboardthat he and his client are still moving forward with the lawsuit.

“We read it. Defendants assert First Amendment protection for napkins and hairbrushes,” the statement said. “We look forward to filing our response next week.”

Back in March, Parkkinen said his client was never contacted about theLove Storysinger using the “Life of a Showgirl” title.

They also claimed Swift went ahead with the title even after trying to trademark the phrase with the US Patent and Trademark Office but being denied because it was too similar to Flagg’s.

Image credits:taylorswift

“She registered it. She earned it. We have great respect for Swift’s talent and success, but trademark law exists to ensure that creators at all levels can protect what they’ve built,” Parkkinen toldCBS Newsin March. “That’s what this case is about.”

Flagg’s lawsuit asked for theongoing sales of Swift’s albumand merchandise to be blocked because each sale “compounds the confusion in the marketplace and further erodes [Wade’s] ability to be recognized as the soul source of her Confessions of a Showgirl brand.”

The former Las Vegas showgirl first began using the “Confessions of a Showgirl” banner when she started writing a column with the same title for theLas Vegas Weekly.

Flagg said she developed the “Confessions of a Showgirl” banner branding because she has a lot of “crazy stories” to tell

Image credits:marenwade

Flagg has said in interviews that she believes her experience as a showgirl has given her a bunch of “crazy stories” that she wanted to share with the world.

“I just have crazy stories. I have stories about getting stuck in a giant birthday cake, impersonating a Madonna impersonator when I don’t sound like Madonna or look like Madonna… getting to meet Mariah Carey,” she toldLas Vegas Morning Blendin a 2024 interview.

She turned her thoughts and experiences from her showbiz life into a live show and touring production, trademarking “Confessions of a Showgirl” in 2015.

“Shows Americans will sue people for anything lol,” one commented online

byVenus Vivaldi

in

May 09, 2026

Taylor Swift Breaks Silence On Ex-Vegas Performer’s ‘Showgirl’ Lawsuit With Scathing Statement

With a legal feud on her hands,Taylor Swiftis not backing down. A legal battle is brewing between the 36-year-old singer and a for...

Read More