Lord Alistair McAlpine, the visionary collector, triggered Broome's affluence
Despite the BBC news headline, the Lord Alistair McAlpine of West Green I knew was no grandee.
He was ever the down-to-earth, frangipanis-loving Broome visionary, back in the Kimberley region for the first time in a decade, when I last rendezvoused with him in 2012.
I recall he liked what he saw in his beloved Broome, with one warning about the town he truly helped put on the international tourism map.
“It’s important the planners stick to the ‘no higher than a palm tree’ height principle when it comes to new development,” he advised.
Describing the heat during his last visit in March 2012 as like a very gentle sauna, McAlpine, the Treasurer of the British Conservative Party under Margaret Thatcher, was there to be recognised by the shore for his contribution to putting the place on the tourism map.
Dubbed by the eastern states press as "Lord Of The Bush", he was formally recognised at a ceremony in March 2012 when given the presentation of the shire's highest honour, Freeman of the Municipality.
Coming to buy seashells, he first visited the former pearling town in 1979 and was taken with it – albeit describing it as a derelict town. He'd been collecting seashells since a boy - and first came to the then farming town Perth in 1958 on the maiden voyage of the SS Oriana, the first of a new era in ocean liners.
Within hours of arriving in the Kimberley town all those decadesago, he’d purchased a cottage, then the Sun Cinemas (pictured above), and within a few years he'd started a zoo and a luxury resort.
He had been previously building Perth property since the mid-1960s including construction of the Pamelia hotel through his family business.
His acquisitions of Broome properties – many of the best of the pearling master's cottages – got to number into the 20s. One of his books was titled, Adventures of a Collector, and his stretched the world from shells, stuffed birds, old cushions, Turkish carpets, beads, aboriginal art, plants and travellers' tales.
“Without its old houses, Broome was nothing,” the softly spoken McAlpine told me.
His biggest acquisition was the Cable Beach property – then a caravan park and sewer – which is now the Cable Beach Resort (pictured above). It was bought quite informally – a beer mat contract – at the Roey pub.
“The Cable Beach Resort is far better than in the past,” McAlpine acknowledged in our conversation.
Broome, set in one of Australia's great wilderness areas, is easily isolated.
McAlpine’s reluctant exit from the town came in the wake of the debilitating 1989 Australian pilots’ strike, and he said he might still be there but for it.
As the UK-based The Telegraph noted in his weekend obituary in 1989, "after an Australian pilot’s strike lasting six months, his Australian tourism venture, in which he had invested £250 million, collapsed, costing him much of his personal fortune."
"It’s greatly improved since my day," he suggested, dressed dapperly in earthy colours that matched the geographical locality, but perhaps not suiting the temperature.
"The town has developed very well, but it’s not there yet.
"There’s a lot more buildings, but not much has changed.
"It’s a mature town, but I’ve been impressed by the restraint. They’ve stroked it terrifically,” he said.
He felt there was a need for more foliage in the town. By contrast he'd recalled the return visits to Port Douglas over the years which he noted had changed out of all recognition.
During a public gathering he was quizzed on the impact arising from the development of the controversial gas project at James Price Point.
"Resources will be a short-term thing," he suggested.
But he indicated he was more concerned at the prospect of eco-hotels opening up through the Kimberley and people arriving to them on buses and in gas-guzzling four-wheel drives.
He is keen for railway lines to be constructed in the region. He suggested a railway line from Meekatharra to Broome and onto Darwin and a narrow gauge rail line from Broome up to Cape Leveque on the Dampier Peninsula.
It was only in 2010 that he stepped down from his seat in the House of Lords. The West Green title stems from his association with West Green House, an 18th-century country house at West Green in Hartley Wintney in the English county of Hampshire built by General Henry Hawley, who led the cavalry charge at the Battle of Culloden.
The National Trust has owned the house since 1971, after being left the property by Victor Sassoon in 1957. McAlpine acquired the lease in 1976 and restored the gardens and added monuments designed by the classical architect Quinlan Terry.
The house was damaged by an IRA bomb attack in 1990, though McAlpine had left the house just three weeks previously, at the expiration of his lease.
Of course, Marylyn Abbott of Sydney bought the lease from the National Trust in 1993 having previously developed her well known Kennerton Green garden in Mittagong, New South Wales. Abbott, the former Sydney Opera House tourism operator, holds opera seasons there.
Lord McAlpine in 2012, photograph by Jonathan Chancellor
He lived with his wife, Athena (pictured above on his last trip to Australia at Broome), in southern Italy, owning a haute bed-and-breakfast, the 15th-century Il Convento di Santa Maria di Costantinopoli, in Apulia. His dear friends Sarah Stein, his book publicist, and her chef husband, Rick Stein, along his last guests.
I am sure it would have been fun, but I never got there.
Back in Broome, guests can still stay at McAlpine House, the Broome house built in 1910 for pearling master Herbert Kennedy.
Made in the traditional and unique architectural style of Broome, from corrugated iron and timber with spacious, latticed verandahs, the house was purchased in 1982 from the Kennedy family. He planted an extensive garden with aviaries which housed exotic birds, including his prized Eclectus Parrots, which still reside at McAlpine House.
It was to be Lord McAlpine’s residence in Broome for the next decade.
In the late 1990s, the house once again became a pearler's home, being purchased by Marilynne Paspaley, a member of the family who have been master pearlers in the Kimberley since the 1930s. Marilynne Paspaley has overseen its evolution into a boutique hotel.
The Broome property market has much to credit/blame Lord McAlpine for its current status with a $640,000 house price median.
"It's affluence caused largely by myself," he suggested over the years.
