'Eccentric Multimillionaires Living in Poverty'

It’s a Santa Barbara story out of a Charles Dickens novel: an eccentric brother and sister living a life of poverty for decades while turning their backs on an English estate worth millions.

It’s been one of the most novel, complicated, long-running cases in Santa Barbara Superior Court conservatorship history, piling up thousands of pages of documents — and thousands of dollars of legal fees on both sides of the Atlantic.

Before John died last June at 85, his Cornwall property was locked in the centuries-old “entail” system, whereby the eldest male heir inherited everything. It was one of the last of England’s entailed estates.

That meant that upon his death, it would have gone to a California cousin, John Westropp Figg-Hoblyn, leaving his sisters, Margaret and Anne Auld, out in the cold.

And that is where Margaret, now 78, has been living off and on in recent years. Attorneys and courts here and in England made legal history by managing to end the entail by creating a will before John Paget’s death. As a result, the estate, now estimated at $4,760,310 and under court administration in England, will go to Margaret and Anne. John Westropp, who unsuccessfully contested the action, gets $200,000.

Margaret (like John Paget, a Stanford University graduate) “has a long history of homelessness and tent-living,” and a few months ago, she “was discovered in a starved and disheveled state,” according to a county conservator’s report.

She was being evicted from her latest place, and the next stop was out on the street, conservators said. So they stepped in. Now, she’s a multimillionaire, on paper at least.

Although part of the property, considered prime farm land, has been sold to benefit the estate, much of it is still tied up, awaiting sales, according to a conservator report.

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Eccentric Multimillionaires Living in Poverty

See Also:
John Figg Hoblyn, California Victim