After spending several months in the Libyan desert, it was nice to get back to the green, rolling hills of Surrey and Broome Hall. Ollie had been there for months on end shooting The Lion of the Desert, an overlong if historically accurate epic about Omar Mukhtar – played by Anthony Quinn – who led guerrilla resistance to Italian rule in Libya until his capture and execution in 1931. In the movie, filmed on a lavish scale and bankrolled by Colonel Gaddafi, reportedly to the tune of thirty-five million dollars, Oliver plays the fascist General Graziani, appointed by Mussolini to crush the rebellion. It’s a noble performance, full of the required gravitas, and it was a film he was justifiably proud of, in spite of its eventual failure at the box office.
There was always something special about coming home to Broome Hall for Ollie, his own little piece of England, especially from such an alien and far-flung location as Libya. ‘He aspired to be what he probably always wanted, that was to be an English squire and a gentleman, and he was,’ says Christensen. ‘He loved all that bullshit about being related to Peter the Great. It was a great source of pride to him. To sit on that ancestral pile and to look across the land as far as you can see, and the woods and the lake and the horses and the croquet lawn, and that half-mile drive going to the huge gates, he just loved it.’
But the place had never stopped being a millstone round Oliver’s neck and by the end of the seventies it had finally brought him to his knees. He simply couldn’t afford to keep it running any more, a stark reality that broke his heart. It must have been awful to watch all his belongings being packed into tea chests and the large furniture sold off, the stables cleared out and his beloved horses going, to see his personality totally erased from a house that had so often played host to the sound of laughter and marvellous antics until it was completely empty and soulless. ‘I remember when the whole thing was starting to fragment and Broome Hall was going,’ says Mark. ‘And being down in the cellar bar with him, a place that was a shrine to fun rather than a shrine to alcohol, it was his play place. I remember him breaking the place up almost, breaking pictures, the Thorhill Glass got broken and the Penicillin Glass was smashed. There was a sense of finality about it all, that mould was being broken, because it was time for a transition. He was moving on.’
Worse, his gang of loyal workers had to be dismissed. Too upset, Ollie couldn’t face them himself, so it was left to David. ‘I got them all together in the hall and gave them a speech about our problems and they took it well. Some of them had been there years.’
Although leaving Broome Hall was, as David puts it, a ‘huge wrench for Ollie’, for about a month now it had ceased to resemble a proper home. The reason: Jacquie and Sarah were no longer living in it. It hadn’t always been happy families between everyone but the last year or so had been particularly rough and Jacquie had walked out on Ollie several times. ‘They’d have a big old barney and then we’d go and stay with my grandparents or somewhere else for a few nights,’ recalls Sarah. ‘Then we’d go back home again. But obviously it was just getting to the stage where it wasn’t manageable any more.’
That Christmas was particularly miserable. On New Year’s Eve Oliver sat sullen in the kitchen, imploring the clock to reach midnight. Unable to wait any longer, he changed the hands to twelve o’clock and shouted, ‘Now it’s midnight! Now it’s New Year,’ and, taking out his shotgun, he blasted the timepiece off the wall.
Just ten years old at the time, Sarah couldn’t help put pick up on the changeable atmosphere in the house. ‘I was aware that it was quite volatile. They tried to hide a lot from me, but there were moments when they couldn’t and there were occasions it got quite physical as well. My mum did have the odd black eye.’ Jacquie even turned up at Millfield once to visit Mark with a rather obvious shiner. ‘By helicopter. Can you imagine it? The things I did. But it wasn’t that often. Maybe it was my fault: I provoked him too much. It would be a complete sudden outburst and one just happened to be in the way. If you have a really awful row, sometimes it reaches a point of no control and also no return. But it happened so seldom.’
Such incidents can’t be so easily dismissed or swept under the carpet, especially coming from a man who all too often embraced violence. ‘Jacquie had a horrific time,’ says David. ‘I wasn’t there but Bill and Jen were and there are stories of Ollie pulling Jacquie along the passageway by her hair. Towards the end it was gruesome. Jekyll and Hyde again.’
Still, Jacquie was more than capable of sometimes giving as good as she got. ‘She tried to stab him once,’ reveals Sarah. ‘He always used to show me these marks. “Look at this scar on my arse, girl! That was your mother with a carving knife.” I don’t know if that’s true or not, but he used to show me this scar on his bum. I wouldn’t put it past her, she was very feisty.’
Then one night Jacquie grabbed her daughter, put her in the back seat of her car and drove off, this time never to return. She’d finally had enough. A few days earlier they’d all been at the pub and after returning to Broome Hall Jacquie was as usual dispatched to the kitchen to cook Ollie and his mates dinner. ‘I had a great big bowl of pasta sauce that I’d heated up and was ready to serve and he just tipped it all over me. I didn’t react, I just went on serving it out, I didn’t do anything, I didn’t go and clean myself up, I just sat there for the rest of the evening covered in pasta sauce. It had come to a stage where I thought, I don’t think I can take any more of this.’
Jacquie was under the impression that Ollie wanted things to change anyway. ‘I think he needed to move on and I think I was wise to go.’ She’d suspected, or knew, that he’d been seeing other women. ‘And, looking back, I think in a sense he was trying to make it so that I would be the one to leave rather than him; which I did in the end.’
By walking out Jacquie knew exactly what she was doing, that by not being married to Oliver she had no legal right whatsoever to his property or wealth, not that it bothered her one jot. ‘Even if we had been married I would never have gone to a solicitor, it just isn’t in my nature. When I took Sarah and left I expected nothing in return. I was with the man because I loved the man, I wasn’t with him because of what he had.’ In any case, without having to raise the issue Oliver made sure that Sarah was provided for, and that included continuing to pay for her education. ‘That’s what he was like,’ says Jacquie. ‘He was supportive of everybody in his past, Mark, Kate, everyone.’
Broome Hall was eventually sold to a property developer and Sarah remembers spending a final day there with her father, saying goodbye to the place before it was carved up into apartments. They walked around the grounds and in and out of empty rooms, finally coming to rest in what had been Ollie’s bedroom. ‘We both stood there and just looked out of the window. It was a view he’d always loved. As a ten-year-old you don’t really understand what’s happening, but there was this sense of sadness. Broome Hall had been his dream and it had gone.’
Ollie moved into a seven-bedroom Grade II-listed sixteenth-century farmhouse called Pinkhurst Farm, just outside Oakwoodhill, near the Surrey–West Sussex border. Jacquie meanwhile moved to Guildford, close to where Sarah was attending boarding school, and found a job working for a medical magazine. For the first time in her life, aged nearly forty, she took out a mortgage, the first step towards independence and trying to build a new life for herself. Every weekend she drove Sarah to Pinkhurst to stay with her father, dropping her off halfway up the drive, not wishing to get too near the house. She’d do the same when picking her up, and there would be Sarah waiting alone near the bottom of the driveway. ‘One time I came and he was there with her. “Why don’t you come to the house,” he said. So I did, and we had a couple of glasses of wine. Sarah had a bedroom there and while she was upstairs Oliver said, “Why don’t you stay?”’ It was a difficult position to be put in and Jacquie was tempted. Of course she was: they’d had a great life together and shared a child. ‘But then it flashes back: do you really want to go through all that again?’ So in the end the answer was no. And after all these years Jacquie still thinks she made the right decision. ‘Do you ever know if you’ve made the right decision? I so very nearly did say yes, but I didn’t, I said no. And that was the last time I saw Oliver.’