George Sassoon - Personal Life

Personal Life

After his father died in 1967, Sassoon inherited and occupied his father's large country house, Heytesbury House at Heytesbury in Wiltshire. He found it much neglected and worked to restore it, and also battled unsuccessfully to stop a planned new A36 bypass from going through the park of the house. In the process, he sold many of his father’s papers to raise additional funds. After a serious fire at Heytesbury House in the 1990s he moved to a smaller property in the nearby village of Sutton Veny; but spent part of the year on Mull, where he had inherited his mother's property Ben Buie on her death in 1973.

Sassoon married four times - firstly Stephanie Munro, at Inverness in 1955 (dissolved 1961); secondly Marguerite Dicks in 1961 (dissolved 1974); thirdly Susan Christian-Howard in 1975 (dissolved 1982); and lastly Alison Pulvertaft. He had a daughter by his first marriage, Kendall Sassoon, who has two children of her own with her partner, Stewart Reeves. They are Oliver Thornycroft Reeves-Sassoon and Logan Thea Reeves-Sassoon. Kendall is the Patron-in-Chief of the Siegfried Sassoon Fellowship, and a Lady Associate Royal Welch Fusilier. His daughter and son by his third marriage, Isobel Hannah (born 1976) and Thomas Thornycroft (born 1978), were both killed in a road accident in Mendip, Somerset, in 1996.

Sassoon was something of a bon-viveur, well-known among other things for his playing of the piano-accordion. Among his other interests were cricket, the Antipodes, and amateur radio - his call-sign was GM3JZK.

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