Talk:John Hervey, 7th Marquess of Bristol

Death?
No mention of what he died of? Seems odd not to include that. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 76.233.24.210 (talk) 07:24, 9 June 2009 (UTC)

Francesca Fisher
It would flesh the article out to have just a little more on the wife. ThePeerage.com cannot count as a relaible source, since it cites Wikipedia, but it does provide good leads. It says here, citing the 1998 Complete Peerage, that she was the daughter of Douglas H. Fisher of Marbella, Malaga, Spain. An obit of John in the Spanish newspaper El Mundo says she was vegetarian and a non-drinker, and her father was a "constructor afincado" (builder? property developer?). It seems an unlikely pairing. Are there any reliable English sources for these? The Independent obituary by Jessica Berens, which I've just found, says "Francesca Fisher, to whom the marquess was briefly married, was driven halfway over a cliff in the Bentley and left hanging there like the last scene of The Italian Job". (NB it doesn't say who was at the wheel, but gives it as one in a list of examples of life-threatening japes that happened to his entourage.) Although that should be a reputable source, it is mentioned in passing without quotation or dates. A sentence or two about her, how they met, would add to the article. One can assume he was under pressure (internal or external) to marry. Why did he choose her, and why did she accept him? BrainyBabe (talk) 10:07, 11 March 2009 (UTC)
 * Nine years in, I think that's still a good question. Any answers? Valetude (talk) 00:16, 4 February 2018 (UTC)
 * Please read WP:NOTAFORUM. There are already six sentences in the article about her, including content from the obit in The Independent about parking the Bentley on a cliff. The article mentions she didn't drink alcohol. I'm not opposed to using information from El Mundo to speak about her more. Chris Troutman  ( talk ) 00:34, 4 February 2018 (UTC)
 * Also, nine years on the article has been completely rewritten from the ground up, so opinions based on information back then are as useful as wondering whether Gordon Brown could win an election. Ritchie333 (talk) (cont)  09:54, 4 February 2018 (UTC)

Removal of sourced material
I have just reverted the deletion of this sentence:


 * His maternal half-brother, George Lambton, said the family had no hard feelings about the disappearance of the money.

The sentence had been removed by User:Carr1, with the edit summary that it was not accurate. The core content policy of verifiability states that:


 * The threshold for inclusion in Wikipedia is verifiability, not truth&mdash;that is, whether readers are able to check that material added to Wikipedia has already been published by a reliable source, not whether we think it is true.

If a reliable source can be found to state that the families are feuding, by all means include that, subject to WP:BLP (which obviously doens't apply to the subject of this article, but may to other family members). BrainyBabe (talk) 06:59, 19 March 2009 (UTC)


 * The sentences have been altered again by the same editor. For the record, the Independent article I got the material from says:
 * His half-brother, George Lambton - their mother was the first wife of the 6th Marquess - said there were "no hard feelings" from the family at the fact that the money had all gone. Mr Lambton, 43, a Conservative councillor, added: "He made the most of his life; he packed more in his 44 years than most people do in their whole lives. But he definitely mellowed a bit in the last five years."
 * I had previously written:
 * His maternal half-brother, George Lambton, said the family had no hard feelings about the disappearance of the money.
 * and that had been changed to:
 * His maternal half-brother, George Lambton, said the Lambton side of the family had no hard feelings about the disappearance of the money. This cannot be said for the Hervey side.
 * The addition of "the Lambton side" is not stated in the article given as a reference. It might be a reasonable assumption, but there again it might not. Best not to guess.  Any suggested rewordings consistent with the source would welcome here.  The sentence "This cannot be said for the Hervey side." is nowhere given or implied in that or any source I have looked at, and cannot be allowed to stand. It is an unsourced statement masquerading as a sourced one, and so I am going to revert the changes now, putting a notice on User:Carr1's talkpage to that effect. BrainyBabe (talk) 23:59, 25 March 2009 (UTC)

Names
I have scratched my head at what to do with the names in this article. First-hand accounts in the sources from friends and colleagues seem to use "John", but that isn't consistent with our general guidelines on writing for nobility. I have gone with "John" for early life (particularly since "Hervey" can be confused with any number of family members, especially his father), then "the Earl" post 1960 and "the Marquess" post 1985, though occasionally still using "John" where this can still cause confusion. I can't think of a better way of doing this - can anyone else? Ritchie333 (talk) (cont)  14:10, 19 September 2016 (UTC)

Wastrel - for the record
I've worked on this article on and off for ten years; I'm glad it's got to GA. I note that the reviewer can't see the ODNB but assumes good faith. Just for the record, and because I do find the 7th marquess utterly compelling, I'll copy a couple of snippets from there. It begins:
 * Hervey, Frederick William John Augustus, seventh marquess of Bristol (1954–1999), wastrel, was born on 15 September 1954 .....

Of all the hundreds of ODNB biographies I've read, I cannot think of another that uses such a pungent term for a one-word life description. Where other subjects would have "sculptor" or "politician" or "saloniere", the biographer can find no positive activity to ascribe to him. The bio only has two paragraphs. The second sentence of the second one turns "speak no ill of the dead" on its head:
 * Bristol was notorious for mean-spirited practical jokes

And the biographer concludes with a cautionary note to us:
 * Bristol's chief legacy, besides the ruin of his family's fortunes, was a gift to obituarists, who made an imaginary genetic link with the eccentricities of assorted eighteenth-century Herveys.

That's us told, then. Carbon Caryatid (talk) 19:50, 4 November 2016 (UTC)
 * I came across this article about six months ago when I heard mention of Lady Victoria Hervey, wondered "what on earth is a lady doing on TV?" and read up about the Herveys, of which John is the most fascinating (though his father, Victor, comes a close second). It's difficult to know how to summarise the Marquess' life. On the one hand, some of the wacky things involving helicopters and shotguns are just stuff of the bizarre life of the upper-class, the lack of fatherly love and the drug dependency is genuinely sad, throwing the family fortune down the toilet and a genuinely nasty streak, particularly post-marriage is not at all nice. A complex character, indeed. PS: I can access the ODNB through my library card (see above conversation) and although I didn't add "wastrel" (did you do that, CC?) I did check it was genuinely there. Ritchie333 (talk) (cont)  20:22, 4 November 2016 (UTC)
 * The word "wastrel" was added in parentheses and with strict reference to the ODNB a couple of edits after my first contribution. I'd added a brief paragraph about Bristol's "remarkable dissoluteness"; another editor seems to have been spurred by this to look up the subject in the ODNB, which I don't think I had access to in 2006. Carbon Caryatid (talk) 20:45, 4 November 2016 (UTC)