One can celebrate the long life of the 11th Duke of Marlborough, I suppose, even as one challenges the presumption of inherited superiority that all too obviously governed the manner in which it was led. “Your Grace”, the expected term of address, was not one that came easily to the mouth of anyone by the time of his accession to the dukedom in 1972; it was not one that could ever be uttered by the present writer who came to know ‘Sunny’ in the year following, after moving to a property in the town of Woodstock.

The privilege of wandering gratis through the grounds of Blenheim Palace, which I was accorded as a ‘local’, was not lightly regarded, despite its recipient bolshily questioning the right of anyone to hold suzerainty over what was so clearly a public asset. The immensity of the park was eye-popping to the observer; ditto the massive scale of Sir John Vanbrugh’s palace, which in those days was starting to see from the duke some of the tender loving care it so direly needed.

More than one of last week’s obituaries paid tribute to his life- long efforts to restore what his father — a curmudgeon noted for his thrilling rudeness — had so conspicuously neglected. Stories to the detriment of the tenth duke abound. Simon Winchester tells a good one in his 1978 book, Their Noble Lordships. On a visit to one of his daughters, he was heard to bellow down the stairs before breakfast that his toothbrush “was not working”. It was not foaming properly, and would she kindly arrange to have a new one. “The puzzled daughter went to investigate, finding the cause immediately. Toothbrushes only foamed, she carefully explained to her father, if you applied toothpowder: the valet at Blenheim usually performed the task for His Grace each morning.”

His son naturally had the services of a valet, too. The Times obituary noted some of his duties: “Four outfits were always laid out by his valet — riding dress to start the day, casual wear for the morning, a suit for meetings and a smoking jacket for the evenings.”

I was frequently to see the besuited duke as he held court — the word is appropriate — in Woodstock Town Hall as chairman of the magistrates’ bench. The wide lapels of his coats in the 1970s, while in tune with the fashion of the time, were only accidentally in the mode, the garments clearly having been tailored in the 1950s. It was evident that the duke was careful with his clothes, and justly proud of possessing, in his strapping 6ft 5in frame, a figure unchanged since his days in the Life Guards.

In speech, as in dress, he harked back to another age. Like his friend Princess Margaret, he went in for the languid stretching of vowels. (Ringing her pal John Wells at Private Eye, the princess would ask for ‘Jawn’ — which very soon became his nickname.) Dispensing justice at Woodstock one day to a succession of television licence defaulters, the duke rattled out the penalties in rapid-fire delivery: “Twenty pounds fine, £10 corsts.” “Ten pounds what?” asked one. “Corsts!” thundered the duke.

Most of the obituarists noted that Sunny — the name originating in his first-held title of the Earl of Sunderland — was a duke in the grandest style. The same could be said of few of his peers — the Duke of Buccleuch, certainly; the Duke of Devonshire, too. This meant that in his consideration there were activities unbecoming to his status. I recall going over to Blenheim in 1975 to cover the opening of the palace’s miniature railway. Our photographer asked if the duke would be snapped on the footplate of one of the engines. With a visible shudder, he said he did not think that would be necessary. Happily, the duchess was also present and was able to make her husband understand that this was the picture that every newspaper reader would be expecting to see with the story.

Readers were also expecting to see, of course, the headlines that were duly delivered last week on the lines of “black sheep takes over the palace”. The accession to the title of the former Jamie Blandford, which once seemed so menacing a prospect, now looks likely to bring a new lease of life to Blenheim. I fancy he will surprise us all.