CORONET CLAIMED

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXIV, Issue 22777, 10 July 1937, Page 2 (Supplement)

CORONET CLAIMED

OLD MAN'S DOCUMENTS

CHALLENGE TO RANCHER EARL

While the noblemen of Britain,, wearing their robes and coronets, gathered in Westminster Abbey for the Coronation ceremony, an 81-year-old Lancastrian; who for years struggled to prove his claim to a coronet, was placed in his coffin. He was Mr. Robert Pownall, retired optician, of Haydock, who, before the death of the 10th Earl of Egmont in 1932, presented his claim as the hereditary heir and successor. When the earl died, however, he was succeeded by his son, Frederick George Moore Percival, a young Canadian rancher. In addition to the title, which is an Irish one, created in 1733, the new earl inherited £33,000. Mr. Pownall then put his every penny into his fight. He contended the young rancher —now the lltli Earl of Egmont —was descended from a second marriage by the second earl, and was therefore not in the direct line of succession. Mr. Pownall claimed he was a descendant, on his grandmother's side, from the second earl's first marriage. As his claim was founded on female ancestry, the Chancery Court disallowed it. Ono of Mr. Pownall's sons revealed that his father died believing he was the legal Earl of Egmont. "He always told us his grandmother was a descendant of the second son of the second Earl of Egmont's first marriage, and that the title and estates would automatically come to him on the death of tho tenth earl," the son said. "Just before he died ho reminded us that tho tenth earl's son in Canada has not made any attempt to take his seat in the House of Lords as Baron Lovoll." Another member of tho family stated that Mr. Pownall's collection of documents on the Egmont ancestry was tremendous. After his death the six bins of them wero converted into a Coronation bonfire.