Lord Wodehouse (the "most-married man in the peerage") was a notorious skirt-chaser who counted among his conquests Eartha Kitt and Glynis Johns (and was once caught naked by an irate husband in a hotel cupboard).

Incredibly, one wife (Cynthia Westendarp, a Suffolk farmer's wife whom Wodehouse met at Newmarket) managed to hold onto Wodehouse for several years. After she contracted polio, he invited her to recuperate at Kimberley, his seat near Wymondham, Norfolk, "and she never moved out". They were married in 1953...

Though Kimberley's Queen Anne brick mansion was built on land held by his forebears for five hundred years (and had once been visited by Elizabeth I), Wodehouse sold it five years later. Why? "It was," he later explained, "the easiest way to get rid of Cynthia!"

[They were divorced three years later.]

[A jovial extrovert whose interests included breeding prize pigs, playing championship tiddlywinks, shark fishing, UFOs and winter sports (for much of the 1950s he was a member of Britain's national bobsled team), Wodehouse's antics must have greatly amused his Godfather, P.G. Indeed, as a Liberal spokesman in the House of Lords, Wodehouse advised the electorate to vote Conservative -- and was promptly sacked by David (later Lord) Steel.]