Dream Come True

From the days of the dime novel through the era of soap opera, U.S. romantics have dreamed of inheriting an estate and a title in Great Britain. Early this year the dream came true for 60-year-old Adrian Ivor Dunbar, a handyman from Upper Fairmount, Md. Adrian left England more than 40 years ago, made his way to the U.S. in slow stages via Australia and Canada, married a comely widow, fathered two sons (both now in the U.S. Army) and in 1939 became a U.S. citizen. Last January, at the deaths of two cousins whom he had never seen, Handyman Dunbar suddenly became Sir Adrian Dunbar, heir to a 259-year-old Scottish baronetcy and a 3,400-acre Wigtownshire estate complete with manor house, tenantry, hunting lodge and a -L-20,000 trust fund.

As Maryland neighbors oohed and aahed over his good fortune, Sir Adrian sold his tools and made ready to claim his inheritance. "I have no highfalutin ideas about getting into society," the new baronet told reporters who met him in Southampton last month. "I am poor as Job's cat, and I'm satisfied to go on living that way . . . but this is an honor--kinda historic."

Haggis & Bees. In the village of Newton Stewart, Sir Adrian's tenants welcomed him with a bang-up banquet featuring bagpipes and a steaming haggis. An obliging cousin lent him a Dunbar tartan. Then the new baronet went out to have a look for himself at Mochrum Park, the ancestral seat of the Dunbar family.

The 40-room mansion had been vacant for 20 years. The door was locked when he got there. Moss and mildew flourished on the paneled walls. Water seeping from a blocked gutter had rotted the floors. Fungus grew on ancient banisters. Ivy, snaking through broken windowpanes, writhed in green profusion. Thousands of dead bees littered every corner. Lady Dunbar, erstwhile tidy Maryland housewife, held up a picture frame from which the canvas had long since rotted. "A portrait," she remarked wryly, peering through it, "of the wife of the present baronet."

Death & Taxes. The Dunbar solicitors opened Sir Adrian's eyes to even more discouraging discoveries: two houses owned by the estate in England had been sold to meet death duties; most of the -L-20,000 trust fund would have to go for the same cause. Only seven overgrown acres of the vast Scottish estate were still available for farming. Income and real-estate taxes would gobble up all but -L-420 of the -L-2,000 he would collect in rents from the rest of his holdings. With the mansion uninhabitable, the only shelter available to the new baronet and his lady was the heatless, lightless. waterless hunting lodge, and even that had been rented out for weekends. Sir Adrian went back to London and bivouacked in a railway waiting room. His money running out, he got to thinking of the cheap London district he was raised in, before he had dreams of nobility. He put an ad in the paper: "Man of title, but lacking means, seeks respectable furnished accommodation (two rooms) in East Ham for self and wife."

Sir Adrian refused to be discouraged.

"I'm not going to give up and go back to America," said Sir Adrian, "even if I have to live in a tent." "I hope he's going to stay," said one of his 15 Scottish tenants. "We like this wee fella."

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