SerpApi.Org
Andrew Wemyss, who has died aged 100, was a short-service commissioned officer, a Scottish landowner and an entrepreneur who diversified the family business from its historic roots in the Fife coalfields into a range of international companies spanning three continents.
Andrew Michael John Wemyss, a distant cousin of the 13th Earl of Wemyss, was born in Edinburgh on October 3 1925, the younger of two sons. His father, Michael John Erskine Wemyss, served in the Household Cavalry and his mother, Victoria Alexandrina Violet Cavendish-Bentinck, daughter of William Cavendish-Bentinck, 6th Duke of Portland, was a lady-in-waiting to the Queen Mother and the last surviving goddaughter of Queen Victoria when she died in 1994.
Young Andrew was brought up at Wemyss Castle, Fife, the ancient seat of Clan Wemyss. When he was at preparatory school, he brought a friend to stay with him. On one occasion, his mother called them in for lunch but Andrew appeared by himself.
“Where is your friend?” she asked.
“He’s stuck up a tree,” replied Andrew. “He bored me so I removed the ladder.”
He was educated at Eton, where his main interest was working in the school of mechanics. In the course of his time there, he built three boats. At the coronation of George VI in 1937, he was a page to his grandfather, the Duke of Portland, who carried Queen Elizabeth’s crown.
Having enlisted in the Scots Guards, Wemyss was commissioned in February 1945 and served with the Training Battalion on VE Day. After the war, he served in West Germany and, briefly, on the staff of the Transjordan Frontier Force. He resigned from the Army in 1947.
Since the 1500s, the family had operated numerous collieries in Fife that had sustained local communities until the 1960s. At a time when Britain’s coal industry was in decline, Wemyss led a strategy of diversification that established a broad portfolio of companies, ranging from tea and agricultural operations to property development, wines and spirits, and renewable energy. Sheep farming in Western Australia, large-scale tea plantations in Kenya and the production of fine wines in Provence became prominent interests in a global business.
For more than three decades, he served as chairman of the family’s Wemyss Development Company, and he was deeply committed to his family, his community, the people who worked for him and to the stewardship of an organisation that has endured for many generations.
In 1972 he moved from London to Torrie House, a large, Tudor-Gothic-style house near Torryburn, Fife, built for Sir William Erskine in the late 18th century. In 2008, he founded the John Scott Charitable Trust, named after his father-in-law, to advance education and relieve poverty among young people particularly in London, Greenock and Wemyss.
A member of the Royal and Ancient Golf Club, he regarded putting as a tiresome and unnecessary business; playing by his rules, the first one on the green was the winner. He also belonged to White’s and the Muthaiga Club in Nairobi, and was a past Prime Warden of the Fishmongers’ Company.
A voracious reader, especially of military history, he was a stalwart Francophile who loved crossing the Channel, French wine, and cheese. He was one of only two surviving Scots Guards officers of his generation, the other being the Earl of Elgin.
Andrew Wemyss married, in 1967, Janet Alethea Scott. She predeceased him and he is survived by their daughter and son.
Andrew Wemyss, born October 3 1925, died June 30 2026
