Remarkably, so did everyone else. In 1956, Edward Montagu opened the National Motor Museum at Beaulieu, “and if you look at the newspaper cuttings from the time, I don’t think any of them refer to the trial,” says Lord Montagu. “It’s almost as if it had never happened.”
When Edward Montagu died in 2015, aged 88, the baton was passed. “For a long time I was the heir and had the luxury of picking the bits that I wanted to do,” says Lord Montagu. “Since he died, I’ve had to take on everything else.”
This can be overwhelming: “You have to guard against it becoming bigger than you and dominating you,” he says.
His circuit-breaker is his job, one day a week, as head of heritage at the Radio Times, looking after the archives. “I’ve been doing it since 2003 and consider myself lucky to still be doing it,” he says. “I’m very happy being a small cog in a big machine.”
