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Bertie Hope-Davies, who died on August 23 aged 77, was the most
gregarious bachelor and welcome house guest of his age; his capacity for
friendship, his absurd contradictions (he was known to change his mind in
mid-sentence) and his boundless enthusiasm appealed to and delighted every
generation he encountered.

A man of old-fashioned style and taste, wit without malice and
gossip without betrayal, Hope-Davies was a welcome presence at parties in London
and at weekends in the country, as a guest of the Duke of Beaufort at Badminton,
of the Naylor-Leylands at Milton, or of Lady Ashcombe at Sudeley Castle.

Successive generations of the landed and literate, from
Guinnesses to Cavendishes, saw him for what Pauline Lady Rumbold described as
"simply the best house guest and the ultimate 'spare man'."

James Hubert Hope-Davies was born on September 14 1927 at
Swansea, south Wales, the only child of a well-known Carmarthenshire lawyer,
Frank Davies. From Harrow - where he learned of his father's death from reading
the newspaper - he progressed to Sandhurst.

In 1946 he was commissioned into the 1st Battalion, the Welsh
Guards, and served in Palestine during the last months of the Mandate.

His attention was then drawn to farming: he apprenticed on the
Penrice Estate, on the Gower Peninsula, and qualified at the Royal Agricultural
College, Cirencester.

From lodgings at the George Hotel, Dorchester, with his mother,
Valerie, Hope-Davies bought a mixed dairy farm near Evershot in Dorset.

During this period he found time to hunt with the Cattistock
foxhounds, having insisted on riding a horse which could not jump in this
notoriously hard riding country. In 1963 he appeared as a mounted extra in the
hunting scenes of Tony Richardson's ribald film version of Henry Fielding's Tom
Jones.

But so far as farming was concerned, Hope-Davies had not found
his metier. Remarking one day on the scruffiness of a field, and lamenting the
standards of his neighbours, he was surprised to be told that he owned the land
in question. On another occasion he brought in his neighbour's cows for milking
by mistake. "I can't be expected to know all my cows by sight," he
protested.

All the while, Hope-Davies had been cultivating an interest in
country houses in Dorset and Wiltshire and he began to buy and sell properties
on behalf of friends and clients, who trusted his taste and judgment and his
knowledge of Georgian architecture.

When he lost everything - including his farm and cows - in the
property crash of 1974, he moved to London and took a flat off Sloane Square,
where his drawing-room windows had a commanding view of the ladies' changing
rooms at Peter Jones. But he kept a cottage on the Longleat estate and never
lost his love of Wiltshire.

Hope-Davies shared the flat with his friend Gregory Dolak and a
mongrel called Ben, whom he taught to let himself in and out for walks on his
own. On one occasion the dog took himself to Hyde Park on the Number 19 bus and,
according to Hope-Davies, was returned to the flat by Ava Gardner.

With Dolak, Hope-Davies established Craig & Davies, finding
flats and houses for well-off friends and recommended clients. "I'd rather do
property than poverty," he once remarked. "Of course there was no Craig," he
would admit. "But then I could always blame him when clients got irate."

In his later years, the pair moved to Flood Street, Chelsea,
where the green bookshelves of the drawing room were lined with Frank Davies's
legal library.

Hope-Davies was to have one further career, as a catwalk model
for Vivienne Westwood, and a film part in 101 Dalmatians which earned him £1,000
a day.

Hope-Davies was teetotal; during his farming days, when he had
been a local magistrate and churchwarden, he had been jailed in Dorchester for
two months for drink-driving. Thereafter, he devoted himself to the art of
friendship, and this became his true achievement. He was, as his friend the
painter Matthew Carr, observed, "a creature from another age where conversation
aspires to art. His every utterance was suffused by humanity."

Shortly before he died, Bertie Hope-Davies was staying with
friends in Morocco. Looking out to the Atlas Mountains from his poolside lounger
he observed: "Just like Wiltshire."

Hope-Davies is survived by his mother who, aged 103, still lives
in west London.

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