Then, parked outside the lodge was a huge, gorgeous black Mercedes with its lights on and some people standing around it in formal attire. Standing outside the lodge door was an older man wearing a tuxedo, overcoat and top hat, and he was putting on a white silk scarf while chatting with another man in a tuxedo. He was quite a dashing character.
On our way back out a few minutes later, we realized that the beautiful car came with a driver! The driver opened the back doors and the dashing man and his dashing wife (with large British floppy hat) climbed in. Wow. On the way back down the hill we discussed how much more fun our tours of England would be in a chauffeured Mercedes.
Back at our building, the alarm was still going off so we waited outside with several of our neighbors. Soon Karl, the friendly head of catering who we've chatted with before, came rushing down in a tuxedo. He turned the alarm off and commented, "At least Lord Wolfson has left now so we can relax."
Lord Wolfson! As in... Wolfson College? Karl said, "As in the man who paid for this college." We immediately Googled him when we got back inside, and it turns out the man with the top hat is a multi-millionaire businessman and a member of the House of Lords in Parliament. He used to be chairman of a company that owns the British store Argos among other things. He was also the chairman of Burberry for 15 years!! Lord Wolfson is still the chairman of the Wolfson Foundation, which funded not only Wolfson College, Oxford, but also Wolfson College, Cambridge and part of the National Portrait Gallery in London! The painting above is his official portrait in the National Portrait Gallery.
He has short biographies on Wikipedia and the National Portrait Gallery.
What fun! It was a far more exciting trip to the mailbox than we would have guessed.
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