How Goodwood’s last duchess was chased down the street for creating the first multiracial aristocratic family

Susan, the 10th Duchess of Richmond and Gordon, was a campaigner on racial equality and unlikely trailblazer for social change from the stately splendour of Goodwood, writes Mark Mowbray

Susan, the 10th Duchess of Richmond and Gordon (centre), with her family at Goodwood (Goodwood Estate)

There could hardly be a more unlikely social campaigner for racial equality than the modest woman in a straw hat seated in a corner of the Duke’s Box at Glorious Goodwood, the celebrated race track on the Sussex Downs.

Yet for a few years she was attacked by the press and viewed as an unwelcome figure of controversy for her dangerously liberal views on race. Susan, Duchess of Richmond and Gordon, who died on 13 June aged 90, had married into the upper echelons of the aristocracy, but her legacy is as a significant campaigner on racial integration and tolerance.

In the early Sixties, the duchess was chased down the street by angry bigots and chastised by most of the English newspapers, outraged that she had adopted two half-African children.