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THE DOWAGER DUCHESS OF RICHMOND AND GORDON, who has died aged 90, was, for many years, the elegant chatelaine of Goodwood House and the 12,000-acre Goodwood estate in West Sussex, where she shared the liberal, tolerant and deeply Christian outlook on life of her husband, the 10th Duke of Richmond and 5th Duke of Gordon.
She became known in particular for creating the Goodwood International Dressage competition, laying the foundations for the development of British dressage into the country's fastest growing equestrian activity and one in which Britain has gone on to win gold medals in recent Olympic Games.
A great lover of ballet (her eldest daughter Ellinor became a ballet dancer), she was instrumental in promoting dressage to music or "Freestyle to Music", where the horses' paces are set to music to create a "dance", and which is now a component of the dressage competition at the Olympics.
The Duchess was also a trailblazer of the organic farming movement and, with her husband, made headlines in the early 1960s when they adopted two mixed-race daughters.
Susan Monica Grenville-Grey was born on July 26 1932, the daughter of Cecil Grenville-Grey, a Colonel in the King's Royal Rifle Corps, and Monica, née Morrison-Bell. During the Second World War, when her parents were in Egypt, her father fighting in the North African Campaign, she lived with her maternal grandparents in Tetbury. After leaving school she attended a domestic science college.
She met her husband, Charles Gordon Lennox (then known by his courtesy title of Earl of March), best friend of her brother Wilfred at Eton, in 1947 when he came to stay at her family home in Blewbury, Berkshire, during the school holidays. They were married by the Bishop of...