Birds of a Feather
The 14th Lord Berners, Gerald Tyrwhitt-Wilson (1883-1950), was either eccentric or poetic-minded — he used to dye the pigeons at his Faringdon manor house so that when released they became, in Nancy Mitford’s phrase, “a cloud of confetti in the sky.”
Berners also installed a piano in his Rolls Royce, and he once received Penelope Betjeman’s horse into his drawing room for tea — but Britons generally found his oddities endearing, and pastel pigeons still flock through the town square at Faringdon, a tradition kept in his memory.
