Talk:John Hervey, 7th Marquess of Bristol

message: No mention of what he died of? Seems odd not to include that.  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 76.233.24.210 (talk) 07:24, 9 June 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Death? 

message: It would flesh the article out to have just a little more on the wife.  ThePeerage.com cannot count as a relaible source, since it cites Wikipedia, but it does provide good leads. It says here, citing the 1998 Complete Peerage, that she was the daughter of Douglas H. Fisher of Marbella, Malaga, Spain.  An obit of John in the Spanish newspaper El Mundo says she was vegetarian and a non-drinker, and her father was a "constructor afincado" (builder? property developer?). It seems an unlikely pairing.  Are there any reliable English sources for these?  The Independent obituary by Jessica Berens, which I've just found, says "Francesca Fisher, to whom the marquess was briefly married, was driven halfway over a cliff in the Bentley and left hanging there like the last scene of The Italian Job". (NB it doesn't say who was at the wheel, but gives it as one in a list of examples of life-threatening japes that happened to his entourage.) Although that should be a reputable source, it is mentioned in passing without quotation or dates.  A sentence or two about her, how they met, would add to the article.  One can assume he was under pressure (internal or external) to marry. Why did he choose her, and why did she accept him?  BrainyBabe (talk) 10:07, 11 March 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: Nine years in, I think that's still a good question. Any answers? Valetude (talk) 00:16, 4 February 2018 (UTC)
replies: text: Please read WP:NOTAFORUM. There are already six sentences in the article about her, including content from the obit in The Independent about parking the Bentley on a cliff. The article mentions she didn't drink alcohol. I'm not opposed to using information from El Mundo to speak about her more. Chris Troutman (talk) 00:34, 4 February 2018 (UTC)
replies: text: Also, nine years on the article has been completely rewritten from the ground up, so opinions based on information back then are as useful as wondering whether Gordon Brown could win an election. Ritchie333 (talk) (cont) 09:54, 4 February 2018 (UTC)
thread_title:  Francesca Fisher 

message: I have scratched my head at what to do with the names in this article. First-hand accounts in the sources from friends and colleagues seem to use "John", but that isn't consistent with our general guidelines on writing for nobility. I have gone with "John" for early life (particularly since "Hervey" can be confused with any number of family members, especially his father), then "the Earl" post 1960 and "the Marquess" post 1985, though occasionally still using "John" where this can still cause confusion. I can't think of a better way of doing this - can anyone else? Ritchie333 (talk) (cont) 14:10, 19 September 2016 (UTC)
thread_title:  Names 

message: I've worked on this article on and off for ten years; I'm glad it's got to GA. I note that the reviewer can't see the ODNB but assumes good faith. Just for the record, and because I do find the 7th marquess utterly compelling, I'll copy a couple of snippets from there. It begins:
:Hervey, Frederick William John Augustus, seventh marquess of Bristol (1954–1999), wastrel, was born on 15 September 1954 .....
Of all the hundreds of ODNB biographies I've read, I cannot think of another that uses such a pungent term for a one-word life description. Where other subjects would have "sculptor" or "politician" or "saloniere", the biographer can find no positive activity to ascribe to him. The bio only has two paragraphs. The second sentence of the second one turns "speak no ill of the dead" on its head:
:Bristol was notorious for mean-spirited practical jokes
And the biographer concludes with a cautionary note to us:
:Bristol's chief legacy, besides the ruin of his family's fortunes, was a gift to obituarists, who made an imaginary genetic link with the eccentricities of assorted eighteenth-century Herveys. 
That's us told, then. Carbon Caryatid (talk) 19:50, 4 November 2016 (UTC)
replies: text: I came across this article about six months ago when I heard mention of Lady Victoria Hervey, wondered "what on earth is a lady doing on TV?" and read up about the Herveys, of which John is the most fascinating (though his father, Victor, comes a close second). It's difficult to know how to summarise the Marquess' life. On the one hand, some of the wacky things involving helicopters and shotguns are just stuff of the bizarre life of the upper-class, the lack of fatherly love and the drug dependency is genuinely sad, throwing the family fortune down the toilet and a genuinely nasty streak, particularly post-marriage is not at all nice. A complex character, indeed. PS: I can access the ODNB through my library card (see above conversation) and although I didn't add "wastrel" (did you do that, CC?) I did check it was genuinely there. Ritchie333 (talk) (cont) 20:22, 4 November 2016 (UTC)
replies: text: The word "wastrel" was added in parentheses and with strict reference to the ODNB a couple of edits after my first contribution. I'd added a brief paragraph about Bristol's "remarkable dissoluteness"; another editor seems to have been spurred by this to look up the subject in the ODNB, which I don't think I had access to in 2006. Carbon Caryatid (talk) 20:45, 4 November 2016 (UTC)
thread_title:  Wastrel - for the record