Teddy Gates OBE JP

## Cllr Teddy Gates OBE

Teddy Gates what time he won the BBC cookery competition

From Aristopaedia, the free, crowd-sourced encyclopaedia of the gentry, knightage, baronetage, and peerage, sponsored by *Cokayne’s* and *Black’s*

**Cllr Teddy (Edward Henry Lewis) Gates OBE JP** (1987 – ), is a county councillor, chef, hotelier, and magistrate.

## **Life**

Born in Delamere, Cheshire, Teddy Gates, was educated at an independent (former grammar) school, where he was nicknamed ‘Banging Gates’. As a school leaver, he took a flyer on a BBC cookery contest, and – rather dramatically – won it. With the winnings, he hied him to France, to follow his dream of becoming a pâtissier.

He there earnt his BA (Institut Paul Bocuse / IAE Lyon (Université Jean Moulin Lyon III)) and MSc (Institut Paul Bocuse / EMLYON); and in the course of his training became MW (Institute of Masters of Wine) and a full-fledged chef de cuisine, although remaining always a pâtissier at heart and by preference. Returning to Britain, he was hired on at one of the clubs to which the Duke of Taunton belongs, and His Grace took an interest in the lad. He thence went on to become the celebrity chef – ‘the Celebrated Hipsta Chef’, in fact, something he has never quite lived down – at a splashy hotel. Unfortunately, under the pressures of celebrity and in-crowd popularity, he developed a cocaine habit, and was well on the way to flaming out when the Duke, whose weakness is playing at being the *deus ex machina,* intervened. He persuaded Teddy Gates to take on the old and decrepit – and in a business sense, moribund if not defunct – coaching inn outside Woolfont Abbas, near to Wolfdown, in partnership with the ducal money; and, away from the fleshpots of London (especially tempting to Teddy Gates, who is unabashedly pansexual and who was before his relationship with Edmond Huskisson a self-proclaimed ‘ethical slut’), Teddy Gates waxed sober and wildly successful.

   He is now the proprietor-chef of the three-star gastropub and small hotel, The Woolford House Hotel, Woolfont Abbas, Wilts, and has been made Commandeur, l’Order du Mérite Agricole (France) in recognition of his work in Anglo-French culinary *rapprochement.*

As one of a handful of Liberal Democrats in his very Tory ward, he was nonetheless elected a county (unitary authority) councillor, based wholly upon his personal popularity. He also serves as a Member of the Board of Governors for the Agincourt Housing Association Trust, and was considered as a Prospective Parliamentary Candidate in the Liberal Democrat interest for the local Commons constituency; this has gone by the wayside owing to his concentration upon the family he and his husband Edmond Huskisson have lately adopted.

## **Family**

He is the only child of Grahame Gates, a civil engineer, and Beatrice, née Hollinsworth, his wife, who now divide their time between the Downlands and Delamere, Mr Grahame Gates being employed by His Grace on the canal reconstruction project.

Teddy Gates is married to Edmond Huskisson. They have four adopted children: two sons and two daughters.

## **Discography**

*(as second tenor / baritone, The Fonts) (see article, The Fonts)*

## **See also**

* The Woolfonts, Wilts
* Beechbourne Free School
* Edmond Huskisson
* The Woolford House Hotel
* The Fonts (charity vocal group)