Not all of Sark’s ways are so charming. A man can legally thrash his wife with a cane if it’s no thicker than his little finger. Still, most of Sark’s 600 or so inhabitants live placidly, reveling in their time-warped (and tax-free) seclusion. “We have no crime and no unemployment,” says Werner Rang, 79, a member of the island’s 40-member Parliament, Chief Pleas. “Sark is the envy of many people who like our quality of life.”
Even so, the place is changing. Last month the queen formally approved a radical update of the islands’ ancient property laws. As of next week–for the first time in history–landowners will be free to leave property to their daughters. Until now, the womenfolk could inherit only if there were no sons. But that was before a wealthy pair of mainland-born brothers, David and Frederick Barclay, waged a bitter three-year, £1.75 million legal battle to revise the law so their children–three sons and a daughter–could share the family estate, an outlying 160-acre island purchased in 1993.
The brothers won–sort of. Late last year, under threat of action at the European Court of Human Rights, Chief Pleas voted to reform Sark’s law of primogeniture. The inheritance laws now ignore gender. But land still can’t be parceled out among multiple heirs. And the dispute has hardly endeared the Barclays to the locals. “I think they [the brothers] are a pain in the butt,” says Mary Collins, a 59-year-old resident.
Not that the Barclays were ever too popular here. The brothers, whose financial empire includes London’s Ritz Hotel and a Scottish newspaper group, hardly ever visit Sark’s main island. On Brecqhou, their private islet, they spent some £60 million to erect a castle known locally as the Carbuncle. The brothers don’t live there; they prefer Monte Carlo. And they have made no secret of their scorn for Sark’s institutions. Writing in the family’s flagship newspaper, The Scotsman, David Barclay castigated Chief Pleas as “undemocratic and intimidatory” and pilloried Sark itself as “a haven for international tax evasion and fraud.”
The islanders can only shake their heads. Michael Beaumont, the 71-year-old seigneur, scoffs at the Barclays’ insults. He says Sark’s freebooting days are long gone. Like many islanders, the seigneur says he’s irked more by the Barclays’ attitude than by their aim. “The change was inevitable,” he says, “but it didn’t have to happen this way.” But the jousting continues. Sark’s law still prohibits the Barclays from dividing up the islet. The brothers are planning to fight on against the traditionalists. “They have blatantly ignored international law recognized by the entire Western world,” David Barclay complained to NEWSWEEK. As if Sark ever cared what the outside world thinks.
