The foodie Gladwin clan proves successful families can still get on

At the launch of their new cookbook, this quintessentially English dynasty demonstrated an admirable recipe for familial harmony

It felt more like a wedding than a book launch. In fact, some of us almost felt we were intruding, gatecrashing a family get-together. At The Orangery in London’s Holland Park this week, the Gladwin family, from Sussex, corralled relatives, friends and hangers-on (like me) to celebrate a new tome, An English Vineyard Cookbook. Yes, it’s a nice-looking book of recipes, a collection of seasonal dishes, a guide to making the best of nature’s bounty and the story of an English farm and vineyard – Nutbourne – but it’s more important than that. It’s a rare glimpse, very much in evidence that evening, of a family in harmony, working together and doing so both joyfully and profitably.
For exquisite and tantalising reasons of intrigue, we usually trade in stories of family conflict. We don’t meet up with great chums and swap yarns of peace and harmony. Instead, we relish tales of squabbles and rows, of ghastly deeds, of frightful behaviour, back-stabbing and betrayal.
My own family has enjoyed its fair share of this. Indeed, my great-uncle, Osbert Sitwell, virtually made a career out of describing the wars between his parents and between his siblings and their father. Some family fallouts are over the most trivial of reasons, which like so many arguments are lost in the mists of time, the battles becoming more important than their origins. But my great-uncle, great-aunt and grandfather had quite a good reason to disparage their father as he had, after all, precipitated, then allowed, their mother to go to prison for fraud in 1915.
He could have paid off the debts that led to her trial and conviction but that went against his principles. And her three months in Holloway served to cast Sir George as the family villain. Searching once through the microfiche in the library of the Sunday Express, I found the headline in that paper that was the way my grandfather, Sacheverell, at boarding school, discovered his mother had gone to jail.
It’s the story of money and power that draws us to the Murdochs. It was reported just this week that a new chapter in their very real succession drama is about to begin as Rupert, now firmly entrenched with his oldest son Lachlan, is to go to trial in Reno, Nevada, in an attempt to strip voting powers in the family trust from his other children Prudence, James and Elisabeth. 
The biographers and filmmakers are limbering up to capture all the juicy details of this new chapter in the long-running familial and corporate slug fest.
Or we can savour the delicious splits in the Salem family, from Beirut in Lebanon, battling over who is entitled to the profits of a trading empire based mainly in West Africa. Moussy Salem, grandson of the founder, claims he has been unfairly cut out of his share. His uncles Freddy and Beno, who run a property empire that includes the Mayfair restaurant Scott’s and the Christian Louboutin shoe store, dispute the claim. The clash has just reached London’s High Court.
Perhaps they should look to the Gladwins, who have yet to invest profits from their farm, vineyard and London restaurants – which include Rabbit, The Shed and The Pig’s Ear – in lawyers’ fees.
Peter and his wife Bridget bought their farm in 1991 and today Richard, the eldest, is the restaurant group’s manager, Oliver is the chef and youngest brother Gregory is the farmer and winemaker. Bridget painted illustrations for their new book and the family photos within, and the sight of them all together at The Orangery was a magnificent picture of productive harmony. Food and drink is clearly a more convivial family business than publishing or property.
But I did notice that father Peter, 70, was the one who made the speech and he didn’t offer the mic to his offspring. While they’ve all carved out their niches in the family business, he clearly realises that, a bit like HS2, the project needs a (benevolent) dictator.