As he loses second wife ... How will Tetra Pak's Hans Rausing cope? (2024)

EVEN to hardened detectives, it was a ­macabre scene. In a second-floor bedroom strewn with rubbish and swarming with flies, in one of London's most exclusive addresses, lay the decomposing body of a woman crudely covered with a tarpaulin and bin bags.

Her hand was still clutching the crack pipe that had killed her, but such was the decay she could only be formally identified by the serial number of her pacemaker.

The story of Eva Rausing's fast life and early death in 2012 was one of the corrupting power of stupendous wealth, uncontrollable drug addiction and terrible sadness. But perhaps the most remarkable aspect of the tragedy was the transformation following Eva's death of her husband, Tetra Pak heir Hans Kristian Rausing.

He had been stopped by police driving erratically in his red Bristol sports car, in which they discovered a carrier bag of unopened letters addressed to his wife. It led them to the £70 million Belgravia mansion where, in his drug-­befuddled, grief-stricken state, he had hidden Eva's death for two months, preventing her burial.

For nearly two years afterwards he was a patient at a Marylebone psychiatric hospital, where he slowly recovered. And it was there that he rekindled a friendship with the formidable woman who was to become his second wife and who surely rescued him.

Yesterday's news of the death at 63 from cancer of the whip-smart Julia Delves Broughton, whom Hans, three years her junior, ­married at Woburn Abbey nearly ten years ago is a blow so ­shattering for the family that the ­superstitious might conclude the Rausing name has been more of a curse than a blessing.

Julia, who had her own story of sorrow and loss, not only brought Rausing back from his appalling anguish but helped him find joy and purpose in life again. Although intensely private, the couple became one of the country's great philanthropy teams, giving away more than £330 million of ­Rausing's fortune, including £50 million a year to UK charities and more than 1,000 grants.

But theirs was also a love match. 'They were extremely affectionate towards each other,' said a friend. 'Hans knew he owed Julia everything, but she was equally devoted to him — protective, of course, but loving, too.'

Their romance and his recovery have been compared with that of Victoria Getty who freed her late husband, Sir Paul Getty, from his crippling drug dependence and helped him become one of Britain's most generous benefactors.

Inevitably, Julia's death has ­provoked questions about how Rausing will cope, but a family source tells me: 'He is very much on the straight and narrow.'

All the same, I understand that even though she'd had a long ­battle with ill health, the baronet's daughter's death was unexpected. Close friends say the family have been shocked by the news.

'It does seem unspeakably cruel that after everything Hans has been through, he should lose the one person who had brought him stability and happiness,' says one of their circle.

That they had more than a ­decade together will doubtless be a source of strength for the ­billionaire's son, who was so overawed by his 6ft 8in father that he ran away to India to find himself . . . and found drugs instead.

If Hans's story is one of redemption from self-inflicted demons, his second wife's was of over­coming adversity.

Their marriage in July 2014 was a union of two names both ­infamous and gilded.

Rausing is heir to one of ­Sweden's most inventive ­industrial dynasties, the Tetra Pak packaging family, while Julia was the granddaughter of the aristocratic Sir Jock Delves Broughton, a ­central figure of the Kenyan Happy Valley set.

Sir Jock was sensationally acquitted of the war-time ­murder of Lord Erroll, the lover of his wife, Lady Diana, in the notorious White Mischief case which was later made into a film ­starring Charles Dance and Greta Scacchi.

In December 1942, shortly after the trial and not long after returning to Britain, 59-year-old Sir Jock was found dying from a self-administered morphine overdose in a room at the Adlephi hotel in Liverpool.

Unhappiness and tragedy continued to stalk the family. Julia was the product of a broken home and her father, Sir Jock's son Sir Evelyn, married three times.

His first union was childless, but the second — to Helen Shore, a Manchester greengrocery wholesaler's daughter — produced four children: daughters Julia, Isabella and Lavinia, and a son, John, who would have been the 13th holder of the 17th-century baronetcy. But he died in a freak accident when he was only two.

Sir Evelyn and Lady Delves Broughton had just finished tea on the lawn at Doddington Park — the family's 35,000-acre Cheshire estate — when John and his two elder sisters, Isabella and Julia, wandered off.

According to family folklore, ­Isabella was told by her mother to 'keep an eye' on her brother. But she was momentarily distracted when the toddler, who was eating toast, was taking off his shoes and stepping into the ornamental pond. He suddenly pitched ­forward and within two minutes was dead.

He did not die from drowning but from asphyxiation, having fallen after choking on the toast. At an inquest into his death, the coroner described the accident as a 'one in a million chance', and said no one was to blame.

But Isabella, who grew up to be the flamboyant and much-admired fashionista Isabella Blow — the Tatler fashion editor who discovered Alexander McQueen and model Sophie Dahl — spent the rest of her life agonisingly believing her mother had blamed her for John's death.

Indeed, her relationship with Helen was so toxic that Isabella would have nothing to do with her. A troubled figure who spent many years battling depression, she swallowed weedkiller in 2007 and died. Her mother did not attend her funeral.

For her part, Julia remembered nothing of the pond tragedy, which happened when she was three. But, according to friends, she grew up feeling sorry for her sister over the blame unfairly attached to Isabella, and a rift developed between her and her mother, too.

(Pointedly, Helen was not at Julia and Hans's wedding when a family friend, the Earl of Derby gave her away.) Then, when her daughters were entering their teens, Helen and Sir Evelyn split up. The manner of her departure was later recalled with a mixture of humour and bitterness.

In his biography of Isabella after her death, her art dealer husband, Detmar Blow, described how Helen had 'lined up her children on the gravel outside the gardener's cottage and shook their hands goodbye. This disgusting act of abandonment was the culmination of a truly dreadful mother-daughter relationship'.

Sir Evelyn later happily remarried for a third time to Rona, whose daughter by an earlier ­marriage is Louise, the duch*ess of Bedford, and whose husband owns Woburn Abbey where Julia and Hans were married.

Such a childhood might have impacted anyone, but the artistic Julia was level-headed with a ­fascination for high culture and high heels.

To her friends she was funny and outspoken with an uncomplicated attitude to life. She needed that in abundance when, aged 30, she found herself working as PA and gatekeeper to John Bryan, Texan businessman and some-time lover of Sarah, duch*ess of York.

When news of Bryan's affair with Fergie — who had just separated from Prince Andrew — broke, Julia found herself in the eye of the storm as the international media descended on the American's office-cum-flat in a Chelsea mansion block.

'She was brilliant at dealing with nosy journalists,' Bryan later told me. 'Very brisk, as if they were pesky flies.'

The story of the romance became so big no amount of blue-blooded put-downs would suffice.

But it was all invaluable experience for Julia, who first met Hans in 2002 when he went to a lunch at Christie's auction house in Mayfair where she had started as a secretary but quickly rose through the ranks to become a senior director working for Princess ­Margaret's son Lord Linley — now the Earl of Snowdon — in the chairman's office.

At that stage, Hans was married to Eva, the daughter of an ­American PepsiCo executive he'd met in a drugs rehab centre in her native U.S.

The couple had wed in London's Swedish church in 1992 and went on to have four children.

They became regular guests at the then Prince Charles's Highgrove fundraising dinners. Often at these lavish events, Eva would sit next to the Prince of Wales. In return, she gave millions to projects such as his restoration of Dumfries House in Ayrshire.

In 2006, Hans, a serious art ­collector, encountered Julia again when he called in at Christie's to arrange for a valuation at his home in Belgravia.

How much she knew of his then troubled life is not known. What she almost certainly did know is that his parents, who lived on an estate in Wadhurst, East Sussex and whose £9.5 billion fortune is shared with his two sisters, never gave up on their wayward son when he began taking prodigious quantities of cocaine and heroin.

Eva, too, relapsed into drug use and was caught in 2008 with ­heroin and crack cocaine in her handbag while being routinely searched at the U.S. embassy in London, where she had gone to renew her passport.

It was characteristic of her relationship with Prince Charles that he should speak up for her and plead for her to be given a second chance when there were calls for her to be sacked from the board of one of his charities.

All the same, the then Prince was profoundly shocked when she was subsequently found dead at her home in 2012. For his part, Rausing was given a ten-month suspended jail sentence after admitting in court that he had prevented her lawful burial.

A subsequent inquest found that her death had been the result of a 'dependent use of drugs'.

By now, Hans — who had become a cadaverous shell of a man — was being treated in the Capio Nightingale psychiatric hospital in Marylebone, Central London.

During that time, while recovering from addictions, he began planning the addition of a huge, two-storey basem*nt to his house. It was at this point that he met up once again with the still single Julia Delves Broughton. Pretty soon the young woman who had gone to see him to discuss what pictures to hang was being ­credited with bringing him out of the depths of despair.

She had a remarkable effect on shy Hans, who'd always felt the weight of his family's fortune and who was a recluse for many years as he and Eva descended into drug addiction.

By the time he left hospital fitter than he had been for years, love was blooming and he and Julia were seen out together for the first time. They went for ­dinners, to the cinema and to art galleries, but Julia denied there was a romance. Then, in April 2014, they announced their engagement.

A year after their wedding, they moved into the £28 million house that Rausing bought from former Chelsea FC owner Roman ­Abramovich on fashionable Cheyne Walk. He had by then attempted to put the tragedy of Eva's grisly death behind him, by selling their old home.

As a sign of his new drugs-free existence, he arranged for the team renovating the new property to produce a 15-page booklet for circulation among the neighbours, explaining all the development plans. They include landscaped gardens and servants' quarters.

Crucially, he wanted to turn the place into a 'family house' for his children from his marriage to Eva. He and Julia also owned an £11 million Cotswold mansion.

Within a very short time the direction of their life together was set — handing out vast sums from the Rausing fortune through the Julia and Hans Rausing Trust. From the National Gallery to prison and youth charities, they donated millions.

In 2020 they gave £1 million to this newspaper's Mail Force charity to supply protective equipment for front-line workers during the Covid crisis. In just six months, they gave £34 million to charities struggling during the pandemic.

All in all, it's a fitting legacy — but Julia's greatest achievement must surely be in saving her beloved husband's life.