Where there's a will there's a whim

By Patrick Jackson
BBC News

A Portuguese aristocrat's bequest of his fortune to 70 total strangers is the latest in a line of unusual last wills and testaments.
He could have left it all to a charity, any charity - perhaps one that cares for cats as Jonathan Jackson of Columbus, Ohio, envisaged when he drew up his own will in the late 19th Century?

Mr Jackson left money for the creation of a "cat house", according to The People's Almanac, where cats had sleeping quarters, a dining hall, an exercise area, specially designed roofs for easy climbing, a conversation room and - why not? - an auditorium where they could listen to the accordion.

Instead, Luis Carlos de Noronha Cabral da Camara opted for setting a cat among the pigeons: 70 people listed in a Lisbon phone directory were contacted out of the blue after his death to be told he had made them his beneficiaries.

They had been chosen at random from the directory, in front of two witnesses at a registry office 13 years before.

It certainly came as a shock to them, a top Portuguese lawyer told the BBC News website.

In the first place, people do not, as a rule, make wills in Portugal. In the second, Portuguese aristocrats are getting thin on the ground, let alone eccentric ones. In the third - to be chosen by phone directory? No wonder that some feared they were being scammed.

"Every day you hear of pranks people play on old people," 76-year-old heiress Helena told Portuguese weekly newspaper Sol.

Not that there is anything new about odd last wills and testaments.

Beverly Hills socialite Sandra West, 37, left most of her $3m fortune to her brother; her wish to be buried reclining in her baby-blue Ferrari and dressed in her favourite lace nightgown was granted after her death in 1977 McNair Ilgrenfritz, a wealthy American music-lover and composer, left $125,000 to be claimed by a major opera house should it agree to stage one of his self-penned operas; the New York Metropolitan Opera declined the request though it described his Phedre and Le Passant as competent.

Treasure Island author Robert Louis Stevenson tried to leave his birthday to a friend who complained of being born on Christmas Day; he asked that Annie H Ide treat his birthday (13 November) with "moderation and humanity... the said birthday not being so young as it once was".

The Portuguese legacy appears genuine enough - it is just that Luis Carlos had arranged his own departure to be a departure from the norm.

Pin in a book

"Normally if somebody makes a will they have to take it reasonably seriously in terms of making sure their wishes are complied with," said Richard Grosberg, who speaks for the UK Law Society on wills and probate.

"You have people who will put something in which will mean something to the person who is receiving it."

He recalls one man bequeathing his watch to a friend who used to joke he would like to have it when he was "gone". Another man left £5,000 ($9,800) to a friend living in the Scottish borders so he could get mains water connected to his house.

"You have those sorts of things that have a light-hearted element to them but the people are serious in that they want the money to go to that person - as opposed to someone saying 'Right, I've no idea as to whom I'm going to leave it to so I'll stick a pin in the phone book'," says Mr Grosberg.

He points out that in the UK, "you can, generally speaking, do what you want" with your will though there are grounds for challenging it such as mental incapacity or the existence of dependents.

The result, as fellow UK wills and probate specialist Jeremy Wilson notes, is that wills can equally be used as a weapon to spite the living.

He knows of one case where the person leaving the will left a nominal sum to a close relative. "There was a lot of bitterness there," Mr Wilson notes.

On the European continent, however, things are usually rather different.

An untraditional aristocrat

Luis Carlos was a childless bachelor when he died at the age of 42 so he was unusually free to dispose of his estate, which consisted of a 12-room apartment in central Lisbon, a house in the north of Portugal, a car and 25,000 euros ($32,000).

Under the Portuguese system, which is similar to much of European continental law, close relatives - or "obliged heirs" as they are known - stand automatically to gain the greater part of a person's inheritance, and the person bequeathing gets to dispose freely of only about a quarter of it.

"We don't have a tradition of wills in Portugal," says Dr Perri da Camara, vice-president of the Portuguese Law Association.

"Actually, to talk about a will here to somebody is a bit like talking about death and people don't like to talk about death."

If the dead person makes no will and has no legal heirs, the fortune passes to the Portuguese state.

Aristocracy, Dr da Camara adds, is becoming a thing of the past in Portugal though there are still a few big families around,

In the village of Calvos, where Luis Carlos had latterly been living, he was remembered with fondness by a man who worked for him.

"He was a good man although he drank a lot," the man told Portuguese TV.

And he had a sense of humour too, according to one of his friends, Anibal Castro Vila, who told Sol newspaper:

"I am sure he just wanted to create confusion by leaving his belongings to strangers. That amused him."

I should have known you'd read The Hitchiker's Guide to the Universe. It took me a few times of seeing your message geader to remember where I'd heard that line before. Don't forget to take your towel!

__________________
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