Overlooked Britain: A philanthropist's palace

Heroic American steel tycoon Andrew Carnegie paid for 3,000 libraries and built glorious Skibo Castle in his native Scotland

- Lucinda Lambton

‘A man who dies rich dies disgraced,’ thundered my hero Andrew Carnegie (1835-1919).

In an essay – his foundational work on philanthropy, The Gospel of Wealth – he wrote, ‘The problem of our age is the proper distribution of wealth, so that the ties of brotherhood may still bind together the rich and poor in harmonious relationship.’

Having made a vast fortune as an industrialist, particularly with steel, iron and the railways, he was responsible for the stupendous architectural, as well as philanthropic, achievements of building some 3,000 libraries worldwide. Not only that; he also gave more than 7,600 organs to churches, as well as creating and endowing myriad organisations dedicated to education, music and scientific research.

From 1899-1903, he built many towered Skibo Castle in Sutherland, originally a 13th-century castle, overlooking the Dornoch Firth. He loved and lived in it on and offuntil his death.

Splendid, rather than beautiful, it is now a luxurious club which has barely changed since Carnegie’s day. The bagpipes are still played at breakfast. Here the illuminati gathered: Mark Twain, Rudyard Kipling and John B Stetson – who in the 1860s invented the cowboy hat. Booker T Washington and President Woodrow Wilson were also guests.

Then there was the deaf and blind Helen Keller, who came to lunch with Mrs Carnegie, praising Skibo as an ‘enchanting place’. She wrote, somewhat piously, ‘How often the dwellers in that castle, when they look out from their windows, must think of the Psalm “I will lift up mine eyes unto the hill.”