Nice day for a Branson wedding: Harry’s girlfriend Cressie is singing and royals are guests – is this the biggest wedding since Kate and Wills?

Next Wednesday Richard Branson’s son will marry Isabella Anstruther-Gough-Calthorpe in a four-day celebration attended by London’s most beautiful people. Joshi Herrmann reports
24 01.03 Blonde composite
1 March 2013

It’s the sort of affair that usually takes place in a parish church in the Home Counties, attended by Middletons and assorted blue bloods, and moves on to the bride’s father’s estate for an evening of ballroom festivities.

But next Wednesday Sam Branson and Isabella Anstruther-Gough-Calthorpe will tie the knot on the summit of a koppie overlooking the South African low veldt, in sight of the lions, buffalos, leopards and elephants of the Kruger National Park.

And there won’t be a Caroline Charles dress in sight.

It’s the social season’s most anticipated wedding since the royal one two years ago, and if you didn’t know differently, you might think Sam and his bride have chosen the names for their guest list from the Westminster Abbey seating plan that day.

The young royals’ set will be well represented at Sir Richard Branson’s private Ulusaba reserve — Princesses Beatrice and Eugenie are flying out, as are super-rich playboy Arthur Landon and Prince Harry’s best friend and wingman Tom Inskip. Kate Winslet will add a bit of Hollywood glamour to proceedings, married as she is to Ned Rocknroll (formerly Edward Abel Smith), Sir Richard’s nephew. Guests, including model Gabriella Wilde, one of the bride’s many half-sisters, and polo-playing brother Jacobi Anstruther-Gough-Calthorpe, have been sworn to silence because the Bransons have signed exclusive coverage rights with Hello! magazine, the proceeds of which are going to charity — they aren’t even allowed to tweet about their African trip.

Speaking to the Standard before flying out to South Africa yesterday afternoon, Sir Richard’s mother Eve, a former air hostess, confirmed the wedding will be an intimate affair: “This is just the immediate family and the immediate friends,” she said. “I think it’s going to be good!”

Documentary-maker Sam, 28, and actress Isabella, 32 — the blondest couple on the London party scene — have been together just over six years. Their relationship hit the headlines when it emerged Prince William had taken a shine to Isabella at a black tie ball in 2004 and sustained his interest for months after.

A source says what went on between William and Isabella amounted to “a bit of flirting, and maybe even a bit of kissing” although never a romance. But Kate and Isabella’s relationship is “cool” to this day, and the Duchess of Cambridge certainly won’t be seen in Ulusaba where, as some of next week’s guests might smile to recall, she escaped with Sam’s sister Holly on a “girl’s trip” at the time of her split with William.

A royal love interest who will be attending is Prince Harry’s girlfriend Cressida Bonas, half-sister to the bride. They are both daughters of Sixties It girl Mary Gaye Curzon, who married Isabella’s father, property magnate John Anstruther-Gough-Calthorpe, in 1977, and then Cressie’s father, entrepreneur Jeffrey Bonas, just over a decade later.

Cressie, who spent last week skiing with Harry and his cousins Eugenie and Beatrice in Verbier, is going to be part of the entertainment at the wedding, with plans for her to sing at Wednesday’s ceremony. Harry is not expected to be there to see her perform, despite being in Africa this week.

In true Branson style, guests will enjoy days of partying, before and after the wedding.

“Everybody’s having to pack a lot of suitcases,” one guest tells me, “because we’ve got to be dressed up in different things for four different days.” Male guests have been asked to bring linen suits for the White Party, where specially ordered neon lights will illuminate white-dressed revellers. As with his sister Holly’s wedding to Fred Andrews on Necker Island in 2011, there will be a fancy dress night. Then it was pirate themed but, appropriately given their safari location, next week’s guests will be going as animals.

“I’m going to shatter everybody, because I’m going to go as a lady bug!” says Eve, who is hoping for less drama than she had on Necker in 2011 when Kate Winslet saved her from the fire that destroyed the Great House, a story dramatically narrated in her new autobiography, Mum’s the Word.

The festivities are being organised by Branson’s former assistant Alexia Hargrave, who flew out with her events team early last week to finalise preparations at Ulusaba and set up the security arrangements demanded by Hello! magazine. The publication covered Holly Branson’s wedding in December 2011, which saw the magazine print 35 exclusive pictures a few weeks later.

Hargrave has been put in charge after impressing Sir Richard with her organisation of Holly’s nuptials, a bigger party that saw 100 guests descend on Necker, sleeping on Sir Richard’s catamaran and in the six luxury cottages that had survived the fire that destroyed his Caribbean island home the previous August.

Sir Richard is in South Africa already too, and a family member says Ulusaba has been chosen over Necker for the celebrations because “he wants it to be different” from previous Branson weddings, including his own to Sam and Holly’s mother Joan Templeman on Necker in 1989, when the kids were four and eight respectively. “It certainly will be different,” the source says.

Comprising 13,500 hectares of low veldt, and in the shadow of the Drakensberg mountain range, Ulusaba is the exotic gem in Sir Richard’s international property portfolio.

Guests will be staying in the three distinctive lodges on the reserve, one of which — the Safari Lodge — is a tree house whose rooms are connected by rope bridges with wild beasts roaming beneath. The Blairs holidayed at the reserve in the summer of 2009 and members of the public can stay there too, with the Cliff Lodge — which has a private pool — available to rent for £4,000 per person per night.

When the costumes come out next week, the blonde beauty with the longest name in high society will be a Branson, and the extraordinary aristo-new money nexus that their relationship has always represented will be official.

Sam is marrying the girl, four years his senior, whom he spent his early twenties wooing as a long-haired party boy, persisting as she fielded the advances of all London’s most eligible bachelors, including Prince William. Now grown up and carving a niche for himself as a thoughtful and environment-conscious documentary maker, he is hoping to build on Breaking The Taboo, a film he released last year about the war on drugs.

It isn’t known whether Isabella, who appeared in How to Lose Friends & Alienate People in 2008, will retain her already barrelled-down stage name Isabella Calthorpe but Sir Richard is said to be “thrilled” with the new addition to his colourful clan.

And for the lucky few dozen heading to South Africa this weekend, he’s planned the kind of legendary party that only the Bransons can deliver.

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