Mark Shand

Mark Roland Shand (28 June 1951 – 23 April 2014) was a British travel writer and conservationist, as well as the brother of Queen Camilla. Shand was the author of four travel books and as a BBC conservationist, appeared in documentaries related to his journeys, most of which centered on the survival of elephants. His book Travels on My Elephant became a bestseller and won the Travel Writer of the Year Award at the British Book Awards in 1992. He was the chairman of Elephant Family, a wildlife foundation, which he co-founded in 2002. Family, education and marriage Shand was born on 28 June 1951, as the son of Major Bruce Shand (1917–2006) and his wife, Rosalind Cubitt (1921–1994), daughter of the 3rd Baron Ashcombe and Sonia Rosemary Keppel, daughter of Alice Keppel. He was the brother of Camilla Parker-Bowles (later Queen Camilla) and Annabel Elliot. Shand was educated first at St Ronan's School in Kent and then Milton Abbey School in Dorset. He was expelled from Milton Abbey for allegedly smoking cannabis. As a result, his father sent him to Australia to make a living on his own, where he had numerous jobs including working as a jackaroo on a station and a guard at an opal mine. He later returned to London and worked as a porter at Sotheby's, subsequently, he and his friend Harry Fane, the son of the 15th Earl of Westmorland, started a business of selling Cartier jewellery for a while. In 1990, Shand married Clio Goldsmith, a French former actress, daughter of Edward Goldsmith and niece of Sir James Goldsmith, who were all members of the prominent Goldsmith family. They lived in Rome and had a daughter, Ayesha (born 1995). Shand confirmed in 2010 that the couple were divorced. He was a godfather to one of the sons of Jemima Goldsmith, his former wife's cousin.