Anthony Macey (solicitor)

From Aristopaedia, the free, crowd-sourced encyclopaedia of the gentry, knightage, baronetage, and peerage, sponsored by Cokayne’s and Black’s.

Anthony Macey is the senior and managing partner of the leading firm of high street solicitors in Beechbourne. Although regarded by London colleagues as ‘a provincial solicitor’, his practice is primarily amongst the nobility, gentry, and large farmers of the district, notably including HG the Duke of Taunton.

Early life
The nephew of His Honour Judge Cundick, Circuit Judge and late Chancellor of the Diocese, and a distant cousin in consequence to the local psychiatrist Cicely Pinnell-Cundick as well as to the Hart-Maceys and Trulocks, Mr Macey was born to Piers Macey, his predecessor as senior partner in the firm, and his wife Emma née Trulock, on 12 August 1975. (Mr Piers Macey said ever after that, fond as he was of the lad, his timing was miserable, as the senior Mr Macey had been invited by the then Marquess of Badenoch, one of the Taunton trustees, to join the guns for the Glorious Twelfth, and was forced to miss out.)

Educated at Marlborough, Tony Macey went up – to his father’s disappointment –, not to Oxford, but to Exeter, where he could be dead certain of at least an upper second. It was taken for granted that he should follow in the footsteps of his lawyerly forefathers.

Career
After qualifying, which he did with ease, Tony Macey continued on the even tenor of his way at the family firm of Cundick, Macey, Pinnell, Macey, and Hart. He was regarded as a sound man and a safe pair of hands – and as contentedly unambitious – from the off.

This last was not entirely true. Cundick, Macey, Pinnell, Macey, and Hart might occasionally condescend to aid discreetly in briefing a criminal barrister, if the accused were of sufficient social standing, or the connexion of an old client; it certainly did not despise commercial matters; and it recognised the melancholy fact that divorce was now a fact of life. But Mr Macey has always prided himself upon his draughtsmanship, and particularly in conveyancing; and the one disadvantage, to a provincial solicitor with a taste for conveyancing matters, in living in the district, is that so much of the land is firmly in ducal hands, and, consequently, only rarely re-tenanted, and never alienated. He learnt early on to subsist, intellectually, upon Wills.

All the same, Mr Macey has made his mark in numerous matters of more than local interest (including, although without the emergence of indiscreet detail, the probate affairs of the late Lord Crispin Fitzjames-Holles-Clare-Malet, the present Duke’s scapegrace brother); and is far and away one of the most respected and respectable solicitors in the West of England, and both man of business and personal friend to His Grace. Between 2010 and 2014, he served as Town Clerk for Beechbourne.

Personal life
Mr Macey married, in 1996, Amelia Penruddocke. They have three daughters: that lifelong horsewoman Anne, who works with the Hon. Mrs Maguire at the Woolbury Stud, and Meg and Ivy, ‘Irish twins’ in age, who have managed to become YouTube stars with cheeky (and perfectly above-board) video diaries, challenges, short films, and the like, such that they are likely to leave their respective universities (Bristol for Meg, Exeter for Ivy) not merely debt-free but with a considerable financial stake with which to start adult life.