DNA test proves former care worker is entitled to £50m country estate

A former care worker has inherited a £50m country estate after a DNA test proved he was the son of its deceased owner.

Jordan Adlard Rogers, 31, found out his father was the aristocrat Charles Rogers after his death in 2018 and has now moved into the 1,536-acre Penrose estate in Cornwall, which his family has lived in for generations.

“I’m not going to forget where I’ve come from,” Adlard Rogers told CornwallLive. “I’ve been at the point of worrying about the next bill and have had a tough start in life but now I’m here I want to help people.”

He said he planned to set up a charity to help people living in nearby Porthleven and Helston.

Adlard Rogers said he knew Charles Rogers could have been his father from the age of eight and had spent years trying to arrange a DNA test.

The Penrose estate in Cornwall.Photograph: SWNS

An inquest last week heard Rogers had spent 40 years as a reclusive drug addict. He was found dead in his car outside his Grade II-listed farmhouse on the estate in August last year having taken an overdose.

An estate manager who was the last person to speak to Rogers said that in the months leading up to his death he was malnourished, neglecting his personal hygiene and rarely changing his clothes.

Since moving in, Adlard Rogers has attempted to find out more about his father’s life. He said: “I haven’t been here long and don’t know all the ins and outs but have been able to piece some of the puzzle together.”

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He described his father as a free spirit who had “big shoes to fill” to keep up with his brother, an RAF pilot, and his father, a lieutenant commander in the Royal Navy.

“There was always a pressure of him trying to match expectation,” said Adlard Rogers. He said the death of Rogers’s brother Nigel from cancer – “who he was very close to” – and a stint in the army in Northern Ireland had affected Rogers “greatly”.

He said: “I’m now starting to get my feet under the table here. People say I’m lucky but I would trade anything to be able to go back and for Charles to know I was his son. Maybe then he might have taken a different path.”

Prior to receiving the test results, Adlard Rogers, who recently had a son with his girlfriend, had been living in council housing and working as a community support worker. He will receive £52,000 a year from the Rogers family trust.

In 1974, the family gifted the estate to the National Trust in exchange for a 1,000-year lease allowing them to continue living there.