The Governing Body

Mark Brunel-Cohen was born near Liverpool, educated at Downside and Sandhurst (Army Scholar), followed by a thirty year career in the Wine Trade, the majority of which was with Allied Domecq.

He married Sally in 1974 and raised their five daughters in Sunningdale. For nearly fifteen years he was a School Governor at St Francis Catholic primary school in Ascot attended by his children.

Setting up his own online wine retailing business (Binends.com), he moved to Sherborne and his two youngest daughters were happily schooled at Leweston.

Since arriving in Sherborne, for five years Mark was a Lay Observer appointed by the Ministry of Justice.

With his Liverpool connections Mark has been Chairman of the Board of Trustees of a Liverpool grant-making charity, helping disadvantaged young people. He is also Chairman of a small engineering company in Liverpool .

Mark has 10 grandchildren one of which is about to begin his association with Leweston at the Nursery.

Simon Greenwood enjoyed a public-school education at Winchester College.  He first came to live in West Dorset in 1972 on leaving school when he was a farm student at Ryme Intrinseca before going to Reading University in 1973 to study Estate Management.  He returned each summer to work on the farm and the first job worth applying for was with Savills in Wimborne as a rural land agent.

Simon is a Chartered Surveyor and Director of Savills, having joined the firm in August 1976 and after 45 years still works three days per week in Wimborne.  His practice has evolved from rural land management and he is primarily involved with development consultancy and valuation, identifying potential land for development and then project managing it through the planning process until either selling it or negotiating the value of it.

Simon and his wife, Sara, live at Yetminster in a house her family bought in 1970 and are heavily involved in equestrian activities and other country sporting activities.  They have two daughters who are both involved with property, one is also a Director in Savills in the Residential Development Research team, the other, also a chartered surveyor, specialises in valuation management.

Jamie Mead (née Jago) grew up in Sussex yet has strong family ties with Dorset and Leweston – her grandmother, three great-aunts (all Parmiters), aunt and mother attended St Anthony’s Convent, her mother serving as Head Girl. 

Moving to London to begin a career in public relations in 1987, she launched her own PR company specialising in residential property three years later. In 2008, the firm was acquired by Savills, where she established and grew a PR department to cover every aspect of non-commercial property. On retiring in 2021, she joined the board of Hearthstone Investments, a fund manager specialising in affordable private rented housing in the UK, as a non-executive director. She and her husband founded a tech enabled services platform called Viewber in 2016, which services thousands of clients in the property space and has completed over 600,000 appts. 

Jamie comes from a strong equestrian background and has been involved with horses and ponies all her life. She competed from the age of five, and subsequently trained and produced animals and riders for the show ring. For the last 30 years she has been a senior equine judge and has been invited to adjudicate at every major show, including: The Royal Dublin Show; Royal Windsor Horse Show; The Royal; The Horse of the Year Show; and The Royal International Horse Show, Hickstead – judging a total of eight times at the latter two.

Married with two grown-up sons and two stepchildren, Jamie moved to Dorset 13 years ago; her husband grew up in the County and was educated at Sherborne.

Lucy Hawks is an Old Antonian. She read law at Oxford University, followed by a year at Bristol University to complete her Legal Practice Course.

Lucy trained and then qualified as a solicitor at Macfarlanes LLP in the City. She worked in the Litigation Department specialising in Commercial Litigation and Contentious Trusts and Probate.

Lucy lives near Bruton and is married with a daughter and two sons. In her spare time, she enjoys walking her two flat coated retrievers, gardening and cooking.