Outrageous Fortune: Growing Up at Leeds Castle

by Anthony Russell

  For his selfless contributions to the final victory over Napoleon, the Prince Regent created Henry Paget the 1st Marquess of Anglesey. Although it was offered, he refused a pension for the loss of his leg, which Monsieur Paris duly had buried in his garden, thereby establishing a shrine for visiting dignitaries and gawkers of a historical bent.

  * * *

  Almeric had emigrated to the United States in 1881 to seek his fortune. His first venture was a cattle ranch at Le Mars, Iowa, where he became acquainted with Teddy Roosevelt. Moving to New York, he met Pauline and worked with her uncle and father setting up the Dominion Coal Company and the Dominion Iron and Steel Company at Sydney, Nova Scotia. Their wedding was at Saint Thomas Church, on Fifth Avenue in New York City, with President Grover Cleveland in attendance. Granny B was born Olive Cecilia Paget in the United States in 1899.

  Soon after, the family moved to England. Pauline Paget, who had always suffered from frail health, died after a brief illness in 1916, leaving my grandmother Olive, at seventeen, a rich woman in her own right. A year later she became the Honourable Olive, when her father was created 1st Baron Queenborough for having sponsored a battalion of volunteers during the war and establishing the Almeric Paget Military Massage Corps with clinics to treat wounded soldiers in hospitals throughout the United Kingdom.

  In July 1919 Olive married the Hon. Charles Winn, second son of Lord St Oswald, who lived at Nostell Priory. They had two children, my aunt Pauline (born 1920) and my mother, Susan (born 1923), and lived in a large house on Hill Street, off Grosvenor Square in London, until they divorced in 1925. Because he later went to live in America with his third wife, Theo, I saw my grandfather fewer than a dozen times when I was growing up, but I am sure that my mother’s warm personality, kindness, and sunny outlook on life came from him. I loved his expressive bushy eyebrows, handsome pinstriped suits, half-closed left eye (never explained beyond “from the war”), which frequently twitched involuntarily, and full-bore raspy chuckle. He would sit in my father’s chair by the window in our London house, a glass of whisky in his hand, and talk with feeling and humour about our lives and what I took to be other vital matters. And then he would be gone, not to reappear for two or three years. I once spent half a day with him when he came to take me out from St Aubyns. Just he and I, going for a walk up in the rolling green hills known as the South Downs; having tea in a quaint old seventeenth-century teashop; shopping for sweets—enough sweets to fill half my locker when I got back to school! He had an easy generosity of spirit. I was always sorry to have to say good-bye to him.

  Granny B married Arthur Wilson Filmer in 1926. He was a big-game hunter and a collector of fine antique furniture and tapestries. He also was the owner of East Sutton Park, near Maidstone, Kent, and he took my grandmother to see Leeds Castle, which had been vacant for two years, soon after their marriage. She straightaway spotted the potential in the somewhat derelict building, which had not seen repairs for almost a century. Not so William Randolph Hearst, who decided to look elsewhere for his “de rigueur” English castle—a weakness of American millionaires at the time—after his agent informed him that there were twenty bedrooms, one bathroom, and a crumbling ancient shell.

  Granny B and her husband were thus able to buy Leeds in 1926 for the then-gigantic sum of $874,000. The Wilson Filmers parted company soon after the purchase was completed, and in 1931 my grandmother (retaining ownership of the castle) married Sir Adrian Baillie, 5th Baronet of Polkemmet, a Scottish businessman, sportsman, and member of Parliament. Her full name therefore became the Honourable Olive, Lady Baillie, but it was simply as Lady Baillie that she became known. Granny B was the last private owner of Leeds Castle, the eleven-hundred-year-old former stronghold of Saxon kings and Norman knights, which she lovingly restored, lavishly decorated, and exquisitely maintained, transforming it into a unique and magnificent twentieth-century country home.

  I was lucky with lineage. Money, and lots of it, appeared to grow on trees, especially those which adorned the Leeds Castle parkland. Ancestors with glowing titles and extraordinary accomplishments filled the history books, but there would be consequences for being handed everything of a material nature on a plate, with no clear indication of what one might be expected to do with such good fortune.

  * * *

  The castle’s three long drives led to the gatehouse, which for eight hundred years had guarded the entrance to the two small islands upon which sat the castle and the Maiden’s Tower. Inside the gatehouse were a squash court, golf clubs, bicycles, and two go-carts. There was a large storage area for the estate workers’ tools and gardening equipment facing a small house where the gatekeepers, Mr. and Mrs. Jenkin, lived. And there was a gun room where shotguns and cartridges were kept locked up and made ready by the gamekeepers, George Riggel and his son, Peter, for pheasant-shooting Saturdays. The circular croquet lawn, lying reverently before the statuesque castle facade, and the swimming pool, tucked away behind a tall neatly trimmed hedge, adjacent to the Maiden’s Tower, rounded out the array of outdoor activities and visual majesty.

  In the milieu of aesthetics, taste, and the international beau monde, Granny B’s undertakings at Leeds Castle became renowned and a byword for matchless taste. On a lesser-known and smaller scale, her homes in London and Nassau enjoyed similar degrees of recognition. For more than thirty years, she worked closely with Stéphane Boudin, who became a close friend and went on to be hailed, by many, as the finest decorator of his time. James Archer Abbott, curator of the Evergreen Museum & Library at Johns Hopkins University, wrote in his impressive history of the Jansen firm: “As a result of her [Lady Baillie’s] association with Jansen, she became the iconic tastemaker of pre–World War II England.” Granny B might have huffed and puffed a bit at such an accolade, perhaps out of false modesty, but I suspect it would have pleased her greatly.

  * * *

  About Granny A I had mixed feelings. Her domineering personality could one day whisk me along on a magic carpet ride, but on another give me a drastic case of the heebie-jeebies. I seldom saw her because she was always travelling or foxhunting or both, but when she did enter my life she blew in like a hurricane, engulfing the household for however long she was around in a blitzkrieg of nonstop activity. Walks, games, come here, go there, do this, do that. It took everyone at least a week to recover after she left—even Nanny, who would have her job explained to her in the minutest detail, daily. Granny A was a terror but she loved us, and this was her way of expressing it. “After all, my darlings,” she would say. “You don’t get to see me that often.”

  In keeping with her whirlwind character, Granny A was always a dashing dresser, and the day she took me, aged six, to my very first film at a cinema on Oxford Street, was no exception. She wore a hat, veil, scarf, jacket, flowing skirt, and high boots, all flung together with a superlative eye for cut and colour. Everything she did seemed to be done at breakneck speed; her thinking, riding, talking, driving, cooking, arranging—all were conducted so crisply and rapidly that anyone within striking distance had to concentrate ferociously on keeping up or be prepared to be left trailing in her formidable wake.

  The film was called Tonka (aka A Horse Named Comanche) and, to my initial delight, she insisted on taking the bus (“Much more economical and so much more fun”), another first for me. Of course she also insisted on sitting up top, at the front, so she could energetically tell me—and the entire upstairs section of the bus—all about everything we were witnessing from our vantage point, including the personal faults in half the population’s general appearance, the unsatisfactory skills of our bus driver (“Much too jerky, he should know better!”), and how filthy all the buildings looked (“Something really must be done”). Every time I found myself looking the other way when she was speaking, she would grab my leg and vigorously shake it: “Pay attention when I’m talking to you.” After being instructed “Sit up straight,” “Don’t touch the handrails, they’re full of germs,” “Straighten your tie, it’s u
nbecoming on a young man to appear slovenly,” I was feeling a little the worse for wear by the time we arrived at Oxford Street, and I noticed some fellow passengers giving Granny A peculiar looks as we made our way off the bus.

  I have no idea why this particular film was selected for my introduction to the joys of big-screen entertainment. Perhaps the equestrian subject matter seemed appropriate for a small boy, but it may have been due to Granny A’s obsession with horses and hunting. Once comfortably ensconced in our seats, however, I found myself sitting through a one-hour buildup to the Battle of the Little Big Horn (I, of course, possessed little knowledge or understanding beyond Indians bad, U.S. cavalry good). After that I was obliged to endure the nightmarish sight of countless horses being slaughtered by streams of arrows. To make matters worse, the doomed soldiers then used the wounded animals as cover before being annihilated themselves. I emerged from the spectacle sobbing like a lunatic and had to be comforted by Granny A over tea and buns around the corner.

  “There, my darling, try not to get yourself all wound up. It’s only the cinema.”

  “But it looks awfully real. Did it actually happen?”

  “Well, historically speaking, yes.…”

  This was almost too much to bear, but on the bus ride home she was sympathetic to my feelings and calmed me down by insisting that the horses were not hurt in the making of the film. Even though she was generally more restrained than on our outward-bound journey, I still wondered how anyone could have such supreme self-confidence and jaw-dropping disregard for what others might be thinking about her.

  * * *

  Granny B, by way of contrast, conducted herself and her affairs with great deliberation and thoroughness. If she needed to talk to someone during castle weekends, including a member of the family, an “audience” would be set up by Borrett with precise timings as to when it would begin, and end. “Audiences” were almost always held in Granny’s boudoir, her private sitting room, adjacent to her bedroom.

  All her finances were scrupulously attended to, from the largest sums down to the smallest. If a guest at one of her houses expected to get away with surreptitious and extravagant use of the telephone provided in each bedroom, Borrett would discreetly place an itemized bill there before their departure. Anything so rash as nonpayment curtailed future invitations. Once, the immensely sophisticated Johnny Galliher, a New Yorker with a wicked sense of humour and, so the story goes, a frighteningly large cock, failed to pay. Only because he was such a good friend and prized cardplaying member of the court was this isolated incident allowed to be swept under the rug—though not forgotten.

  Granny B was generous with her friends, her family, and especially with those in her employ, but she refused to be taken for a ride and skillfully chose the people who worked for her. Cash was her preferred method of payment for purchases, whether in person or by a member of her staff. From time to time stories filtered through as to how this worked.

  One day Lily, her London housekeeper and dog walker, was dispatched to Christie’s to collect a pair of gorgeous porcelain ho-ho birds destined to end up on brackets in the drawing room at the castle. She arrived at the very grand West End auctioneers clutching a loosely tied and rather grubby-looking brown paper bag. “I’ve come to collect some birds!” she announced at the reception desk. Once her identity had been established, and the objects in question located, she handed over the bag, which contained several thousand pounds in cash.

  Each of my grandmothers was a law unto herself, and unto all those who came into her orbit. I always thought my mother’s feelings towards Granny A—especially when an upcoming visit triggered the red-alert systems in our London household—hovered uneasily between dread and resignation. She would get noticeably agitated as arrival day loomed, and the rest of us took our cue from her, except my father, whose bond with his mother appeared to be so strong that little could upset their equilibrium. When I was little, one of the best things about Granny A’s visits was that she would always come up to the nursery and spend a lot of time with me playing games and reading stories. I particularly enjoyed “bing” (her word). I would sit on her lap as she bounced me vigorously up and down, holding my hands, laughing and singing and generally making the most foolish of noises. Suddenly she would part her knees, I would fall to the floor with a tremendous thump, yelling, “Again, again!” and we would repeat the manoeuvre at least a dozen times. “Enchanting,” Granny A once described me in a postcard to my mother, which now comes as a surprise, because I always thought she regarded me as a young chap rather in need of some straightening out.

  Granny B did not play games with me. In fact she very seldom saw me, even though most weekends we were both in, or around, the castle. She ruled her roost with an imperial touch, keeping a watchful eye over the efficiency of her operations and the well-being of her friends, employees, and family. Fraternizing with the grandchildren was not her forte. Indeed, I never had what might be called a proper conversation with her.

  * * *

  My first participation in a full-fledged castle way event turned out to be both pleasurable and mildly disheartening. The joyous prospect of finally being allowed, at the age of six, to join Granny B and the court in observing one of the weekend’s most keenly anticipated ceremonies was muddied by my being treated like the invisible man from start to finish.

  It was a glorious afternoon. The sun bathed the magnificent castle and its equally ravishing moat and parkland in a glow of spring perfection. Not a single cloud was visible. The daffodils that lined the outer edges of the moat danced merrily in the occasional breeze. The black swans and their families whistled and crooned with gusto. The pike rested dreamily in the shallow water. The smell of recently mowed lawn permeated the air like a delicate aroma from the kitchen of a master chef. The ranks of lush woodland stood firmly to attention behind the commanding and majestic cedars. It was a scene of consummate beauty and tranquillity.

  I, on the other hand, was in a state of feverish excitement now that Nanny and I had been given permission to join the highly select group invited to accompany my grandmother to the launching of the ducks.

  Granny B had always struck me as looking very old, very distinguished, and more than a little fierce. Everyone would say she was a wonderful person, albeit eccentric. That may well have been true, but I never got to know her because the only times I was in her company were when I watched her play croquet and when I was allowed down from the nursery for tea with the grown-ups. These occasions were so fraught with ritual that leaping off the castle battlements always seemed preferable to making inept attempts at conversation with people who appeared indifferent. No amount of shyness, however, was going to prevent me from witnessing the launching of the ducks. I’d had my lunch, and my rest, and at three o’clock on the dot Nanny and I positioned ourselves right outside the castle doors on the very comfortable chairs from which guests liked to watch the croquet, or have a snooze, the one often leading to the other.

  I was surprised to see Granny’s huge black Mercedes 600—a gift from Gawaine, who was in the motorcar business and was also an accomplished racing driver—and Brewer, her chauffeur, waiting. The duck ceremonies took place only half a mile or so down the front drive, and I had assumed we’d all be walking. But there were more cars behind Granny’s, including the dark green van I knew belonged to Peter, the birdman, so clearly a convoy was going to be the order of the day. It wasn’t long before I heard voices coming from the library and the clomp-clomp of shoes on the stone floor in the entrance hall. I wondered who would speak to me and what they’d say.

  The door opened, and there was my grandmother, looking very old, very distinguished, and more than a little fierce. She was holding on tightly with one hand to the arm of Peter, the birdman, and smoking a cigarette through a long ivory holder with the other. I wasn’t sure if she’d seen me because her glasses made it quite hard to tell if she was looking at you or not. After a pause I heard her say, “Anthony, darling, why don’
t you and Nanny come with me?”

  Granny B’s voice was deep, husky, and mesmerizing. It seemed to travel through space and time, which is exactly what I did upon hearing it. I found myself between Nanny and Brewer in the front of the large black car, and immediately felt carsick from the smell of leather. Fortunately, my mother’s smiling face suddenly appeared at the window, so Nanny wound it down and let in some air.

  “Everything all right, darling?” she asked me, puffing on a cigarette and adjusting her scarf at the same time.

  “Fine thanks,” I replied, this being one of my longer speeches of the day.

  “I’m going to walk down and join you at the ducks,” she announced, as if the ducks were very grand people who lived down the road and were expecting us all for tea. Off she strode with her purposeful gait and all round air of charm and civility, leaving Brewer, Nanny, and me to talk amongst ourselves like old friends, which I suppose is exactly what we were. I heard a tap-tap-tap on the back window, and as Granny wound it down there was Johnny, the young head footman, looking very handsome in a dark suit and tie: “Everyone is ready, m’lady.”

  “Thank you, Johnny. All right, Brewer.”

  With that brief exchange completed, Brewer started the engine and we were off. At a snail’s pace, Granny B not being fond of speed. Funnily enough, the unstoppable Borrett, who actually won a medal in World War II for running an officers’ mess with distinction, was also known about the estate as Fangio, after the famous Argentine racing driver, because of his fondness for driving around at frightening speeds, usually in second gear.

  As we eased our way around the croquet lawn towards the gatehouse, I saw we were being followed by two more large cars, a silver Rolls-Royce and a blue Facel Vega—the weekend’s favoured guests, no doubt. Peter’s green van had gone on ahead, leaving in a cloud of smoke. It was then that I noticed a curious feeling of importance creeping up on me. For the most part, children at the castle tended to get overlooked in the grand scheme of things, but there I was, ensconced in the great Mercedes 600 with Nanny, Granny B, and Morg, on my way to the launching of the ducks and feeling almost elated.