Outrageous Fortune: Growing Up at Leeds Castle

by Anthony Russell

  The magisterial grandeur of Stowe, Palladian, palatial, and exquisite in form and façade, once the country seat of the Dukes of Buckingham and Chandos, in 1965 a boarding school for six hundred boys, swiftly passed me by. I’d been a successful big cheese at St Aubyns, so becoming a small fry all over again wreaked havoc with my new but still tenuous self-confidence. The drab Corinthian columns which graced the school’s North Front, so greatly admired but, through my eyes, so badly in need of a clean, typified for me every aspect of my new seat of learning. What’s more, despite being only ninety minutes’ drive northwest of London, Stowe attracted the coldest, wettest, and dullest weather imaginable.

  It was my winter of discontent. Twelve weeks of frigid acclimatizing to new rules, new faces, new systems, new accommodations, new teachers, new world. New friends helped. Richard and I had arrived on the first day at the same time in the new boys’ dormitory at the top of the house, both of us carting our trunks up the never-ending stairs, he aided by his stepfather, Enzo, a sculptor, and me by David, now an old boy, who had kindly driven me up in my mother’s Jaguar to offer as much moral support as he could.

  After the sad farewells, Richard and I had walked round the main building, impressive, indeed stately in its institutionalized form, particularly the domed assembly hall where they say the Beatles had signed autographs and former pupil David Niven had somehow deposited a master’s car, minus its wheels. I straightaway admired Richard’s insouciance and willingness to look on the bright side, while I still seethed at my parents’ lack of consideration offloading me in such a gloomy and inhospitable place.

  Clearly my attitude was unfortunate, even crass, but an unrealistic view of my place in the world had dogged me for years, and things had perhaps been a little too easy. The vast comforts of the castle way softened up the beneficiary almost to the point of no return. Although I didn’t like myself for doing it, I soon found myself comparing the amenities and splendours of Leeds Castle with the bleak, authoritarian shabbiness of Stowe. Such thoughts I was obliged to keep strictly to myself, not wishing to become public enemy number one before I’d even got started.

  Richard’s jokes were quite good, and he was kind enough to find funny my laboured attempts at humour, even when I suggested how much better the place must have been two hundred years before. Lanky and possessed of a fine Roman nose, he liked the same music as I did, and our friendship took off on a high note.

  Peter, a year older than me, black haired, wild eyed, and preternaturally self-possessed, became my friend later in the term. We discovered that we not only shared the same tastes in music and fondness for an occasional Player’s No. 6 cigarette, but also his father was the star stylist and owner of Olofson’s, the salon on Brompton Road where my mother went to have her hair done every week. Furthermore Peter lived with his mother, the actress Pauline Olsen, in Rutland Gate, which Nanny and I had always passed through on our way to and from Hyde Park for our walks all those years ago.

  It was soon apparent that spending time with older boys had the undesirable effect of upsetting the “all in the same boat” connection with my year’s crop of new boys. Peter and Richard did not become friends with each other, so from the word go I found myself in the familiar position of operating with my feet in separate camps.

  At St Aubyns there had been no such thing as free time. Each day had a set timetable which was rigorously adhered to. At Stowe, however, when you weren’t in the classroom or playing scheduled sports, your time was your own, and it was up to you how you managed it. This meant that when I wasn’t dozing through science or math class, or playing rugger, squash, hockey, or hurling down cricket balls in my capacity as opening bowler for the Colts “A” team during the summer term, I could more often than not be found strumming my acoustic guitar in the music room at the far end of the west colonnade. One reached this room by passing through the junior changing rooms, which were always liberally perfumed by the aroma of unwashed socks, sweaty jockstraps, and other sports accoutrements. It was also, distressingly, the venue of choice for prefect beatings. Fortunately I was summoned only once for a thrashing by the head of house, after receiving a chit for disobedience during house-room prep. During the administration of the six resounding thwacks, I maintained a running dialogue apparently containing sufficient humour to slightly derail the concentration of both my tormentor and his slouched witness, thereby lessening the unpleasantness of the wretched scene.

  * * *

  It was Christmas Day 1965, and my first term at Stowe had come and gone. I was standing in my Maiden’s Tower bedroom, luncheon over, staring through the windows at the rain as it fell in its usual dreary fashion on the still-immaculate croquet lawn. Off in the distance the red flag on the ninth green twisted listlessly in the wind, sodden, bowed, like a condemned man tied to the stake. Beyond, the cluster of towering cedars maintained their ancient, dignified presence, but they, too, were shrouded in a blanket of grey drizzle and melancholy.

  Within the MT walls the gloom outside was matched by an all-encompassing sadness, felt in every corner, in every room. Word had come from Nassau that Morg had died. The shock was excruciating and real. The household had dispersed, each to his or her spot, to cope with the news. I felt I wanted to cry, needed to cry, and wondered how it was that someone in whose company I had, over thirteen years, spent only a limited amount of time could have formed within me such a deep, emotional connection. Natural leaders with great charisma often inspire intense devotion in those around them, even from a distance. I didn’t have proper conversations with Morg any more than I did with Granny B; castle way bylaws saw to that. But I knew him well enough to understand what my family had lost.

  If this was how Morg’s death affected me, what must it have been like for my mother, who had adored him since she was a child? And for my father, who had perhaps looked upon him as a form of surrogate father for the one he never had?

  I went to my mother’s bedroom, knocked on the door, and found her preparing to set off on her rounds distributing Christmas presents to all the old friends and retainers who worked on the estate, as she had done every Christmas Day since I could remember. She told me to come in as she reapplied makeup and fussed about, doing her best to pretend things were normal. Neither of us mentioned Morg.

  “Can I come with you this year, Ma?” I asked. Normally David or James went with her to keep her company and help with the chatting and carrying the presents.

  “Yes, darling, of course. That would be very nice of you.” My mother had such a sad look on her face and seemed so utterly bereft that I wanted to say or do something to help, but nothing came to mind. So I told her I was going off to find my brothers and load up the car with the gifts so we’d be ready to leave when she was.

  This was the first time since the war, to my knowledge, that the court had not spent Christmas at Leeds. Granny B’s bronchitis and Morg’s cancer had brought about the decision to leave for the Bahamas early to escape the harsh English weather.

  I knew deep down that it was more than just Lord Margesson who had died—such was his aura, his charm, his sense of humour, and his genuine concern for all of us and everyone who worked at Leeds. Without ever overshadowing Granny B’s position as the castle’s dominant personality and patron of all things great and small, Morg had embodied the spirit and the splendour that was Leeds. He had been there before the war, when the castle was one of England’s most sought-after weekend invitations among leaders of society, government, and the arts. He had been a constant and reassuring presence throughout the postwar period, when Granny B had entertained and conducted her affairs, in general, on much more modest levels than in the early years.

  It was the tallest, strongest, brightest-burning candle in the whole castle firmament that had finally flickered out. The place would never be the same.

  * * *

  “What on earth are you going to do with that?” asked Mr. Gilbert, my Temple housemaster (also known, bizarrely, as Prune), who accosted me
one day during my second (Lent) term, outside the house prefect’s study.

  “Play music, sir.”

  “Play music? With that?”

  The object of Prune’s scorn was my new acoustic guitar, a gift from my parents for passing my Common Entrance exams the year before. Prune and I never got on well. He insisted on letting me know, once, how much he preferred David. “He was very nice,” he’d said in his strangely squeaky voice, “but you’re”—there he had paused as he sought the mot juste—“nasty!” This I found less than encouraging—indeed, infuriating, and somewhat confusing as well—and it further exacerbated my general ill feeling towards Stowe. “Nasty” was not a word I would have applied to myself at the time, or at any time, but Prune chose not to explain himself. In my usual fashion I told nobody about it: Never let on. People do not want to know. Get a grip. Your parents may be losing it, Morg gone, Stowe a total drag, but who doesn’t have a problem?

  “Absolutely, sir. The Beatles, and many other groups like them, are being very successful and making lots of money playing music on instruments like this.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.” Prune genuinely did not know what I was talking about. He was old school in the classic sense and probably considered any music post-Bartók to be rubbish. It turned out, though, that dismissing what I cared about most was not to have the effect he was hoping for.

  I was on my way to the music room. There, my trusty and essential chord book and the sheet music for Donovan’s “Catch the Wind” shared the rickety upright piano’s music stand, and I succeeded in learning to play the tune in one afternoon, attracting quite an audience in the process. Some of them appeared to like what they were hearing, especially Peter, and before the term was over he and I had formed a group with Max and Oliver, two like-minded new friends in Temple. Once we had laid our hands on some half-decent equipment—a struggle for all four of us and accomplished, in my case, by bidding farewell to six months’ allowance in a single afternoon—we spent the next three and a half years endeavouring to replicate the finest pop music ever made with the drive and determination of an Olympic rowing team.

  Max was tall, red-haired, and athletic. He was from Yugoslavia, which gave him a slightly exotic air, and his obsession with the ladies was second only to my brother James’s advanced preoccupation in that field. When he wasn’t talking to me about beautiful blondes and brunettes over a Dunhill International cigarette down by the Temple of Concord—an activity greatly frowned upon by the authorities and likely to result in a nasty beating or even expulsion if apprehended—he was writing love letters to them in Serbo-Croat, head bowed in concentration over his desk.

  Oliver was of normal height, a ready wit, a keen sportsman, and an Englishman to the core. Of the four of us he was perhaps the most scholarly and even tempered. That might have explained his decision to be the bass guitarist and his fondness for “Wasn’t Born to Follow” by the Byrds.

  My first year at Stowe ended in July 1966 with the Kinks’ crafty record “Sunny Afternoon” at number one in the top twenty and Britain’s prime minister, Harold Wilson, raising taxes and nationalizing the steel industry.

  Although Ray Davies’s masterful tune and lyric captured to perfection English working-class distaste for English upper-class dismay over Wilson government strategy, it seemed quite clear to me that all those new rich-and-famous Swinging Sixties superstars were, in fact, well on their way to establishing a new aristocracy. And the old aristocracy was so enamoured of this new one that it soon was hard to tell them apart as they all swanned around in velvet suits and Cuban-heeled boots at country house weekend parties and fashionable London gatherings!

  In the still fully operational English class system, the long-established mutual respect between the upper and working classes was, sensibly, finding new and exhilarating outlets for its expression: “What a piece of work is a[n English]man! How noble in reason, how infinite in faculty!”

  It was, of course, important if one was going to be a member of a pop group at school to choose a name for the band that denoted cool and spoke volumes about the ludicrously avant-garde life style and philosophy of its members. In my case this was garnered from fourteen years’ indoctrination in the castle way, and an indulgent, extraordinarily kind Nanny! After much going round in circles the four of us had settled on Source of Controversy. It might not have been as cool and avant-garde a name as we hoped, but the band was certainly controversial with Prune and with all our parents. If proof were needed that Prune might have had a point, even Oliver, the scholar, failed to achieve the two-year-mark examination results everyone had expected he would, and by quite some margin.

  Max, Oliver, and Peter shared a study, but because I was a year behind them I had to linger in the house room, keep my books in a locker, and do all my work at one of the long tables with roughly twenty-five other boys my age or younger. I often found myself knocking on their door, asking if I could have a coffee and work on a tune with them. Sometimes I wasn’t sure if I was welcome. Sometimes I wasn’t sure who my friends were back in the house room. Sometimes I just felt like saying, to no one in particular, “I have to get out of this fucking place,” because anger and frustration at being somewhere I resented being had replaced the achievement highs and happiness of St Aubyns. I felt I had no control over or say as to what happened in my life. Even if I had felt able to speak my feelings to anyone, the nature of those feelings—I should have gone to Eton with my friends from St Aubyns.… I’m above the rest, the castle way makes it clear—would have left me more isolated than ever.

  * * *

  Granny B was having the very devil of a time in Nassau maintaining the level of privacy she had sought throughout her life. Since the early 1960s “unsavoury characters” (many of them friends and associates of Sam Clapp) had been doing their level best to “take things over” (both phrases attributable to my mother’s fine sense of humour and astute assessment of the situation). Every multimillionaire “developer” known to mankind had been showing up with a burning desire to destroy the natural beauty of Paradise Island and transform every square inch they could lay their hands on into a resort hotel and casino. In brief, gangsters and their cohorts were moving in, and something had to be done.

  Granny was briefly, but not for long, able to beat gangland to the punch by purchasing first the Porcupine Club, which had had the dark cloud of a foreign conglomerate with high-rise projections hovering ominously over it, and then Grayleath, the stupendous eleven-acre property adjacent to her beloved Harbourside and one of the many former homes of her South of France friend the wealthy Canadian Dorothy Killam, a house that could have become the target of the very worst of the worst.

  Granny gave Grayleath, which had a sensational garden and an Olympic-size swimming pool, to my mother and Auntie Pops, which was very kind of her although it was never at all clear to me what opportunities might present themselves for the family to gather under this far-off, exotic roof. To the Porcupine Club and its members, a mildly run-down home away from home “estate” for semicolonial types who liked to play a little tennis and drink a lot of gin on the wide, rickety veranda, she gave carte blanche to carry on just as before.

  She personally breathed a long and heavy sigh of relief at not having to contend with the grim possibility of being spied upon in her private domain from a nearby eleventh-floor suite. For the umpteenth time I marvelled at how simple it all seemed for the castle way’s operating system to keep the world, and all its associated complications, at bay.

  Holidays accentuated the Stowe-versus-home-front comparisons, and none more so than the Easter 1967 visit to Paradise Island. Grayleath was a sumptuous addition to the “empire.” Over the period of a year it had been redecorated, air-conditioning installed, and the garden pruned and trimmed with the precision of a Curzon Street barber. So when we all turned up in April, everything looked miraculous, and I, aged fifteen, proceeded to drink copiously from the luxury brew.

  Unlike
Granny’s Harbourside, our house was on the north side of the island, close to the beach, so we had an Austin minivan at the dock to drive guests and luggage the quarter mile up through the garden. This was quite nice because, no matter how much water it received, the grass was always bordering bed-of-nails-like to walk on, especially after a few hours of hot sun had dried it out.

  Eleven acres on Paradise Island was a considerable amount of territory, and the garden was awash in palm trees, cork trees, shrubs, climbers, and flower beds dotted in all the right places with oleander, hibiscus, porterweed, dogwood, and yellow elder. The whole thing was a picturesque riot of Bahamian tropical splendour, and it reminded me, in a peculiar way, of Granny B’s wood garden at Leeds with its winding grassy paths and lush weeping willows. Both gardens were uniquely beautiful and tranquil and were in perfect harmony with the dwellings which abutted them and breathed their air.

  Grayleath was almost U-shaped, built of wood, and painted soft white. The gently slanting grey slate roof, brushed by tall palms, gave the spacious single-storey house a charming and unpretentious appearance. All the rooms were airy, the furniture colourful, the bedrooms had pretty wood panelling, and the card room/music room/second drawing room was a festival of green and white from the sofas, armchairs, and plushest of carpets to the cascade of greenery seen through wide windows, whose shutters were kept open by day. The walls of the long corridor off which all the bedrooms led were trompe l’oeil paintings of Bahamian landscapes, and the veranda overlooking the pool was tiled in black and white, windowed, and casually furnished with wicker chairs and an abundance of plant life. One could be swimming in the transparent turquoise sea, trot up the soft white sand private beach (hosing down one’s feet at the tap by the steps on the way), and be by the freshwater pool in less than three minutes.