Outrageous Fortune: Growing Up at Leeds Castle

by Anthony Russell

  But the past was now a shattered mirror. The protective shield of innocence was gone. Why, now, did I start thinking about how so many of Granny B’s friends were no longer around? How so many loyal retainers, some going back three generations, were also no longer around? How Granny’s health was deteriorating, her weekend house parties greatly reduced? How Uncle Gawaine, for reasons always unclear, had displayed no interest in living at Leeds? How Her Majesty’s Government—I was reliably informed—was waiting in the wings, anticipating an 80 percent windfall on the estate when Granny B died, thereby removing any possibility of the castle’s remaining a private home?

  I had stared out of these same windows in a state of extreme unhappiness that Christmas Day we learned that Morg had died. I was thirteen then. I was seventeen and a half when James died, and such was the shock to my system that I felt I would never be the same. His death left me wanting even more to be like him, in some way to try and fill his shoes. It was unrealistic to think I would ever come close, but I had to try. His death took away the guide I needed most when it came to understanding how to effectively, winningly, rock the boat. His charm, spirit, candour, and smarts had, over time, softened the castle way’s grip on our household, and on our lives.

  20.

  THE UNWARY BENEFICIARY

  I left Stowe in 1970 with a brace of decent A-levels in English and History. My father insisted I follow the rules and organized a job for me at Cooper Brothers and Co., Chartered Accountants, overlooking the fact that mathematics was something I’d never quite got the hang of. I knew that reminding him would be an error because he simply would have instructed me to pull my finger out and not be an ass, just as he had done on the two or three other occasions he had offered his counsel in the past. So I spent a year and a half wrestling with ledgers, charts, and figures in the heart of the City of London before admitting total defeat and quitting, probably as much to the relief of my employers as myself.

  At twenty-one I came into the first portion of my trust fund (thanks to Granny B’s generosity), and I moved out of David’s Bayswater house into my own in South Kensington. Dreaming all the while of playing in a band, I found myself a job with J. Walter Thompson advertising. I had my sights on a post in the creative department as a copywriter, which a vocational guidance test my parents suggested (I wish they’d done that before the accounting idea) had proclaimed was my ideal job. But there was a two-year wait before I was permitted to take the copywriting test, and that was just too long.

  The emerging pattern, clear to any interested party but entirely absent from my own thinking, was that the castle way’s operating system, automatically downloading updates and adding additional layers of code, like Hal in 2001: A Space Odyssey, was in charge of the ship and had been so, emphatically, since I was five.

  In less than three and a half years I walked away from two potentially good careers simply because I wanted to and because I could. How many people are similarly blessed, or cursed? I had a house, I had a trust, and I wanted truly, madly, deeply to be a professional singer-songwriter. No laws were laid down by my parents as to how long this (to them) incomprehensible choice of occupation should be allowed to continue before the cash spigots were turned off. Perhaps that was because they had other more crucial matters on their minds. Their divorce in 1971, after twenty-five years of marriage, had come as a bitter blow to my mother, who appeared to be the last one to find out about my father’s less than clandestine affair with a much younger French woman, a relationship that had been going on long before James’s accident. Fortunately, after suffering a near–mental breakdown, my mother found happiness with Col. Edward Remington-Hobbs, a small-business owner, whom she married in 1972. They, too, spent twenty-five years together until his death in 1997.

  * * *

  The bubble in which I had existed did breed a mind-set all of its own. It had enveloped me everywhere I went. It had told me I was richer (without needing any actual money) and better than the rest. It had told me that I could have everything I wanted and that my position at the top of the heap would remain sacrosanct and unchallenged forever without my having to achieve a thing. Those had been unsuitable thoughts for a child on the cusp of being sent off to boarding school for the next ten years, but for a young adult seeking a way to make his mark such thoughts had moved into the realm of the dangerous.

  * * *

  Four years after my brother’s death, I was playing in a band in London, performing in pubs and clubs and the occasional far-off university, happy at last and brimful of confidence in achieving success down the road. Regrettably, I was again ill prepared for the realities of life when, in 1974, I met with Ahmet Ertegun, the legendary, charismatic cofounder and chairman of Atlantic Records, a friend of my father’s, to see if he would consider signing me to his label.

  “How do you plan to make it?” he asked me in the drawing room of his London house after listening to four of my self-composed demo recordings. As always, he was dressed in a perfectly cut suit with formal shirt and tie—so unlike most other music executives—and exuding a powerful cocktail of bonhomie and hard-nosed professionalism. He was leaning forward in his chair, staring at me through oval glasses which emphasized the size of his eyes and the force of his gaze.

  My plan “to make it,” if it could be called such, was to get a record contract, have hits, and go out and play them in front of enthusiastic audiences. Instead of dismissing me out of hand, Ahmet said, “I’m going to put you in the studio with Dave Dee (who’d been a pop star himself with Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick, and Tich) as producer, and I want you to record five singles for me. Your best tunes.” His hoarse growl seemed to convey a modicum of optimism about the outcome, and he made no mention of “paying dues”—the act of playing the clubs, building an audience, and becoming a seasoned performer—as one or two well-known musicians, including Eric Clapton, later did to me. But with great kindness and generosity he gave me the opportunity to see if I could come up with something to disprove what his instincts were telling him: The kid may be good; he certainly has ambition; but he’s been brought up in a different world; he’s naive about the music business; he’s naive about life. His heart’s in the right place, but his head tells him all the wrong things—no “blood, toil, tears and sweat” required. Atlantic Records eventually turned me down—and the castle way’s operating system marched on.

  It is one of life’s more regrettable features that the most important life decisions are often made when one is young, irrational, lacking in experience, and (oh dear) frequently plain dumb. One’s upbringing either fills or leaves empty the common-sense larder, either promotes or ignores the importance of being serious, either nurtures or casts aside the essence of self-awareness. In all three cases the castle way maintained a lofty indifference, thereby ensuring less than desirable outcomes most of the time. I was consumed with ambition and, according to some, not a bad singer and player. A top London producer wanted to turn me into “the next David Cassidy,” but I insisted on playing my own brand of self-written melodic pop. I should have listened: It might have opened the door.

  Three years later Mick Jagger informed my glamorous French girlfriend, Florence (whom our mutual friend Taki Theodoracopoulos, the famous playboy, journalist, and gossip columnist, christened “the High Priestess of the Jet Set”), that I would never make it in music because I was too posh, too damn spoiled, too right side of the tracks. He even said to me once—with a slight sneer—“Of course, I didn’t grow up at Leeds Castle!”

  Music helped me distance myself from the castle way, but it was too ingrained to disappear over the horizon never to be heard from again. Its power as a curse upon motivation and normalcy had resulted in my first twenty years on Planet Earth becoming a minefield of mixed-up emotions and complicated mind games. The creature comforts were never less than dazzling, but detecting and disarming the mines had been left almost entirely to Nanny, and her expertise in this field was, on the surface, rather limited.

&
nbsp; But if Bertrand Russell was correct that “the point of philosophy is to start with something so simple as not to seem worth stating, and to end with something so paradoxical that no one will believe it,” then Nanny was clearly onto something. “There, there,” she would reassuringly tell me whenever things were looking grim. “I expect you’ll muddle through.” She wasn’t, of course, trying to be rude or put me down by mapping out my entire future in one curt phrase, but it turned out she was right on the money. No bright lights. No glittering career. The castle way and I kept close and consistent watch over one another, and like ragged misfits we muddled our way through a sometimes enterprising but generally mismanaged life. Family welfare (a trust fund periodically topped up) and an inheritance when my mother died in 2001 virtually guaranteed that the huge holes in my understanding of how the world works would remain untouched by toil and trouble. I have travelled umpteen times to the fleshpots of the world but failed to make intelligent use of the proverbial silver spoon. It’s obvious now that the castle way and rock music (just like the castle way and family holidays) were never going to see eye to eye despite my best effort to make them.

  21.

  THE MAN AT THE GATE

  Shakespeare, in his most famous sonnet, chose to compare the beauty of his undisclosed subject to a summer’s day, and that element of perfection was everywhere to be seen, and felt, when I visited Leeds Castle on a sublime Monday afternoon in August 2009, not having been back since my mother died in April 2001.

  My wife, Catherine, and I had been staying with my brother, David, a local councillor and businessman, and his wife, Tia, an antique collector and gardening maestro, in their fine Georgian house on the outskirts of Rye, a picturesque medieval town on the Sussex coast. David’s life had also been crucially touched by the castle way and its hard-line programming, but, never one to make a fuss, the furthest he ever cared to go in expressing his feelings on the subject to me was, “I suppose we were brought up a little soft.” Academically and intellectually very bright, I’m sure the careers my brother started but didn’t quite finish, including publishing and property development, would have turned out very differently but for the troubled waters of our castle way upbringing.

  My wife and I decided we would visit my mother’s grave at St Nicholas’s Church in Leeds village before continuing on our way back to London. After spending half an hour in the pretty churchyard, where natural meadow grasses flourish year-round and the gravestones are dotted haphazardly about as if indulging the untidiness of death, we entered the magnificent eight-hundred-year-old Saxon/Norman church, with its massive twelfth-century tower, high steeple, and intricately carved rood screen separating nave from chancel, and a flood of childhood and adult memories came rushing back, prompting me to suggest to Catherine that we should drive over to the castle to see if they would let us in without, perhaps, having to pay the £16.50 entrance fee.

  Granny B had devoted her life, and vast amounts of money, to exquisitely restoring and maintaining Leeds Castle’s splendour. Before she died, in September 1974, she bequeathed it to the nation with an endowment of one and a half million pounds. I was not at all ready to start becoming a paying customer.

  With few exceptions (golfers for the most part) all visitors now arrived at the new front drive main gate, two hundred yards off the A20 London-to-Dover road. The park drive, which bisects the other two, runs uphill past the cricket pitch directly towards Leeds village, was unattended but had a barrier for which one needed a pass card. I sensed that the back drive golfers’ entrance, just off the narrow country lane to Broomfield village, would provide a calmer negotiating forum, and so it turned out to be.

  We pulled up alongside a grassy verge which bordered what had been the seventh hole of golf (castle guests and family, for aesthetic and convenience purposes, always began their morning nine holes at the third hole because it was an easier, shorter, more pleasing walk, across grass, not tarmac, meandering alongside the moat) and studied the situation. There was a single gentleman, about sixty, wearing a flat cap and jacket, attending the barrier, which was down. There was nobody else in sight. We looked at him and he at us. He must have wondered what the devil we were doing parked where, essentially, there was nowhere to park. I started daydreaming of the countless times I had played this long, impressive hole of golf with tall trees bordering the left side of the fairway and a row of firs standing guard over the green, which was protected first by a deep valley and then by a wide, treacherous bunker directly in front.

  “Are we going in?” Catherine was obliged to ask as my reverie continued unabated. Now that the family connection had, regrettably, been allowed to fade, I was unsure as to what form of welcome we would receive.

  “Indeed we are,” I responded, crossing the road, pulling up to the barrier, and lowering my window all the way down: “Good afternoon.”

  “Good afternoon.” He was a well-built man with a countryman’s unself-conscious demeanour. The look on his wide, weathered face was neutral.

  “My name’s Anthony Russell. I’m Mrs. Remington-Hobbs’s son, Lady Baillie’s grandson. I was wondering if it might be possible for us to come in and have a look around. I haven’t been back since my mother died.”

  His reaction took me by surprise. He came up to the car, leaned down, and shook my hand with a firm grip that didn’t let go, and with his other hand he took my arm and held it, too. It was as if he could not believe it was me, and that my being there could be confirmed only by physical contact. No words were exchanged for a moment. He then released my arm but, still holding my hand, began to speak of my mother and of my stepfather, Col. Teddy Remington-Hobbs.

  “I remember your mother and the colonel. I’ve been at the castle for about sixteen years now, and I got to know them very well. They are truly missed by everyone who knew them. Sadly there are not many left that did.” He stood, releasing my hand, and I saw the discreet pin with “Les Bray” written on it. “The things that stick in my mind are their daily walks around the estate when they would happily talk to everyone and sign their guidebooks for them, and the colonel driving through the grounds with his table-tennis bat held up with a large ‘Thank you’ on it if people moved out of the way. Your mother would pose for pictures with the visitors, usually with the castle in the background of course.”

  I remembered my mother and stepfather doing just as Les was describing. Since the opening of the castle and grounds to the public in 1976 I had frequently witnessed them interacting with the ever-increasing number of visitors. Though her former home had been, with some haste due to my grandmother’s failing health, established as a public charity (the Leeds Castle Foundation) in order to avoid stratospheric death duties my mother saw to it that all those she came into contact with were afforded her warm, personal welcome, as her mother would surely have wished.

  “At Christmas,” Les said, “we used to have a staff party held at the local hotel—sadly no more—and they were the guests of honour. They would join in with the dancing and have a great time giving out prizes to the staff. Your mother knew everyone’s name. She was very special. I wish they were here now.”

  Our family connection to Leeds had lasted seventy-five years, one of the longest associations in the history of one of England’s oldest and most romantic “stately homes.”

  “I’ll radio up to the office to tell them you’re here,” Les said. “Would you mind driving up there to get your passes? It’s where the old laundry used to be.”

  Ah! The laundry! It had been managed in the fifties and sixties by Mr. and Mrs. Love, with three female assistants. On my bicycle tours, when not engaged in high-speed downhill trials, ignoring the possibility of any estate worker in his car coming round a corner from the opposite direction, I’d sometimes stop to peer through the tall windows and watch the ladies skillfully manoeuvring sheets through the gigantic roller, or ironing linen napkins, power cords dangling from the ceiling like puppeteers’ strings. A private laundry apparently was a must be
cause all the sheets were custom made for the enormous four-poster castle beds, and all the linens were from Porthault, in Paris, and hand embroidered in Italy. To send these delicate items out to be washed and ironed every week Granny B had deemed hazardous for their survival.

  “Okay, we’ll do that, thanks very much. It’s been a pleasure meeting you.”

  “Likewise.”

  We set off for the estate office, and in my rearview mirror I saw Les bringing the barrier back down. His heartfelt words had touched me, and straightaway I regretted not telling him so. If I could kick myself for all the times I might have said something meaningful to someone when the situation had called for it, but failed to do so, held back by an invisible force that decreed, “Let’s avoid sounding a little too dramatic, shall we?”—or, sometimes just by a simple lack of emotional dexterity—I would have a sorer bum than a constantly beaten nineteenth-century English public schoolboy.

  Perhaps the most egregious missed opportunity of all was never telling Nanny how much she’d meant to me. At the very least she had deserved a resounding affirmation of my love for her, and it would have been so natural, so easy, during one of my visits to the cosy retirement apartment in Wimbledon my parents had bought for her, close to the famous tennis courts, to finally say the words. But they didn’t come, and after she died in 1976 I felt ashamed of my weakness.

  Les had reminded me not just of my mother and grandmother’s lifelong connection to the castle and its people, but also of my own long-buried, deeply affecting ties, which rose to the surface as we drove slowly down the avenue of lime and sweet chestnut trees and the vision that is Leeds Castle, surrounded by her moat, golf course, and parkland, came once more into view.

  “He was so pleased to meet you and talk about your family,” Catherine told me. “It’s clear he has fond memories of the way things used to be.”