I had a black Mini which I kept in London and Lucian borrowed it several times. One day he arrived at Chesterfield Street, where we had our London house, swinging the key on his finger. ‘This is all that’s left of your car,’ he said. It had been stolen and that was that. Being driven in London by Lucian was hazardous; Marble Arch was terrifying, Hyde Park Corner even worse. He was Mr Toad, scarf and all, in his old but powerful car. He weaved its long body in and out of the swirling traffic, avoiding buses, bicycles and angry taxi drivers by inches. When I shouted, ‘Slower. STOP. PLEASE,’ he said, ‘It’s all right. They’ve all got brakes.’
Twenty years after painting me, Lucian made a portrait of Andrew. The lengthiness of the sittings shows. Andrew, who was not well at the time, is slumped in a chair and has either nodded off or is staring at the floor – it is impossible to tell which as eyelids take the place of eyes. Lucian also painted Moucher, Stoker and my sisters-in-law, Elizabeth and Anne. When hung together these portraits span several decades of his work and reflect the changes in his style.
In 1974, Andrew was painted by Theodore Ramos, dressed in the robes of Chancellor of the University of Manchester. It is a good likeness but the clothes are a far cry from his usual frayed silk shirt, pale trousers and tweed coat. Eighteen years later when he was painted by the Glasgow artist Stephen Conroy, in a portrait commissioned by Stoker, he was wearing his everyday clothes, and there stands Andrew to the life.
It was a daily pleasure to live among the pictures at Chatsworth. Gazing at Velasquez’ Lady with a Mantilla in my sitting room, for example, was a real help when I was trying to do something difficult. There seemed no obvious place to hang Rembrandt’s Portrait of an Old Man – it has to be studied close to and it is no good muddling it up with other pictures – so Andrew put it on an easel to be examined at leisure. Reynolds’ portrait of Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire and her baby daughter, and Batoni’s portraits of the Fifth Duke (looking supercilious) and his younger brother Richard Cavendish (looking drab as befits a second son) suited the blue drawing room. Liotard’s pastels of the great actor Garrick and his wife stood out against the deep colour of the red velvet room, and at the same time were protected from too much light as this visitor’s room was not often used. It was the same with the furniture: certain pieces slotted into certain rooms, mixed up without a thought of dates or nationalities. I loved this mongrel arrangement.
Domestic trials were few, but they existed. One was brought about by Nobby, a delightful, selfish and knowing whippet, who wanted to go out in the night; he insisted and there was no escape. So it was on with a thick dressing gown, down thirty-four steps to open the heavy front door and wait in the hall. Sometimes this coincided with the night watchman’s thrice-nightly tour of the house. His heavy tread and powerful torch picked me out on my innocent mission. ‘It’s all right, only me and Nobby,’ I would say. We passed the time of day, no – night, and on he went on his round. Nobby whined at the door and thirty-four steps later I got thankfully back into bed. The collie dog was not so demanding, but he made his own trouble. At a coffee morning for a local charity where people had paid a stiff price for a ticket, a Chatsworth man said to me in a low voice, ‘There’s been an incident. Collie has bitten a lady.’ The said lady had refused to be rounded up, which Collie thought was his duty, and she had paid for it with a bitten ankle. She was a good sport and did not sue, but such ‘incidents’ happened from time to time.
Owning a large house and land brings with it the feeling of being part of a whole, of being in it together with the many people who work there, living cheek by jowl and respecting each other’s expertise. At Chatsworth, these people formed an organization unmatched in the country, including cooks, cleaners, archivists, art historians, educationalists, needlewomen, accountants, plumbers, joiners, electricians, lodge porters, security guards, retailers, lecturers, night watchmen, firemen, a computer expert, a photographer and a silver steward. This human kaleidoscope produced the philanderer, the drunk, the saint, the beauty, the troublemaker, the pourer of oil, the flirt, the bore (and Bore Emeritus), the talker and the doer, the observer and the instigator. Some had to be begged to take a holiday; others, like the unnamed artists of the fifteenth century who were known from the subjects of their work as the Master of the Legend of St Ursula or the Master of the Holy Kinship, could be aptly described as the Master of the Unfinished Job. The mixture was fascinating and the people in the different departments made me wonder at their knowledge and interest in the place. Something about Chatsworth makes people want to do their best for it – just as visitors return again and again to discover more.
My role, which was never defined in the way a job would be now, was a woolly Human Resource Last Resort. The knock at my sitting-room door came often enough to make me aware of what I was there for. What people wanted, as we all do, was to talk to someone about their worries, real or imaginary. I only had to listen and out it all came. Sometimes I could ‘do something’, sometimes I could not, but the fact that the bottled-up trouble was given a hearing was often enough. In the days when the domestic staff lived in, they were at the mercy of their head of department and when things got too much they came to the fount. I did my best, thinking of poor Solomon, but I am sure I often made terrible mistakes. Like my father, I have a weakness in that I have always found it difficult to work with people I do not like. Inevitably in such a large company there were one or two of these, and I am sure I was often unfair when so confronted.
When asked if I found my role difficult, I could always answer no, not really, because I had seen it all my life. From Swinbrook days I was used to farms and to the field sports that go hand in hand with an estate, whether big or small. Farve did not farm himself but I was friendly with the farm tenants and familiar with their stock, crops and calendar. At Chatsworth everything, inside and out, was magnified a hundred times but the underlying feel was the same. It all depended on the people who worked there. There were few demarcation lines between the staff, roles sometimes blurred and melted into the next profession and if one person needed help, the next person lent a hand. It may have been an amorphous organization, run entirely on trust and instinct, but it worked. In all the years Andrew and I lived at Chatsworth, we were let down seriously by only two employees. Our common aim was to leave things better than we had found them. That, I can honestly say, I think we did. And for us, to be surrounded with such beauty and such excellent people was a reward in itself, and the excitement of living at Chatsworth remained with me until I left.
15
Bolton Hall
B
OLTON HALL IN Yorkshire was a holiday house, imbued with a holiday atmosphere, where, following family tradition, we spent August for the grouse shooting. There was no formality and only one telephone in a cold cupboard under the stairs. It was a total contrast to Chatsworth. The same six or seven guests came every year for the inside of a week and were replaced by another lot the following week; an annual reunion much looked forward to by all. English sporting events are often marred by bad (another word for appalling) weather, which produces camaraderie like nothing else, and because the same people came to shoot year after year at Bolton, this feeling was magnified. When we were bold enough to invite someone new, he must have felt as though he was starting at a new school or, worse still, joining a new regiment. Englishmen never seem to grow up and, like schoolboys, are wary of a new face. ‘Who on earth is that and why have you asked him?’ enquires an old boy of the new. The Bolton Abbey estate had come to the Dukes of Devonshire in 1753, on the death of Lord Burlington, whose only surviving daughter married the future Fourth Duke. Some of the most varied and beautiful landscapes in Yorkshire make up the 30,000 acres of farms, woods and heather moors, well known for the sport they provide. The tall archway topped by a tower in the middle of the Hall was once the gatehouse to the priory opposite, founded by Augustinian canons in about 1150. The holy men chose a place of spectacular beauty, set in the fertile valley of th
e River Wharfe. After the Dissolution in 1539, the gatehouse survived when most of the other monastic buildings were knocked down and their stones pillaged. In 1720 the archway was blocked at either end and converted into a house. Extensions were added over the years and in 1843 Paxton enlarged the south wing to make a drawing room with a bedroom and dressing room above for the Duke. Pugin was brought in to decorate the drawing room in fanciful Gothic style. The lofty archway, once the entrance for all traffic to the priory, is now the dining room.
I first went to Bolton in 1946 with my father-in-law and his friends. The only other women in the party were my mother-in-law and Andrew’s sisters (no women other than family were ever invited to Bolton – a tradition that Andrew followed). When Andrew was young, he and the other Cavendish grandchildren were boarded out, some in the Bolton Abbey post office, some in the farm across the road and others with tenant farmers. Until rationing came to an end, we stayed in the Devonshire Arms Hotel, half a mile from the Hall. We took it over, filling the bedrooms and queuing for the bath and lavatory. Moucher, Elizabeth, Anne and I rode hill ponies to join the ‘guns’ at the various heather-thatched lunch huts. This was all very well when the weather was fine, but getting on to a cold, wet saddle in driving rain when you knew there was no chance of being dry till evening was not so good. There was only one motorized vehicle to get the guns up the hill: an ex-army jeep that was usually occupied by the agent, Mr Hay, and his dog – so host and guests walked. A tractor and trailer took the lunch up from the Hall. Now some twenty vehicles trek along the rough tracks – an unheard-of luxury sixty years ago.
Until the early 1950s, when we put it in, there was no electricity at the Hall. The oil lamps often smoked and Pugin’s drawing-room ceiling was blackened in places. A row of candlesticks was left out to enable guests to hunt for their bedrooms, up a narrow, winding staircase with ropes for banisters. The house was shabby and lacked the number of baths and lavatories now thought necessary for human habitation. Some of the mattresses were made of hard lumps, some sagged almost to the floor. No one minded. (The grand-looking bed in the King’s Room was finally too much and we bought a new mattress.) Two of the bedrooms were pitch dark all day because of the tall yew trees planted a few feet from the house. The others had ancient curtains made of white dimity with long fringes, so there was no hope of keeping out the light.
No one complained. And no one noticed the hole in the drawing-room carpet that got a little bigger each year. Beautiful bits of furniture from Londesborough Hall (where the Earls of Burlington are buried) rubbed shoulders with hard settees covered in hideous cretonne and schoolroom writing tables, their drawers full of silver-framed photographs of King George V and Queen Mary. The King often shot at Bolton in the 1920s and 30s and the house was full to bursting when he came to stay. He brought his own staff, his own post office and a hill pony to carry him to the butts. Queen Mary stayed with her daughter, the Princess Royal, at nearby Harewood House. On 19 August 1921, at 2.00 a.m., a Privy Council was held at the Hall. It was an unusual hour for a meeting, and rare for it to take place in a private house. But the case was an emergency, and the King’s formal consent was required before Parliament could be adjourned later that day.
Mrs Canning, our cook in earlier years, came with us to Bolton. A formidable woman of uncertain temper and curious views on life, she had a theory that you could not buy sugar in Yorkshire, so a sack was thrown on to the lorry with all the other comestibles sent from Chatsworth. Mrs White, who had worked under Mrs Canning at her previous job, helped out at Bolton and cooked at Chatsworth when Mrs Canning was on holiday. She was a far better cook than Mrs Canning and unwisely I once said to the latter, ‘What a wonderful cook Mrs White is!’ ‘Huh, well,’ said Mrs Canning, ‘she could have been, but she only did seven years in the scullery.’ There were not enough cooking utensils or linen at the Hall and the lorry from Chatsworth came laden with immense hampers, including ‘the Bolton silver’ which spent the rest of the year in the safe at Chatsworth. The lorry also brought a set of Derby dessert plates commissioned by the Sixth Duke and decorated with paintings of his houses. For some reason it was thought too risky to use this china at home, but it bumped along the road to Bolton where it formed a traditional part of the dinner table.
The days on the moor were long. The guns often did not get home till 7 p.m., when they would tuck into tea followed immediately by dinner. The reason for providing tea, however late the hour, was told me by Granny Evie: she thought that if the guns were awash with tea they would drink less whisky later. I cannot say I saw any evidence of this, but we stuck to her rule. When Lord Carnarvon came to shoot, I kept a loaded water pistol by my place at dinner and if the talk got altogether too much, I threatened his velvet jacket with a short sharp shower. The energy of the younger guns inspired the older ones and everyone played desperate games of Billiard Fives late into the night. You would think they would have been too tired, but not a bit of it (though no doubt their shooting suffered the next morning).
There was a large staff at Bolton and the guns often brought their own loaders, usually keepers from their own shoots. This added to the holiday atmosphere and the endless laughter from the low-ceilinged, smoke-filled room where the staff ate (and drank) set the scene for the week. One rare hot August evening after a good supper, a troop of them stripped off and jumped naked into the river. I was terrified that in their high spirits there might be an accident, but mercifully the same number came back as went in.
In Swinbrook days, I had loved going out with Farve and the guns, and had always longed to take part, but knew it was a vain hope. Eddy Devonshire would never have allowed a woman gun at Bolton or Chatsworth, but Andrew had no such prejudice. So at the age of thirty I bought a gun and enlisted the help of Mr Lord, the head keeper at Chatsworth (the famous Mr Maclauchlan had just retired after nearly fifty years’ service). Mr Lord and I spent many hours walking the hedgerows, with dogs as beaters to begin with, while I slowly gained enough confidence to take the last butt at Bolton or stand last in the line at a pheasant shoot at Chatsworth. Women guns were rare sixty years ago and initially I was regarded with suspicion all round. Nancy, in her usual way, said that shooting turned me into Farve. ‘Better give it up,’ she teased, ‘it’ll ruin your looks.’
It was one of Andrew’s many acts of generosity to have kept the shoots going for Stoker and me. He himself had never enjoyed shooting and colour blindness prevented him seeing grouse flying low over the heather. He gave it up soon after his father’s death but still enjoyed the organization, having been part of it since childhood. He loved walking and Bolton Abbey gave him the opportunity. Scorning the Land Rovers and ritzy Range Rovers that have replaced legs in the last twenty-five years, he often arrived at a distant line of butts before they did. He sat in their butt with each guest in turn, a folded Times in his pocket and Portly, his big, almost white Labrador, by his side. The newspaper was a proper size in those days and when opened its broad white sheets acted as a warning to the grouse, the wildest of birds: STOP, GO AWAY. The presence of their host was inhibiting enough to the guns without the white and off-white deterrents that went with him. (As soon as the drive began Andrew did put the sodden, peaty newspaper back in his pocket.)
The beaters were mostly boys from Skipton Grammar School and they walked for miles through heather and – worse – wet, waist-high bracken. They soon got to know who the guns were and when Uncle Harold was shooting I heard, ‘Watch out, lads. There’s Uncle Mac up front.’ The boys thought that like many old people he might be overconfident and shoot a bit close to the oncoming line of beaters, but there was no need to watch out, he was a good shot. At Bolton Uncle Harold took on the role of the elder statesman, not just of politics but of grouse shooting. Photographs in the local paper of him arriving spawned his ‘grouse moor image’, which then stuck. He was indulgent to Stoker and his friends, even when, aged sixteen and stumped for something to say to his august neighbour at dinner, Stoker announced, ‘Un
cle Harold, Old Moore’s Almanac says you’ll fall in October.’ After a suitable pause for thought, the Prime Minister replied, ‘Yes, I should think that’s about right.’
Our old friend John Wyndham became Uncle Harold’s private secretary in 1957. He dreaded the outing to Bolton, especially the rickety ride on the tractor that brought him out to the moor with lunch and any telephone messages that had arrived for his boss that morning. The guns were often late and while they waited John and the farmer who drove the tractor played a game. It was invented by the farmer and involved tossing coins into the heather and retrieving them within a certain time limit. As John was nearly blind and unaccustomed to heather, his opponent always ended with a triumphant, ‘I’ve won.’ John was wonderful company and used to make fun of everything to do with the government. At Bolton we watched him throwing top secret Cabinet papers all over the room assigned to Uncle Harold as an office. The typists from Downing Street had never seen such a performance and were half-shocked, half-delighted. Uncle Harold loved John, as did we all. Under the chaos was the sharpest brain in the business.
When Jack Kennedy was President, I often wondered about the messages that went from the Prime Minister at Bolton to the White House. In August 1963, Uncle Harold was staying with us at the same time as David Ormsby Gore, our Ambassador to Washington. Some international crisis was brewing as usual. Uncle Harold summoned David and read him the message he was proposing to send to Jack. It began with a long, flowery account of the day’s shooting (something the President had never done) and was larded with such phrases as ‘sunlit heather’, ‘birds plentiful’, ‘strong north-west wind’. The point of the cable came right at the end of this poetic description. David caught my eye and we started laughing at the idea of the poor puzzled President trying to guess what Uncle Harold was on about. I do not know what found its way to Washington, but I imagine David pruned it somewhat.
Wait for Me! Page 23