In 1972 the Royal Smithfield Club held its annual conference in Buxton and Andrew was invited to be the guest speaker. He already had an engagement that day and, knowing of my interest in food and farming, handed me their letter and suggested I go in his place. It was the beginning of my happy association with that triumvirate of farmers, butchers and makers of agricultural machinery. I visited their Show and was hooked, and for many years Earls Court was my destination for four days in late November and early December. On my first visit I saw a tractor with a price tag of £15,000, which made my jaw drop. Today my jaw would fall off should I see the price tag on one of its vast successors.
The Carcase Hall was a carnivore’s dream, with expert butchers on hand to point out the excellence of the prizewinners. To the uninitiated the names of some of the classes were puzzling: ‘Carcase Cattle Alive’ (to which they could have added ‘But Not for Long’) and ‘Combined Live/Dead Butchers’ Sheep’. The pig section showed the cream of the porcine world. One pen had two lively prime baconers with a side of bacon displayed overhead and a notice that read, ‘Litter Mate on the Hook’. (It was just as well those pigs could not read.) As for sheep, a girl was spotted coming out of the nearby tube station wearing a shaggy sheepskin coat with a red splodge on the lower back – a sure sign that the original owner of the skin had received the close attentions of a ram in his raddle harness. The townee wearer was oblivious of the reason for the merriment of the group of farmers following her.
I was president of the Royal Smithfield Show from 1972 to 1974 and president of the Royal Smithfield Club in 1975. The Queen Mother honoured the Show with her presence and it was my good fortune to look after her during the more private moments of her day-long visits. The Show was just up her street and she was as at home with the butchers and stockmen as they were with her. I followed in her wake as she toured the stands, and I watched the amazing effect her charm had on all those to whom she talked or happened to meet on her path.
Afterwards, we were shepherded by the exhibition manager – Gerry Kunz, son of Charlie Kunz, the famous dance pianist of my youth – to a room called G9 (no relation of G8 or G20 and I never discovered where rooms G1–8 were). G9 had what are described as ‘facilities’ where we were meant to ‘tidy’. It also had a cupboard with every alcoholic drink under the sun and we were able to settle down and chat, oblivious of Gerry and the other officials waiting outside to take us to lunch. During one of these chats, the Queen Mother told me of her pre-war visits to Chatsworth when Granny Evie was in charge, and how on her last visit, on the eve of the Abdication, she and the Duke of York had been acutely aware of the profound change about to take place in their lives. The association with this troubled time went so deep that, in spite of many invitations, she never came to stay at Chatsworth with us.
G9’s drinks cupboard was on the floor, so it was hands and knees for me to find the necessary Dubonnet and gin. I soon learned the drill, kneeling again to pour a second helping – in the wrong proportions no doubt, but with no complaint from the consumer. I loved those moments and the memories. At lunch the Queen Mother asked the assembled company, ‘What has happened to mutton? We always get lamb, but never mutton.’ As a result, one of the farmers kept on some wether lambs for a second year, and twelve months later we fell on the mutton, caper sauce and all. The Queen Mother was president of the Royal Smithfield Show in 1983 and again in 1987–2001. Tradition has it that one who has held this office remains a vice-president for life and wears a large porcelain brooch to proclaim this. The Queen Mother, who had never been ‘vice’ of anything, was a little surprised at the wording on the brooch she was expected to wear. She looked at me quizzically, head on one side, and said, ‘Shall I put it on?’
My eight-year association with Tarmac, the international building conglomerate, came about by chance. Eric Pountain, chief executive of John McLean & Sons, a building firm based in Wolverhampton, had a friend who bred Haflingers, the small horses that I too bred. Eric gave a cup to be presented at the Haflinger Breed Show and delivered it to the Chatsworth home farm one day when I happened to be there. We had a chat and off he went to a more important engagement. Soon after this, he invited me to join the board of McLean. Perhaps he asked me because I was a woman (it was starting to be the thing to do to have a female on the board) or perhaps because my name was vaguely known in the Midlands. I did not know what to expect and went to the first meeting full of trepidation (Eric’s people must have been equally surprised at my arrival). I kept quiet but soon learned the business language of the house builder: land bank, gearing, leverage, etc. McLean was doing well at the time and the company was looking forward with confidence to a great future.
In 1974 McLean was taken over by Tarmac; a shrewd acquisition as McLean was pounding ahead. Various things had gone wrong at the top of Tarmac and a new chief executive was required. Eric was the outstanding man and obvious choice. Again, a woman was required on the board and, as I had been a few years with McLean, I got promotion and became a non-executive director of Tarmac plc in 1984. This led to journeys to South Africa and America with Eric and Nicholas Henderson, a fellow non-executive director. Nicko was a lucky appointment for many reasons, perhaps the chief one being that he could speak French, an accomplishment not shared by most of the top brass of the construction industry. The fact that he had been our Ambassador in the United States also helped and we were welcomed wherever we went.
Tarmac expanded into ten US States and our jaunts to America, including crossing the Atlantic on Concorde, were part of our education. One expedition stands out in my memory. Nicko and I were in Virginia and were sent in a helicopter to look at the quarries along the James River. We wanted to dip down to see the famous eighteenth-century plantation houses on this stretch of water; they have been so often written about and photographed and we were curious to see them in reality. The pilot, however, stuck to his instructions to show us the quarries and we managed only tantalizing glimpses of the houses. All the while the helicopter door kept flying open, which did not seem to matter and no one took any notice.
Nicko was chairman of the Channel Tunnel Group in 1985–6 and was instrumental in the run-up to, and making of, the tunnel. The work was done by a consortium of British construction companies, including Tarmac, in conjunction with their French counterparts – with whom Nicko was able to talk with the familiar ease of one who has lived in France. We went with the other directors on an exciting expedition under the sea when our side was about to meet the French tunnellers. The machines were like something out of a giant’s toy box and I still have – given to me as a memento of the day – one of the claws that played its part in opening up this underground highway to the Continent.
In the late 1980s Tarmac gave a dinner in a private room at the Connaught Hotel where Andrew and I found ourselves in the company of princes of industry. Also present was Denis Thatcher and I sat next to him. When the Chairman tapped his glass and asked all present for their views on the political situation, two memorable things took place: Andrew predicted the future danger of escalating Muslim extremism, showing, once again, how he grasped the world situation before many others did. When it came to Denis Thatcher’s turn to speak, I turned towards my neighbour to find that he had slid down in his chair and that his chin was almost on the table. Eric had the tact to pass quickly to another guest.
One day in 1988 I got a letter from the three directors of the auction house Bonhams, Nick Bonham, Christopher Elwes and Paul Whitfield, inviting me to go and see them. The Bonham salerooms in Montpelier Street were well known to me from Rutland Gate days when we passed them every time we walked through the Hole in the Wall to Brompton Road (often ending up at ‘Wicked Old Harrod’). I had haunted their salerooms in the early 1980s looking for portraits of bulls to hang in the Devonshire Arms Hotel at Bolton Abbey and in the wild hope of finding a likeness of ‘The Craven Heifer’, a vast creature for whom the doors of her shed at Bolton had had to be widened.
Intrigu
ed by Bonhams’ invitation, I went to see them. After polite exchanges, I settled into my chair and they suggested I join the board. ‘That is very nice of you,’ I said, ‘but do you realize I am very old?’ ‘Oh yes,’ they said. ‘We know you’re very old, but we are very young and it will do quite well.’ So I joined and looked forward with pleasure to the prospect of learning about another new world, based on an old family business in which the Bonham family was still represented. I stayed with the company till 1995 when, having done nothing for them, I thought I should make way for someone more spry.
In the same year that I joined Bonhams, I received a letter from Dr Steve Dowbiggin, principal of Capel Manor College in Enfield, inviting me to be patron. I was already too much occupied, but the idea of a College within the boundary of the M25, which taught all aspects of gardening, was too attractive to dismiss out of hand. Besides which Dr Dowbiggin’s writing paper was decorated with a drawing of a fritillary growing up one side. So I accepted. It has been fascinating to watch the College develop over the years from 400 students based in an eighteenth-century manor house, to its present position in the world of horticulture with 2,600 students and five satellites in and around London.
The College owes its success to Steve (a man who talks you into doing just what he wants) and his brilliant heads of department who have been with him for many years. People who live in the city have an irrepressible need to get closer to the earth, to learn about it and dirty their hands in the process. The only Good Thing I did for Capel Manor was to introduce Steve to Andrew Parker Bowles. Andrew’s family, which includes A. E. Bowles, the famous gardening writer, has many connections with Enfield. Forty Hall, where Capel Manor is planting London’s first commercial vineyard, belonged to Andrew’s family for many years. He has done more for the College than I ever did.
We had some memorable days with various distinguished visitors. Mrs Thatcher came when she was Prime Minister. Gardening is not her chief interest but she did the rounds of the show gardens and the classrooms, all in a day’s work. What made her visit unforgettable was the Force 9 gale that was blowing. I soon looked like the Wild Woman of the West, hair all over the place, as did the other women in the party. But not a hair on the PM’s head moved. I was so interested in this phenomenon I could not pay attention to anything else. When Mrs Thatcher left, as tidy as when she arrived, I gave her half a dozen of my best dark brown Welsummer eggs as a thank-you. She looked rather surprised and I wondered if she threw them out of the car window (before it was against the law to scatter unwanted eggs on the road).
In 1993 the Prince of Wales, who chairs the committee responsible for the Royal Collection, invited me to join it. A more fascinating ‘job’ cannot be imagined. The range of what Sybil Cholmondeley, chatelaine of Houghton Hall, called ‘Things’ that the committee look after is unequalled in the world, and the dedicated experts involved in the care of them are specialists in a class of their own. It was my good fortune to be a trustee for six years. One of the first projects the committee addressed was the extension to the Queen’s Gallery at Buckingham Palace, and I was present at the meetings which decided what the building should look like and which architect should be appointed. It was no easy task to adapt an old building, already fully occupied, to one that could be used for temporary exhibitions of all kinds, but the difficulties were somehow resolved and the new Queen’s Gallery feels as if it has always been there. (This was a criterion we tried to follow at Chatsworth when converting beautiful old buildings to a purpose different from that for which they were built.)
Another subject for discussion at meetings was the countless requests from all over the world for loans of works of art. At other times an object – a plate, a knife and fork, or even a chair from a set – that had escaped from one or other of the royal houses appeared in the saleroom. It was the committee’s task to decide on their importance and whether to bid for them to gather them back into the Collection.
A complete inventory of everything not personally owned by the Monarch – and therefore belonging to the Royal Collection – was being undertaken and this apparently endless task was like Lewis Carroll’s seven maids with seven mops sweeping sand from the seashore. The Collection does not stand still. Some departments, such as photography, were added to almost daily, as were presents from heads of state to the royal family. By the end of 2008, a total of 639,908 items had been inventoried and this database must have made the work of Sir Hugh Roberts, director of the Collection, and others in charge of the various departments more manageable.
Only on rare occasions did Andrew and I attend public events together. Most of these were in the early 1950s when Andrew was Mayor of Buxton, the spa town in the Peak District of Derbyshire. It was an office his father had held in 1920, the year Andrew was born, and ‘Buxton’ was added to his Christian names. In the early 1950s the popularity of the spa was declining, but Buxton was an up-and-coming conference town with many hotels from the days when an endless supply of warm water made it a popular destination. (Mary, Queen of Scots benefited from the springs during her captivity at Chatsworth, probably the only time she was warm in the cruel climate of north Derbyshire.)
Food and petrol were still rationed in 1952 and a proper regard for the way public money was spent made the fare served at the mayor’s welcoming dinners rather odd. We and our visitors all dressed in our best: white tie for Andrew, full evening dress with long white gloves for me. I grabbed anything that shone to pin on before I left home to drive the seventeen twisty miles to the Pavilion Gardens where many of the dinners were held. The first reception that Andrew gave as mayor was for three hundred commercial travellers. The main course at dinner was sausage rolls, followed by chocolate biscuits for pudding and coffee with the milk already in it – all handed round with appropriate formality. The three hundred commercial travellers, and the three hundred hairdressers we entertained the next night, had to eat this menu only once. We soon grew accustomed to it.
At these public events Andrew said that he often heard men say, ‘That was before my little do.’ He soon learned that this enigmatic statement referred either to a minor heart attack or to some charitable event that the fellow had organized (usually the former). It was this sort of remark that lightened what were sometimes dim occasions. On the whole we enjoyed our more than fifty years of public life. It was the people we met who made the job so intriguing and it gave us an insight into lives and organizations that we would otherwise never have known. Even when faced with a seemingly dull evening, there were always one or two people who made it enjoyable and reminded me of my luck at being present.
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Orphan
A
FTER THE WAR, when Farve went to live at Redesdale Cottage with Margaret Wright (now married to a Mr Dance), we had little contact with him. If we rang him, Margaret answered and we knew she would be standing over him while he talked, so we seldom telephoned. Failing eyesight had made it difficult for him to write. My letters to him do not survive but a reminder from the distant past turned up in the back of a drawer not long ago. It was one of Farve’s stiff, top-quality blue envelopes, the sort that cuts your thumb when you rip it open. On it is written, ‘Thorn removed from the foot of Stubby’s dog.’ He does not say which dog, but he understood the prime importance of such a thing to me. Except for Decca, we all occasionally went to see him at Redesdale. On one of my last visits I took Kitty Mersey, who had been longing to meet him. We sat in his room, surrounded by metal filing cabinets (‘mechanically sound, Stubby’) and other purely functional furniture, the opposite of what Muv would have chosen. Unopened letters and magazines lay in piles around us. He was old and obviously ill, his one lung still battling with a continuous onslaught of gaspers. The classic features were still there but diminished, and ‘my good dentures’ were too big for the rest of his face. He was the ghost of what he had once been and had little interest left in life. Kitty said, ‘You’re not at all what I expected – a fierce person who might not
have let me in.’ ‘Lady Mersey,’ he replied sadly, ‘I’ve no savagery left in me.’
Muv, Diana and I went to see him for his eightieth birthday and stayed at the Redesdale Arms (the inn with a sign ‘Last Pub in England’ on one side and ‘First Pub in England’ on the other). Diana wrote in her memoirs: ‘I shall never forget the expression on Farve’s face when Muv appeared at his bedside, and his smile of pure delight.’ It was a comfort to me that my parents’ last sight of each other seemed to turn back the years to how I remembered them as a child. Farve died four days later, on 17 March 1958. He was cremated and his ashes buried in Swinbrook churchyard. I could hardly believe my eyes when a little box was produced with all that was left of him; his beauty, funniness, charm and fury all gone for good, and with it my childhood.
In contrast to Farve’s, Muv’s last years were spent surrounded by loving family and friends. She lived mostly in London and spent the summer months on Inch Kenneth, where the rigours of island life never seemed too much for her. The complications of transport were exemplified by the cows. Getting them to the bull to produce a calf (and hence some milk) is worth recording. There was a bull at Gribun, on Mull, and at the first sign of a cow being in season, a rope was put round her head and she was led to the jetty at high tide. The dinghy awaited her, oars at the ready, not as a passenger but to tow her. She was pushed into the deep water with an almighty shove and across the channel to Mull they went, the cow swimming behind with no difficulty. The sea had to be calm, of course, which added another factor to this tricky procedure. With luck, all went well at the first service but should she ‘turn’ at her next heat, the process had to be repeated or there would be no calf – and no milk.
Wait for Me! Page 27