Philippa was in high spirits since she had recently become engaged to Randolph, the 12th Earl of Galloway. Her wedding was to be in October. The sisters spent a happy hour looking at photos before their mother’s arrival necessitated the ordering of more coffee. Gar was beaming, thrilled for both her daughters.
Philippa reported that Reggie had disappeared with Porchey straight after breakfast. As a single lady she had taken her breakfast in the Dining Room with the gentlemen, while both Catherine and Gar had theirs in bed on a tray. ‘They’ve probably gone out for a ride,’ said Catherine, with a smile. ‘Or perhaps some golf. Just look at this beautiful day.’
Reggie’s wit and sunny personality had instantly endeared him to his brother-in-law. Catherine was delighted by their firm friendship. She had detected her older brother Jac’s reticence about Porchey, and suspected that so had her husband. Reggie and Porchey, by contrast, enjoyed a warm and easy-going banter that somehow tied everyone closer together and made her love them both even more.
Catherine balanced the album on an embroidered footstool and sorted some clippings into date order as Marian handed them to her. The first dozen or so pages were already full of pieces from both the British and American press covering her engagement and marriage. She had been intending for months to add the many letters of congratulation, but she hadn’t got round to finishing the task in the whirl before her departure for India, and since her return she had been far too busy, mostly with more melancholy occupations. Now she wanted to remember, and look forward to, more joyful times.
The last few months had seen such frenzied activity. In the immediate aftermath of Lord Carnarvon’s death, Catherine, Evelyn and Porchey had dashed back from India and Egypt to Britain while Almina and Dr Johnnie returned with the 5th Earl’s body. It was a sad homecoming for everyone, but for Porchey, Almina and Evelyn, there was at least the distraction of a million things to do. Lord Carnarvon had stipulated that he should be buried quietly, at a private ceremony on Beacon Hill, the site of an Iron Age fort and the highest point on the Highclere estate. The family was determined to carry out his wishes but it had to contend with the enormous public interest that his new fame had brought.
In the first couple of days after her return to Highclere, Catherine felt useless, unsure what she could do to help. She was now technically the Countess, mistress of the house, but in reality she was still very much the new girl. Unlike her mother-in-law, who had arrived as a nineteen-year-old newly-wed having visited only once, Catherine did at least know the house and its staff a little, having lived there. But that had been in very different circumstances. No one had expected her to assume any responsibility. Almina was then the chatelaine of Highclere and she had been running it for twenty-seven years, through peacetime and war, giving children’s parties for 500, establishing a hospital, organising weekend house parties for royalty. She could have done it in her sleep. There was no particular need to prepare Catherine for the role. If she thought of it at all prior to the 5th Earl’s death, Almina must have concluded that she would be at Highclere for many years yet, and Catherine, who had been raised in the expectation that she would manage a much smaller household, would be able to learn its ways by observing them.
The two women were in many respects not at all alike. Almina was a powerful personality with boundless energy for getting things done. Catherine was far more diffident by nature, with the sort of quiet strength that did not announce itself. She was gregarious among her friends, but she adapted to her surroundings rather than imposing herself upon them.
Fortunately, she had her sister-in-law by her side. Despite Eve’s overwhelming grief for the father she adored, she was conscious that Catherine needed a guiding hand. Highclere was Eve’s home; she had never had any other. She had known Streatfield all her life, as well as a succession of housekeepers. She assured Catherine that the senior staff were more than capable of keeping everything under control and that it was not a time for worrying about the niceties. When Porchey came down from London, he heartily agreed.
Catherine decided that, for now, her greatest possible contribution was to support her husband. She was experienced enough in the ways of grief to know that he had a uniquely heavy burden. Almina and Evelyn were devastated by their loss, but they had at least enjoyed a loving relationship with Lord Carnarvon; for Porchey it was more complex. He had just lost the opportunity to build an adult relationship with his father that might have consoled them both for their lack of closeness throughout Porchey’s childhood and adolescence.
On 30 April, the Earl’s coffin was conveyed by army ambulance from the family chapel to the summit of Beacon Hill. He received the simple ceremony he had wanted, despite the Daily Express’s biplane circling overhead, a photographer leaning out perilously.
Standing by the grave, Catherine could see that Porchey was exhausted. They still had to face the memorial service for family, friends and staff at Highclere in two days’ time, and then the larger service, open to all, at St Margaret’s Westminster, which Almina had arranged for the following week. The 5th Earl’s funeral had been conducted exactly in accordance with his wishes, but the man was now a national hero and there were thousands who wished to pay their last respects.
At some point amidst all the worry over Lord Carnarvon’s illness, grief at his passing and the pressures of their new reality, something wonderful happened for Porchey and Catherine. She became pregnant. Porchey told her in no uncertain terms that she must stop fussing over him and rest up herself. By the time her mother and sister came to visit Highclere in August, Catherine was blooming, and the Carnarvon and Wendell families had the best possible news to cherish. Nothing could have been a better distraction from their sorrows than a baby’s imminent arrival.
The new Earl of Carnarvon had an additional burden: debt. After the burial ceremony on Beacon Hill, Porchey went up to the City of London to see J. R. H. Mullony, the family solicitor, and then to meet with his trustees, who were led by Sir Edward Marshall Hall. Porchey had never really given much thought to his inheritance but he had rather assumed that he would inherit not merely Highclere but the capital to run it. One short afternoon disabused him of all such pleasant notions. Sir Edward informed him that he had no money and he would probably lose Highclere.
‘I’m afraid the estate cannot possibly be retained as it is, not with death duties amounting to half a million pounds,’ said Sir Edward. ‘Highclere will have to go. You can sell off the land, buy a smaller house somewhere.’
Porchey could only stare. Half a million pounds, a sum equivalent to approximately £25 million in today’s money.
In a desperately sombre mood he returned to Highclere, turning over and over the question of how the house could be saved. He loved it and could not conceive of losing it, of being the Carnarvon who let the estate be broken up, the great house sold.
Catherine and Eve were both there to meet him. Eve had grown up at Highclere with her brother and understood instinctively how he felt. ‘How am I to survive?’ he asked. ‘How am I to keep our home?’
‘By all means possible,’ Eve replied.
Low in morale, he knew the one person who could help him was his mother. But Almina was preparing to leave Highclere and was busy going round the castle putting stickers with ‘AC’ on all her furniture and objets d’art, most of which had been given to her by her father, Alfred de Rothschild. She intended to leave some of her china and chairs behind. Porchey couldn’t help feeling resentful of her no-nonsense approach and injured by the fact that his father had left her the outstanding and very valuable Egyptian collection and all his racehorses at the stud.
Porchey began by cutting his expenses. Streatfield was infinitely helpful as they discussed ways to trim the household budget, and Lord Carnarvon appreciated the loyalty, even as he hated having to have the conversation.
Porchey could not resolve the question of how to raise the cash he needed without his mother’s help, but she was preoccupied with deciding whe
re to live and how to arrange her new life. It didn’t seem the right moment to discuss things with her. Porchey decided to speak to her in a couple of months, when they were all feeling less raw.
That summer saw the first of many house parties that Catherine and Porchey gave at Highclere. Porchey in particular was an inherently sociable creature and, despite the sadness and turmoil of the previous few months and the worries over money, they were both young, in love, expecting their first child, and had just come into possession of one of the finest country houses in the realm. One imagines that at some point they must have decided it was time to enjoy themselves a little. The visitors’ book records that twelve people stayed for a week, from 9 to 16 July. One of them was their dear friend Prince George, whom they called PG.
Twenty-seven years earlier, in 1896, Almina had earned her reputation as a gracious hostess and cemented her arrival at the height of British society when the Prince of Wales, the future king Edward VII, attended a shooting weekend at Highclere. That visit had been an extraordinary display of the power of wealth. Almina spent the equivalent of £150,000 on new silk wallpapers for his bedroom, on lobsters and wines and confectionery all brought down from London. It was an occasion of precise formality. Almina had displayed an absolute determination that every single detail be a credit to her and to her husband, the 5th Earl.
The party in 1923 was a very different affair. Prince George was not a distant figure with the power to bestow or withhold approval; he was a personal friend. In addition, the 6th Countess had infinitely less to prove than her predecessor. There was nothing like the same need to impress.
Besides, the world had changed. Five years after the end of the Great War, the Labour Party had already overtaken the Liberal Party as the main opposition to the Conservatives and would form a minority government the following year. After years of campaigning by the suffragettes and their supporters, women over the age of thirty had been granted the vote in 1918, though they would have to wait until 1928 to be enfranchised to the same extent as men. Lady Astor, the second woman elected to the British Parliament, and the first to take up her seat, had been sitting in the House of Commons since the end of 1919.
At Highclere, there were no such obviously radical transformations. The house was still a community that depended on a symbiosis between employer and employee. But if the class distinctions that underpinned this relationship were as carefully observed as ever within the working environment, there had nevertheless been a shift in a broader, societal sense. Upstairs, people still spent their days strolling in the park, chatting, reading a book in the Library, playing golf or planning the future of the stud, depending on their sex. Everyone dressed for dinner, the ladies retired afterwards, the gentlemen joined them in the Drawing Room once port and cigars had been consumed and, like as not, a few hands of bridge would be played. The economics that underpinned Highclere had changed, though. The house was no longer purely a symbol of the leisured class. It needed to earn its own way, and Porchey’s plottings over the future of the stud were part of his plan to make sure it did. Even the easy friendship between Catherine (Anglo-American, respectably upper-middle class) and Prince George (fifth in line to the throne at his birth), which predated her elevation to the rank of Countess, spoke of a very different world from the one in which Almina had operated.
Downstairs, things were different, too. In 1891, four years before Almina became Countess of Carnarvon, approximately 41 per cent of British women who worked were employed in domestic service, and in areas where there was no factory work available, that percentage rose considerably. By 1923 domestic service was one of several options available to young working-class women, who were increasingly aiming at nursing or clerical work. It would be misleading to suggest that there had been any kind of revolution; even in 1931, domestic service was still by far the largest single sector of women’s employment, at 24 per cent. But many women and men alike had fought and worked throughout the war, on the battlefield, in hospitals and munitions factories. They had a greater sense of their own capabilities, their personal identity—and their class identity—than ever before. There was more access to education, and national insurance was increasingly available to cover unemployment or sickness (though domestic servants were not entitled to receive any benefits until 1938). There was a real power shift occurring, and though its ripples were gentle at Highclere, everyone felt them.
Those attending the July house party, meanwhile, spent a very happy week enjoying new amusements as well as old ones. A gramophone had been purchased, for the playing of records by the American bands that were becoming as popular in Britain as they were in the States. The modern world, with its increased freedom of social mobility and relaxation of old customs, was creating its first soundtrack. Isham Jones and his Orchestra, who toured the UK in 1924, or Paul Whiteman, the ‘King of Jazz’, who commissioned Gershwin to compose ‘Rhapsody in Blue’ in the same year, made music that fused early jazz with classically inspired popular song. There was an ‘anything goes’ spirit creeping in, and fun to be had. Highclere wasn’t yet quite swapping dinner and conversation for cocktails and dancing, but now the sounds of jazz drifted from the open doors of the Drawing Room on a summer evening, mingling with the smoke from the ladies’ cigarettes as well as the gentlemen’s.
To complete the happier mood, Eve announced in late August that she was planning to marry Sir Brograve Beauchamp, a great friend of hers who had been a constant visitor to Highclere over the previous couple of years. He was very much liked by the entire family, who were charmed equally by his evident adoration of Eve and his comically out-of-tune renditions of ‘God Save the King’. The wedding was set for October.
Nineteen twenty-three was a year of transition at Highclere, and the summer was not without its dramas. Aubrey Herbert, on whom Porchey had been sent to keep an eye in Constantinople, had been prevented from travelling to attend his brother the 5th Earl of Carnarvon’s funeral by chronically bad health. He had always been delicate, with severely restricted sight from his late teens. Now his eyesight was failing completely.
In July, he and his wife Mary made their way from their villa in Italy to Highclere to join the house party. Despite his sufferings he was excellent company, amusing everyone, as always, with his tales. Aubrey was inclined to dress as a tramp when he was travelling, and counted T. E. Lawrence as one of his friends. He had plenty of stories to tell.
Just two months later, Aubrey’s eccentricities and strong propensity to follow his own path proved fatal. A disastrously ill-advised operation to remove his teeth, which a quack doctor promised would restore his sight, triggered a physical collapse. It transpired that Aubrey had a duodenal ulcer and, within days, poison flooded his weakened system. In late September he succumbed to septicaemia. Not even the combined nursing skills of his mother and Almina could save him. He was just forty-three when he died, and left behind his wife and four children. The Carnarvons lost two brothers within the space of four months, both to infections of the blood that today would be cured by a simple course of penicillin.
Eve’s wedding, in October, was welcome indeed. She and Sir Brograve were married at St Margaret’s Westminster, as Carnarvon family protocol demanded. Catherine was six months’ pregnant as she watched her husband stand in the spot where she and he had stood the year before. The 6th Earl of Carnarvon gave his younger sister away, just as Jac had stood in for their father at Catherine’s wedding. The child that Catherine was carrying would have no grandfather, but in all other respects, she must have felt that he or she would be fortunate indeed.
For Catherine, as for Almina before her, there was nothing so guaranteed to solidify her position, and her confidence, as bearing a child. A son, an heir, would be preferred. As an American, Catherine had been born into a system in which children of either sex could inherit; the system of male primogeniture was not a feature of North American law. Having lived in London for twelve years she had become familiar with the comparatively archaic pra
ctice of passing titles, land and estates exclusively through the male line. Since she had spent the previous six months observing the inevitable entanglements of what was in fact a straightforward succession, she must have been conscious that the whole thing would have been much worse in the absence of a clear heir.
Catherine’s pregnancy lent extra urgency to the question of how to raise the money to settle the death duties. Almina, however, seemed to be distancing herself from Highclere and devoting herself to other people at a perilous time for her son and his heritage. Porchey was desperately upset but Eve managed to restrain him from saying anything too impetuous.
It wasn’t just about the money, though. Porchey’s resentment of his mother had crystallised over the previous few months in response to what he considered an enormous betrayal. Shortly after the 5th Earl’s death, Almina had been introduced to Lieutenant Colonel Ian Dennistoun. The relationship progressed quickly. In November 1923, Lord Carnarvon learned that Almina intended to marry Dennistoun. Carnarvon made it plain that he regarded her remarriage as unwise and unseemly. The two of them were barely speaking.
Almina was sorry for the rupture with her son, especially as it formed the final upset in a long year of losses and emotional turbulence. She had never been minded to worry too much what other people thought, though, and she trusted that, with Catherine and Eve’s soothing, he would eventually come round.
Almina, Countess of Carnarvon married Lieutenant Colonel Ian Dennistoun in December 1923 with a simple ceremony at a London register office; the only people in attendance were the loyal Eve and Brograve. Nowadays people might remark upon the alacrity, as her son did at the time—just eight months after her first husband’s death—but those were different times. For many people who had lived through the Great War, when a few short weeks or even days or hours might be all the time that was left to you before some crushing loss, life was to be relished. Joys should not be postponed. Besides, Almina, for all her charisma and energy, was not equipped for self-sufficiency. She seems to have found in Ian Dennistoun both companionship and a focus for the next phase of her life.
Lady Catherine, the Earl, and the Real Downton Abbey Page 5