The Spencer Family

by Charles Spencer

  It seemed barely conceivable to me that someone so spirited and modern could be from the same generation as my thoroughly Edwardian grandfather. I believe he was weighed down from an early stage by the responsibilities of taking on a family estate that was teetering on the brink of collapse. His father had always been honest about the parlous state the finances were in, noting in his diary for 2 October 1916: ‘After luncheon a long and comfortable talk to Jack about the family difficulties. I fear they arise from my ignorance & perhaps from being too easy going!’

  The end of the Great War resulted in a rush of couples becoming engaged. Some would have gone ahead earlier, but had chosen to wait until the risk of death in battle had passed. Others rushed into it, egged on by the euphoria of finding themselves still alive after the onslaught. Perhaps my grandparents were from the latter group. Their genuine joy at becoming betrothed was recorded with pride by Bobby, who had met and greatly liked his future daughter-in-law, the Duke of Abercorn’s daughter, Lady Cynthia Hamilton:

  I was stopped by Jack coming in to tell me he had proposed to Lady Cynthia and was accepted. He said, ‘How pleased Mummy would have been’, which went through me ... Rushed in to greet Cynthia — Flew to telephone for her to tell her parents. She did and the Duke said ‘yes’ ... What a day. My Boy coming to tell me in his happiness has pleased me more than I can ever say — and his remembering his beloved Mother at that moment. It was so wonderful to me. Bless him and Cynthia. She was so good when I said I feared he would be poor.

  My grandparents married on 26 February 1919. One hymn, ‘Perfect Love’, reduced Bobby to tears, and it was a deeply emotional day for the widower, who felt a pang at Cynthia’s becoming Lady Althorp — the first to carry that name since his Margaret. In the vestry, while the choir sang a Brahms anthem, Grandfather leant over to kiss his father, who then in turn embraced his daughter-in-law. Afterwards they made their way in the rain to a reception at Hampden House. That night Bobby wrote in his diary: ‘So they went off in a motor to begin, as I pray, the divine “vie a deux”. May my Boy be as happy as happy — oh so happy.’

  *

  Grandfather and Grandmother moved into Althorp in 1922, after Bobby’s death from a heart attack. The house soon became the passion of Grandfather’s life. He had the mind of a curator, and he loved nothing more than hand rinsing the china, or dusting the books in the Library. A member of the Standing Commission on Museums and Galleries, he was also chairman of the Royal School of Needlework. During the middle years of the twentieth century, he was the ideal tenant of the family’s possessions: highly appreciative of their heritage importance, while living modestly enough to minimize the need for sales.

  His one serious miscalculation was agreeing to the disposal of Holbein’s only portrait from life of Henry VIII. Grandfather took the view that he needed cash, in order to be able to pay for his children’s education. Negotiations were conducted through a London dealer in the 1930s. Eventually it was sold for £10,000, to the Thyssen family. At the time, this was thought a good price for the tiny painting. However, it was valued in the 1980s as being worth £30 million, and is now one of the masterpieces of the Thyssen collection in Madrid, where I visited it four years ago, with a pang of regret.

  After decades of neglect, Althorp’s maintenance needs also required funding. Bobby had had no money for even the most basic work, and the House was in as poor a state as it had ever been, when Grandfather began a steady programme of restorative work in the 1930s. By the early 1940s he was in despair. The task was so massive and unrelenting, that he feared it would prove impossible to complete. It was an assessment that led him to contemplate handing the property over to the National Trust.

  In June 1942 Captain Hill, the National Trust surveyor, came to inspect Althorp, to see whether he would accept its gift from my family. At first, during a meeting in the Estate Office, he seemed interested. However, Grandfather was determined to give him an unadulterated picture of the problems that had led him to ponder Althorp’s disposal, and so he showed the captain the dry rot. This infestation was particularly virulent outside the Long Library, but was not confined to that area — it seemed to be everywhere.

  The captain thanked his host for his honesty, and reported back to his superiors. The National Trust then told Grandfather that, given the circumstances, he could keep his ancestral home, and the unenviable expense of cutting out its cancerous flaws. The Trust’s reply reached Grandfather as he was going round the top floor rooms, putting down foot baths to catch the rain water that was seeping through the roof.

  Spencer House also came to be viewed by Grandfather as an ancestral burden. Again, it was a place he treasured for its history, and even more for its beauty, but one that he hated for its expense. He had no need for such a huge residence in London, and the cost of maintaining the building — let alone the staff’s wages — persuaded him to quit it. He gave a final dinner party there in the 1920s, having the splendour of the occasion photographed for the family records. He then resigned himself to the fact that he would never occupy it again, allowing a succession of tenants to use it, a practice that has continued to this day, with the string of companies controlled by Lord Rothschild enjoying opulent surroundings, thanks to the huge sum of money that they have spent restoring it to its original splendour.

  Credit should go to Grandfather for not following the trend in the 1920s and 1930s, when Devonshire House, Dorchester House, Aldford House, Chesterfield House and Brook House were all pulled down by despairing owners. The aesthete in Grandfather would never have contemplated such a move. He did, however, come very close to a sale in 1943, when the Bath Club and the Royal Society expressed serious interest in acquiring Spencer House. The price discussed was £250,000, and over tea one afternoon, Queen Mary encouraged Grandfather to take the money and sell.

  He hesitated, not wanting to be the Spencer who finally surrendered one of the family’s two principal homes. It was with relief then, that in mid-1944 he received an application from the auction house, Christie’s, to rent Spencer House. Their King Street premises were destroyed by incendiary bombs, and they needed to find somewhere suitable in the St James’s area, to continue their business. Grandfather negotiated a lease for £5,500 per year, for five years. It was testimony to his spirit and to his sensitivity to the importance of heritage, that he did not meekly accept the money, and shed his responsibilities.

  That said, Grandfather did not like the idea of leaving Spencer objects behind during his tactical withdrawal from London. From the 1920s until the Christie’s lease, he oversaw the gradual transferral of all the contents of Spencer House to Althorp. When the pictures, furniture and china had been removed, it was the turn of the doors and fireplaces. The extraordinary richness of the fittings of Althorp is largely thanks to its having cannibalized the innards of its urban sibling.

  From 1939 to 1945, Althorp was — in common with many other large ancestral houses — made to do its bit for the war effort. Oak trees in the Park were cut down for use in naval construction. At the same time a searchlight battery was established a few hundred yards from the House. Also in the Park, the family cricket pitch was handed over to soldiers billeted locally, for them to use for football matches.

  Inside the House itself, the main bedrooms were used to store the Law Society’s picture collection. However, cunningly, Grandfather saw to it that Althorp’s interior was not handed over for the use of servicemen. In July 1943, when 900 Royal Artillery personnel and 100 vehicles streamed into the Park without warning, Grandfather complained with such vigour at the invasion of his patrimony that the entire force was gone within eight weeks. There were to be no repetitions of this sort of mishap: Grandfather was happy to help his country, but the contents of Althorp had first call on his loyalties.

  The same was not the case with the Shooting Box at North Creake, the Norfolk home where the Red Earl was taken when he suffered his stroke in 1905. This became a land girls’ hostel, and was treated with such a w
ilful lack of respect that after the war my father believed it to be irreparable, and had it pulled down. Grandfather was aggrieved at this decision, having faced far greater challenges with Althorp and Spencer House, and having dealt with them with gumption.

  Grandmother was very loving, and was greatly loved. I have never heard anyone ever say a word against her memory, and she is still very much alive as a paragon of sweet nobility, in the recollections of everyone I have spoken to about her. The word most widely used to describe her is ‘saintly’.

  She showed an enormous affection for people of all backgrounds, frequently visiting the ill or the bereaved in the villages and on the farms around Althorp, an easy presence in total contrast to the bristling tensions of Grandfather.

  Grandmother was beautiful, sensitive and utterly without pride or snobbery. The young girl who had shown no concern when her future father-in-law had warned her that she was marrying a pauper never complained about the straitened circumstances of the once wealthy family she had married into. She drove her weathered little Morris around the county, happy for Grandfather to enjoy the luxury of the chauffeur-driven Rolls-Royce that he would not surrender, even when he clearly could not afford to run it.

  One day Grandfather told her that he needed to be driven to London, and she would therefore have to take the train. She agreed readily. The train crashed, Grandmother was thrown hard against the side of the carriage, and her head was badly damaged. It was on the same part of her brain that took the impact of this blow that she later developed the growth that turned into a malignant tumour, causing her death in 1972.

  The royal family mourned a charming and popular courtier, who had assisted the Queen Mother as a Lady of the Bedchamber with energy and sparkle. But Northamptonshire felt the loss more keenly, knowing that somebody very special, who had done an enormous amount of unsung voluntary work for the community, was gone for ever. As a mark of respect, it was decided to name the county’s hospice after her.

  I remember Grandmother’s memorial service. The whole family gathered at Althorp, and I came over for the day from my nearby prep school, aged eight. The most vivid memory I have is of breakfast that day, a troupe of mainly elderly relatives sitting glumly round the table in the Tapestry Dining Room, most of whom I had never knowingly met before.

  Grandmother’s brother, ‘Uncle Jimmy’, sat chain-smoking on one side of me and then, with an absent-minded flourish, stubbed a cigarette out in his uneaten grapefruit. It was an act so fantastically thrilling to me, barely out of the strictures of the Nursery, where even elbows on the table resulted in punishment, that I instinctively warmed to the charming old duke, who showed his contempt for petty convention in the extinction of his early morning smoke.

  The other underlying memory of that winter’s day was the feeling of genuine grief that a truly outstanding life had come to an end. My father looked utterly devastated; and even Grandfather, who had not been close to his wife for many years, seemed shaken to the core. I wish I had known her for longer.

  Grandfather never attained his wife’s popularity. He induced respect in many, and fear in almost all. John Richardson, who has worked on the Estate as a forester since I was born in 1964, still recalls with a shudder how ‘the old Earl’ would drive around his land, checking how everything was looking. One day he found the foresters at work, and stopped to watch them. John can still recall how he could barely move, so terrified was he by this silent inspection. Grandfather sat there, motionless, attentive, unintentionally menacing, before driving on, without a comment.

  There was something about Grandfather that enjoyed antagonism. My father told me about his sadness, on taking over Althorp, at finding file after file of letters that Grandfather had copied out, to keep for ever. They were often combative, sometimes abusive, and largely regrettable. It was a fault Grandfather was aware of, but could do little about.

  In 1929, he found himself alone at North Creake with my father, then aged five. Grandfather decided to take this opportunity to start a notebook, writing down observations on subjects or people that he might from time to time find interesting. In the foreword he noted: ‘I know I am inclined to be most critical about people so my views will be perhaps more unfavourable than they ought to be but I think I can discern their good points though I am afraid I am more likely to notice their bad ones.’

  His special prejudices were engaged by the ignorant, particularly if they failed to show sufficient interest in his beloved home — a sorry fact demonstrated by countless entries in his diaries: ‘Waited about until 4.10 when the Youth Fellowship from St Mary’s Far Cotton came 40 minutes late. The 22 young people were very dumb, so it took just an hour to go round the house ...”Opened the house & at 2.30, 29 wounded American soldiers came to see the pictures. They were very nice & liked looking, but knew nothing.’

  One of Grandfather’s other regrettable characteristics was his reluctance to engage in easy conversation with those who worked for him. He particularly did not enjoy banter with his chauffeur; the desired silence being encouraged by the glass screen between himself and the driver’s seat.

  On the drive between London and Althorp, before the motorway was opened, Grandfather would sometimes find it necessary to tap the glass; a signal that he needed to stop for a call of nature. One day he was on the road’s verge, half-way through his business, when the wind blew and slammed the passenger door shut. The chauffeur knew that the slamming of the door meant that his lordship was back in his seat, ready to resume the journey, so he drove on. Apparently he did not once look behind him during the remaining stretch from mid-Bedfordshire to Althorp, aware that Grandfather did not enjoy being glanced at in the mirror.

  After sweeping in to the front yard of the House, the chauffeur got out and held my Grandfather’s door open for him. It was only then that he realized something was seriously wrong; and only when my Grandfather arrived in the car of a senior member of the Bedfordshire Constabulary that he knew he was in for a distinctly difficult time with ‘Old Lordy’.

  However tricky Grandfather may have been, he was not an evil man. This, though, was how he was portrayed by a national newspaper after it deliberately misconstrued a typically thorough and practical piece of housekeeping by him, labelling him ‘the Anti-Christ’.

  When the vault in the Spencer Chapel at Great Brington was chiselled open to receive Charlotte Spencer’s body in 1903, the resident agent, A. L. Y. Morley, took the opportunity to write a report on the condition of the enclosed coffins. The results made distressing reading for the family, as it became clear that centuries of neglect were depriving generations of Spencers of dignity in their final resting place:

  The coffins lie in two chambers; those in the western chamber are all leaden ones, and nearly all are those of the Earls of Sunderland, who were also Barons Spencer, and their families. The coffins live in bad and irregular order, one on the top of another, some of the lower ones being much crushed, and in at least one case bones are visible ... There are four or five name-plates lying loose on coffins, but there is no certainty to which coffins they belong.

  This sorry picture remained with Grandfather throughout the next half-century; he even copied Morley’s report into his own crested notebook. He then decided, in middle age, to address the problem in an intelligent but slightly startling manner: the lead of the coffins would be used for repairs to the church roof, and the bodies would be individually cremated, the ashes being given their own individual urn.

  Grandfather was present when each coffin was opened. He later recalled how the majority of early Spencers were small men, by modern standards, with red beards that had continued growing after they were interred. Once exposed to air, they quickly started to wither into powdery disintegration.

  The newspaper in question, which has long been established at the bottom end of the tabloid market in England, decided this was an opportunity to portray a member of the aristocracy as a depraved gravedigger, disturbing the bones of his ancestors in an ine
xplicably macabre manner.

  The only other time that Grandfather was treated with such inaccuracy by the press was during the scandal surrounding the Prince of Wales’s affair with Wallis Simpson. In compiling a profile of Simpson, one newspaper correctly named her first husband as being ‘Earl Spencer’. However, when the photograph accompanying the article showed Grandfather, instead of an American naval commander with the first name of ‘Earl’, his sense of humour came to the fore, and he enjoyed the ridiculousness of the error with his family.

  Grandfather was capable of a lighter side. After Grandmother’s death he used to enjoy having my eldest sister, Sarah, to stay at Althorp. He would delight in spoiling her — letting her wear some of his Spencer jewellery, and revelling in the naughtiness of his teenage granddaughter smoking in his presence. They had an easy rapport which, if they had witnessed it, many would not have believed possible of a man mockingly known as ‘Jolly Jack’.

  My last memory of Grandfather stems from 20 May 1975. It was my eleventh birthday, and he appeared in his Rolls, with the whippet-like chauffeur, Mr Hutchings, at the wheel, to give me my present: four very academic books on the weapons and uniforms of the British Army. I remember being aware that this old man, with his slicked back hair, his suit fitted so the waistline came in at the ribs, covering his mighty belly, was essentially a very kind person. You could see it in his eyes.

  Looking back, I genuinely believe that the death of his mother at such an impressionable age, combined with the undiagnosed depression that his father slipped into, impacted hugely on him, making it easier to hide behind bluffness and apparent aggression, rather than having to allow gentler emotions to come to the fore. He was difficult in order to scare off people in a way he could justify to himself, rather than risk the agony of trying with others, and then being rejected. We said a rather formal farewell to one another that afternoon.