George VI, Denys’s mother and Queen Elizabeth at our wedding reception
My wedding dress was of white brocade and I wore the Elphinstone tiara. My dress was made by a Miss Ford who had an establishment just off Bond Street; my mother had had her clothes made by her for years and so she thought it would be sensible if we used her services. I had three adult bridesmaids; two friends from my teens, Jeannine and Marigold Bridgeman and my cousin Diana Bowes-Lyon, as well as two little girls, my nieces Jenny Gibbs and Susan Wills.
The King and Queen attended, which was especially important to me, because the King was my Godfather. There were huge crowds in Parliament Square and for the first time in my life I became, in that much overworked present-day description, a celebrity. The whole day went by in a blur of hymns and music; champagne, voices; people, people, people and clouds of confetti. We caught the night train to Edinburgh, where the Carberry chauffeur met us with a car we had been lent by my father. We drove to Birkhall which had been lent to us by the King and Queen, who had also hired a cook for us for the first part of our honeymoon. I had a tremendous affection for the old house, which held many happy childhood memories for me, and we had a wonderfully peaceful time. Then we set off to the south of France, where Patrick Plunket had rented a villa, perched on top of a hill, high above the Mediterranean. We had another blissful two weeks there and I learnt to gamble in the local casino. The green roulette tables fascinated me and with beginner’s luck I actually made money. For a while I fostered the illusion that a casino was as good as a bank.
We returned to London, only to repack our bags to set sail for New Zealand for my introduction to Denys’ relations on the other side of the world. We made landfall at Christchurch after five whole weeks at sea. There was a tremor of excitement at the arrival of Queen Elizabeth’s niece, and much to the amusement of Denys’ aunt Maire Hutton and his cousins, we had to be photographed and interviewed by the press. Auntie Maire, the sister of ‘Tahu’ Rhodes, was married to a sheep farmer called George Hutton, who had been Lord Plunket’s ADC when he was Governor of New Zealand. They were a wonderful couple and it was a deliciously eccentric household. They had dreaded my arrival, expecting a posh ‘Pom’ but they soon discovered that their fears were groundless. Auntie Maire was large and untidy and always wore big felt hats, crammed on to her head at any old angle. She darned the heels of her stockings with whatever coloured wool came to hand. They had no help in the house and Uncle George did his own washing in a bucket of cold water. Soap didn’t enter into this rudimentary laundry. It felt like there was mutton for breakfast, lunch and tea. We herded the sheep, riding pensioned-off polo ponies, fished, shot and explored, sleeping in the back of a van we shipped out from England. We also went into the barely explored areas in the deep south of South Island. This meant a sixteen-mile trek up a river carrying our kit, crossing smaller rivers supported by two lines of wire, one for our feet and the other for our hands. It was a hair-raising experience when the rivers were in flood.
Our home for ten days was a one-room wooden shack shared with our guide and fellow shooter. It was, in retrospect, an odd way of spending a honeymoon. Each day we climbed through virgin forest to reach the bare hilltops where the deer roamed. It was tough work and Denys succumbed to a knee injury so I went off alone. One day I heard a stag roaring not far away. I roared back, having been taught to do so by our family stalkers. The stag took the bait and approached at an angry and inquisitive trot. I shot him and then skinned him with my not very sharp pen knife, in the way I had learnt by watching the stalkers at home. It was something of a feat. Deer were regarded as pests in sheep-rearing country and culling was encouraged and organised officially by state governments. A dollar bounty was the going rate for just a tail and obviously much more for a whole skin. I reckoned I was entitled to at least ten dollars, but did not claim it.
But being the niece of the Queen Consort of New Zealand had its obligations — or drawbacks. We were invited by an organisation glorying in the name of the Pioneer Women of New Zealand to a reception in our honour in Christchurch. The very thought of it sent a chill down my spine, but there was no possibility of refusal, however polite. It was a memorably ghastly event and to my dismay we were greeted by a pipe band which preceded us up the drive of a large suburban house where the rituals were to be staged. The gathering included all the great and the good of South Island, brought to order by the forceful President, a Miss Wigley, who made a speech of welcome. Her best friend, whose name I can’t remember, was in attendance. In the middle of the discourse the ‘best friend’ turned round to do some vital thing she had forgotten. The Wigley barked at her: ‘Don’t turn your back on royalty.’ The ultimate embarrassment was the line-up, when all the guests shook our hands and either bowed or curtseyed, probably after a rehearsal conducted by the President. The cousins, acting as sub-royalty for the day, clustered in the background doubled up with laughter, but fortunately the Wigley, who by then was in ecstasy, failed to notice.
We returned home in June 1951. Our honeymoon, extraordinary though it may seem these days, had lasted nearly a year. We looked at various houses and found in those days that prices dropped like a stone when you looked in the south west. We fell in love with a rather dilapidated former rectory called Uplowman near Tiverton which had been used by American troops during the war. My darling father bought the house for us for £8,500. I had my first baby, Annabel, in February 1952 in London. She decided to arrive late at night and with labour increasing we set off for the hospital in North London via Hyde Park. We swished in through the gate at the top of Exhibition Road, but to our horror, not least that of the expectant mother, we found the gate at the other end firmly shut. It was an awful moment; was my baby to be born in a car? I really needed to get to the hospital and a midwife quickly. Then we had a stroke of fortune; a policeman turned up out of the blue and after giving Denys a short lecture on the opening and closing times of the park, produced a key, wished us well and let us out.
Once I was in the hands of the midwives Denys took himself off to Whites, his club in St James’s Street, in search of strong drink. This was well before the days of fathers being encouraged to observe every twist and turn of a birth, and personally I did not want him there; it was woman’s work, I reckoned. Anyway a delicious little girl duly arrived, perfect in every detail. Back at home Annabel was looked after by a monthly nurse who was very efficient but impossibly grand. She name-dropped duchesses she had attended and seemed on intimate terms with many fathers in the membership of Whites. We soon acquired a local farmer’s daughter as a nursery maid. Three more children arrived, Victoria, born in London in 1953, Simon, in 1957 at home and Michael, in 1960. For a short time we had a nanny and a nursery maid as well as a live-in couple. In those days the wage for a couple was £7 pounds a week and for the nursery maid £3.
Our family home in Devon had thirty acres. The house was three-storied, had six bedrooms and a small flat for the married couple who cooked, cleaned and did the gardening. Mr and Mrs Mallet stayed with us for twenty-five years helping us to bring up the children and get on with our lives. We did all this on £3,000 a year, which was the income from my Elphinstone marriage settlement.
A family group at Uplowman, painted by Terry Whidborne, Denys’ first cousin
I had married a very attractive pauper. Denys did not then have a conventional job, but as I had grown up in a household where none of the men actually had salaried positions it seemed the natural order of things and it was good to have the father of the house around all the time. We were incandescently happy and worked like beavers to create a garden. We had a couple of cows and we turned the barn, once the village school, into a deep litter hen house and turkey run rearing the birds for the Christmas trade. We also kept a pig called Percy which lived on the household scraps. When the time came for poor Percy to go to the slaughterhouse I was distraught. The worst moment was when I went to pick up his corpse from the abattoir. The dead pigs were hung from their b
ack legs, but I recognised Percy at once and felt even guiltier. I was obviously not cut out to be a livestock farmer.
We loved Uplowman. It was a wonderfully relaxing environment and nobody seemed to mind if I went shopping with my hair in rollers and a cigarette clenched between my teeth. Denys would shut himself away in the summer house and write books in the style of Hammond Innes, published by Longmans. He also went on expeditions for an organisation engaged in desert locust control in the Sudan, Somalia and Kenya and later undertook a search for uranium in Tanzania. His books were largely based on personal experience. One of them, The Syndicate, was turned into a rather awful film which seemed to have little relationship to the book. Denys received the princely sum of £500 for the rights and we went to see it at the Electric Cinema in Tiverton. We rather wished we had not been included in the credits.
We also entertained our friends and family. The Queen, Queen Elizabeth and Princess Margaret came for the weekend. Each of them put up their detectives in the local pub, where on one occasion Margaret’s policeman made very extensive use of the bar facilities. When the Queen came to stay there was more than usual collaboration with the local constabulary and coppers lurked in the bushes round the house. A footman came to help with the breakfast trays, and the Queen’s Dresser was allocated one of the children’s rooms, who after eviction had to camp out elsewhere. In the evening we played ‘the Game’ with one person acting out the title of a book, a saying or a song which had to be guessed by the others.
Denys at Uplowman, 1960
Memorably one of the other guests, David Stirling who was responsible for the setting up of the Long Range Desert Group, later to become the SAS, was told to act The Taming of the Shrew which involved this immensely tall man pretending to be a mouse running up the Queen’s skirts. We were crying with laughter but David got quite huffy because we thought his acting was not of Old Vic standards. On the Sunday of the visit we all went to church in the village which delighted our old vicar. I put my foot down at housing Margaret’s Dresser and assumed an older cousin role. With our growing family there just wasn’t room. Margaret could be a demanding guest, and on one occasion, when she brought her husband, Tony Armstrong-Jones, the lavatory seat in their bathroom came apart. I assume that Tony must have sat down heavily. They wanted a replacement installed at once, but it was just not possible over a weekend and we firmly told them so. For a couple whose every whim was pandered to, they took it quite well and there were no more complaints.
Left to right: Annabel holding Penny, Michael, Denys, Victoria and Simon in Scotland
In the evening we lightened the mood by playing charades. One of the men dressed up as a woman and unknown to us entered Princess Margaret’s bedroom, borrowing a great deal of her make up including her lipstick. He gave a hilarious performance, but it was only much later that Her Royal Highness discovered the depletion of her stock of cosmetics. She failed to see the funny side.
There were no complaints or embarrassing dramas when Queen Elizabeth came. I’m sure she would have much preferred to have spent a quiet weekend at Royal Lodge rather than becoming the pivotal point of a sojourn in our happy go lucky household. I would do my best to make sure that everything ran like clockwork. I would go through every detail of the menus for every meal with Mrs Mallett, attempting to cover every eventuality, and so before my aunt arrived I would bid Mrs Mallett farewell and say, with feeling: ‘See you when it’s all over.’ However despite all my rehearsals, I still managed to receive my aunt wearing gumboots. Mrs Mallet was horrified, but she recovered enough to have a lovely time, entertaining policemen, footmen and all the guests.
Once when Queen Elizabeth was entertained at Uplowman, it was midsummer and the sheep were making a lot of noise, baa-ing their heads off. In those days we followed the convention of the ladies leaving the gentlemen to their port after dinner. Queen Elizabeth thought they were lingering far too long and marshalled us women outside the dining-room window, conducting them in a baa-baa chorus. As the tempo increased in volume the tippling men took the hint and they joined us in the drawing room for coffee.
I have been assured by my children that I am a consummate hostess even when disaster looms. There was one mid-winter occasion when our overworked heating system blew up. The electric fuse box near the kitchen burst into flames and we had to dial 999. The fire brigade arrived and marched through the house in huge muddy boots and quenched the blaze. There was no light and on the heels of the departing firemen the guests arrived for the weekend. We received them by candlelight. We had, of course, dressed for dinner and managed to reorganise the menu. The first course passed in relative peace and then the kitchen hatch opened and Mrs Mallet announced that the cowman’s wife had arrived to say that she thought her husband was dead and please, could Mr Rhodes go over and see if he was actually dead. Mr Rhodes declined and told the gardener Mr Mallet to go, as he’d been in the war — so had Denys for that matter but he chose to overlook that qualification — and would know if he was dead. Ten minutes later the hatch opened again and the message was that Mr Mallet thought the cowman was dead, although he had twitched a couple of times. The final request, death having been established, was for Mr Rhodes to go and lay the poor man out. This pleasure, I’m afraid, Denys also declined. The awful thing was that the whole macabre sequence was unbelievably funny and our rather ribald weekend guests were convulsed, save one of them, Lady Waverley, the recently widowed wife of Sir John Anderson, the Second World War Home Secretary, who had been responsible for planting corrugated-iron air-raid shelters the length and breadth of the land, known as Anderson shelters, who seemed merely bemused. She wrote to me afterwards saying that perhaps she had been taking death too seriously — which was very tactful of her. Queen Elizabeth would have revelled in the situation if she had been there.
We both used to be asked to Balmoral and luckily Denys took to stalking and enjoyed it as much as I did. We never went out together, but stalked on different beats. The thrill of a successful shot after a long wet crawl through the heather was an exceptional pleasure. Having shot my first stag in my teens and my last in my seventies, I believe that I have terminated the lives of around 350 stags which needed to be culled. One evening while staying at the Castle, we were sitting in the drawing room with Princess Margaret. ‘How is your book getting on?’ she asked Denys. ‘It’s nearly finished,’ he replied, ‘but I desperately need a title.’ At which point a voice behind us said: ‘And I cannot think of a reason for giving you one.’ The Queen had entered the room unobserved: this was an example of her quick repartee.
As well as crossing the Scottish border annually, we crossed many others as well, including the small country of Sikkim, where we were asked if we could be guardians to the two young grandsons of the Maharajah, who were due to go to Harrow when their prep-school days ended. We gladly agreed: they were roughly the same age as our two girls and this increased the family to six. When they arrived we had to give them guidance on Western habits and etiquette. We found them somewhat out of touch with so-called civilisation and we even had to teach them how to use the lavatory, they having been used to the local Indian arrangements. They returned to Sikkim for the long summer holidays but stayed with us for the Christmas and Easter holidays.
The eldest boy, Tenzing, was sadly killed in a car crash when he was only twenty-six years old. The younger brother, Wanchuk, was enthroned as the token 13th King of Sikkim after the death of his father from cancer in 1982, but was powerless because his kingdom had been subsumed into the Indian sub-continent by Indira Ghandi. He was a very devout Buddhist and had responsibility for religious matters. He was a really nice man and was inclined to disappear on three-year-long meditations living in a cave in the mountains. After they had been with us for some time, they asked if they could call me Mummy. I thought this might be rather confusing, so we settled on Auntie. Years later, when I was a Lady-in-Waiting to Queen Elizabeth, I met the present Dalai Lama, who was full of praise for Wanchuk’s spiri
tuality and dedication.
In the real world we needed extra help with our acres, but this was not affordable, so in 1973 we took the dreaded decision to sell Uplowman, where we had been so happy. There were other dark clouds on the horizon. From the earliest days of our marriage Denys would often predict that he wouldn’t make ‘old bones’. In 1965 he had a heart attack and spent quite a long time in hospital. My nicotine intake doubled during that time and became even greater when he came home. He had been forbidden to smoke any more, but I still needed to and took to hiding my cigarettes inside my palm or alternatively having to visit the loo more than I normally would, for a quick drag. Towards the end of his recovery from his heart attack he sank into a very deep depression. It was an awful time and lasted for almost a year. He couldn’t face seeing people, even his nearest and dearest. I vividly remember the moment his illness began to recede, when we were driving up to Scotland. At one overnight stop, after dinner, we went for a short walk and suddenly he laughed. It was a blissful sound, not heard for at least a year.
Tenzing and Wanchuk Namgyal
We moved house twice and we were living at Spitchwick, on the edge of Dartmoor, when Denys first became very seriously ill and was again taken to hospital. One day our local doctor telephoned and asked to see me. The news was bad: Denys had lung cancer, and the growth, because of its position, was inoperable. The doctor warned me bleakly that my husband had little more than a year to live. I felt as if my world had crashed into a huge, deep black abyss. I drove home hardly seeing the road through my blurred vision as the tears rolled slowly down my cheeks. Why, I wondered, couldn’t one cry elegantly? Why did one have to have red blotchy eyes, and a nose needing ceaseless blowing?
The Final Curtsey Page 8