Last Curtsey
Page 29
In June 1973 Rose was arrested and stood trial in October at Exeter Crown Court charged with taking part in a burglary at Yarty Farm, the Dugdale home in Devon where Rose had been brought up. Paintings and family silver valued at £82,000 had been stolen. Police knowledge of her’s and Wally’s IRA connections and suspicions that they had been involved in smuggling arms were factors in making the arrest. Rose, who pleaded not guilty, claiming to have been coerced by her associates, used the trial to repudiate publicly her family and background. The majority of the stolen goods had been recovered and were assembled as exhibits in the courtroom, symbols of an upbringing Rose by now regarded as iniquitous. During the trial she interrogated her own father, a witness for the prosecution. She told Eric Dugdale: ‘I love you, but hate everything you stand for.’ At the end of the trial she turned upon the jury: ‘In finding me guilty you have turned me from an intellectual recalcitrant into a freedom fighter. I know no finer title.’
Rose Dugdale on her release in 1980 from Limerick prison after serving six years of a nine year sentence for her part in the Russborough art robbery and for helicopter hijacking near the border with Northern Ireland
Finally Rose was given a two-year suspended sentence while Wally was given six years in jail. She denounced this as yet another blatant example of capitalist injustice: the rich girl being let off lightly in relation to the poor man convicted on the lesser charge.
In June 1974 Rose Dugdale was on trial again, this time at the Special Criminal Court in Dublin. She was charged with receiving nineteen Old Master paintings stolen in a raid on 26 April from Russborough, the Palladian mansion in the Wicklow mountains belonging to Sir Alfred Beit. The Beits were amongst the wealthiest of all the ‘Randlords’, dynasties made vastly rich through mining gold and diamonds in South Africa. Sir Alfred’s father had used his money to amass one of the world’s great private art collections, half of which had descended to his son. Rose – in apparently convincing disguise as a Frenchwoman – with three IRA accomplices broke into Russborough late at night, pistol whipping Sir Arthur and his wife, tying them up and gagging them. The haul included a Vermeer, two Rubens, paintings by Velázquez and Gainsborough and a famous Goya, Portrait of Doña Antonia de Zarate. The Beits looked on in helpless anguish as these and other masterpieces were wrenched out of their frames with a screwdriver. Their total value was said to be around £8 million. The objective behind the robbery was to trade the paintings for the release of Dolours and Marion Price, sisters who had been jailed for life on explosives charges and were on hunger strike in Brixton Prison. However, three of the paintings were discovered two weeks later in a wardrobe in a cottage in west Cork which Rose – keeping up her French alias – had rented, and the rest were found rolled up in the boot of a Morris she had borrowed from her landlord. Fingerprints left at the cottage were identified by the army as belonging to the Provisional IRA leader David O’Connell. This time Rose Dugdale pleaded ‘proudly and incorruptibly guilty’ at her trial.
Once again she used the courtroom as a political platform, denouncing Britain as ‘a filthy enemy’. In her submission to the court she maintained that the Irish people had the sole right to the wealth of Ireland; that the Dublin government was guilty of ‘treacherous collaboration’ with England; and that victory would eventually be granted to what she referred to as ‘the army of the people’. She did her best to prevent what she considered irrelevant details of her earlier existence being mentioned in court: she was reported to have ‘laughed contemptuously’ as a prosecution witness stumbled through a list of her European finishing schools, mispronouncing all the names. Rose’s Dublin court appearance and indeed the raid itself on people well known to her parents, Lady Beit being connected to the Churchills and the Mitfords, marked another ruthless step in the rejection of her past. When Rose was sentenced to nine years’ imprisonment she turned to her supporters in the crowded public gallery, giving a defiant clenched fist salute. In 1974, a son, Ruari, was born in her cell in Limerick Prison and in 1978 by special dispensation Rose was married to the father, Eddie Gallagher, an IRA terrorist himself serving a twenty-year sentence in Portlaoise High Security Jail for the kidnapping of Dr Tiede Herrema, the Dutch businessman. The wedding was held in the heavily guarded oratory of the prison at Limerick, the first time a marriage between convicted prisoners had been permitted in the history of the Irish Republic.
One can see Rose in part as a figure of her period, the family denying 1970s. She connects with the active terrorism of the German Red Army Faction, otherwise known as the Baader–Meinhof Gang, whose attacks on property and murders of prominent individuals from 1974 onwards posed a grave threat to German democracy. Like its leaders Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhof the members of the group were predominantly middle-class, well-educated people in their thirties, born in the uncertain years of the Second World War, as Rose herself had been. There is also an obvious parallel with the case of the American newspaper heiress Patty Hearst who in 1974 was kidnapped by a radical gang calling itself the Symbionese Liberation Army (SLA). Her father Randolph Hearst had begun by meeting the demands of her captors, organising multi-million-dollar food distribution programmes for the poor, only to see his daughter turn against him. Taped messages from Patty Hearst became increasingly hostile to her family and class until in the end she told them: ‘I have chosen to stay and fight.’ Video footage of her participation in an SLA bank robbery, the heiress turned into gun-wielding terrorist, remains as an eerie memento of that time.
In some respects Rose was just another politically radical, profoundly disaffected child of the seventies. But what makes her case particular and to me so poignant is the way that it is rooted in the then declining English upper class. This was a drama played out amongst the country landowners, the Lloyd’s underwriters, the acquirers of great collections of art, all people of a kind Rose lumped together as obsolete. Her reactions had their own simplicity and logic: ‘For years’, she said, ‘my family have been taking money from the poor. I am just trying to restore the balance by giving some of it back.’ Her coming-out ball she remembered as a horror: ‘One of those pornographic affairs which cost what 60 old-age pensioners receive in six months.’ To call Rose a reluctant debutante would be inadequate, toweringly so. As an example of committed and in its way heroic resistance to the Season the story of Rose Dugdale can never be surpassed.
And my own case history? What had I been doing between 1958 and the Racquet Club reunion in 1990? My story is certainly a tamer one than Rose’s. But the Season set up a species of resistance with me too. In October 1961, the autumn after I left Oxford, I married Ian White-Thomson, who had been at Oxford with me. We made a nostalgic return for a large wedding, which was held in the chapel of Ian’s old college, New College, as I have described. I cannot blame Ian for the gradual disintegration of the marriage. He was then tall and good-looking, highly intelligent, generous and sensitive, and I expect that he still is. It was not Ian himself, it was the life that went with him. The life of the young married Mrs Ian White-Thomson, wife of the rising young business executive in a firm called Borax, came less and less to suit me. I hated the monotony, the repetitiousness, the London dinner parties with two or three carefully chosen, smartly dressed, charming, articulate and infinitely boring married couples, mirror images of us. Most of all I loathed the weekends with Ian’s sociable military family in Essex. The shoots, the tennis parties, the before-lunch Sunday drinks parties. The routine became anathema. The moment of truth came in the middle of a rather ramshackle and drunken hunt ball held in Chelmsford Town Hall. I looked around and realised that this was like the Season only worse.
One effect of the Season was to make me very serious. I was in any case a natural swot, irritating my contemporaries at Miss Ironside’s by getting 99 per cent for maths. I used to listen avidly to Top of the Form, yearning to join one of the teams of little geniuses showing off their knowledge to quiz-master Lionel Gamlin. The most popular girls in the Season were the s
illy ones, but silliness had never come easily to me. What had been a long summer of disguising my intellectual interests in order to survive brought about a perhaps predictable reaction. I wanted a career as a writer and intended to be more professional than the professionals. No one was going to brand me as an ex-deb amateur.
In 1963 I joined the Guardian. It was a turning point. To say I joined the paper with something very like the relief and gratitude with which my friend Teresa Hayter joined the International Marxists may sound ridiculous. But that is the way it was. Arriving from a very different way of life in which the deadlines were those of the next social occasion, I loved the sense of urgency, the rethinks and the crises on which the lifeblood of a daily newspaper depends and the feeling of attachment to a paper dedicated to upholding moral values (yes, the Guardian in those days was a little sanctimonious) within which I had my own albeit minor role. I loved the easy camaraderie of a culture in which the chief reporter could come over to my desk holding out a battered copy of Simone de Beavoir’s The Second Sex and tell me: ‘You ought to read this book.’ In effect I was the Guardian’s Swinging Sixties correspondent, recruited as the voice of metropolitan youth at a time when the paper had only very recently ceased to be the Manchester Guardian and was much expanding its London base. I interviewed John Lennon, David Hockney, Ossie Clark (who I described, correctly, as the rudest man in London) and all the other obvious 1960s interviewees, and I wrote an early feminist column for the women’s page. I was thrilled when Jonathan Aitken, in his book The Young Meteors (1967), a study of young people’s precocious impact on the public in the sixties, referred to Fiona MacCarthy’s ‘alarming views’. Energised by my excitement at working for the Guardian I was so productive that, faced with what had become an embarras de richesses, the editor suggested my pieces should appear under two different by-lines, giving the paper two journalists for one. I had become what would now be seen as a workaholic. I have come to blame the Season for these and many subsequent symptoms of excess. Would I, for instance, have felt the need to spend eight years – eight years – on the researching and writing of the life of Byron, reading every single letter that he ever wrote, leaving not a stone unturned in the Byronic haunts in Italy, Greece and even Aberdeen if I had not been disowning my own past life as a debutante? Maybe; but I think most likely not.
Fiona MacCarthy in advertisement promoting Guardian women journalists in 1965
I escaped to find my own working-class hero, David Mellor, a designer and silversmith. He was already fairly famous, a young man with an E-type, when I went to interview him for the Guardian in 1964. A little later I moved north to live with him in Sheffield, a city where no deb has ever danced. It was an exciting time to be young and living in what was soon to become known as the People’s Republic of South Yorkshire. Sheffield was still a working city of cutlery and steelworks. I liked feeling a part of this environment of making. We had two children and sent them to Sheffield comprehensive schools, believing in the ethics of the social mix. The miners’ strike of 1974 impinged upon the city. Collection points for food and money for the striking miners’ families were set up in the street and outside the Town Hall. There was a mood of grim determination mingled, oddly, with a sense of carnival, the warmth and sheer exuberance of people united in a common cause.
In my own writing as a biographer I gravitated towards the utopians, people seeking better alternatives to the world they had examined and found wanting. All the books I have written have been about outsiders. C.R. Ashbee, the Arts and Crafts architect who led an exodus of craftsmen from the slums of the East End in search of an idyllic existence in the Cotswolds. Eric Gill, Roman Catholic patriarch and sculptor, whose back-to-the-land communities purported to be cells of good living ‘in the chaos of the world’. William Morris with his radical and generous ideals of art for the people in the face of widespread social inequalities and Victorian imperialist greed. Lord Byron: a lord yes, but a poet and iconoclast who attacked the venality of English high society with devastating wit.
These were busy, fulfilled years. A lot of work, a lot of travel. Our friends now tended to be artists, designers, architects, theatre people, other writers. Any links with the old deb world were broken. The memories of the queues outside the palace, debs’ mums’ lunches, Allegra Kent Taylor’s cocktail dance, the descent of the virgins down the staircase at Queen Charlotte’s, the Fourth of June at Eton, the bread-and-butter letters, Lady Ham-’n-Eggs, Royal Ascot, the rained-off Henley Royal Regatta, the party at Luttrellstown, high jinks in the Bothy, the whole panorama of the Season, had receded into one of those jumbled, intermittently beautiful and slightly shaming dreams.
EPILOGUE
Diana, Princess of Wales
Lady Diana Spencer came upon the scene as a ghost of Seasons past when the royal engagement was announced in February 1981. Prince Charles, who when he became King would also be Supreme Governor of the Church of England and Defender of the Faith, was bound by an anachronistic set of royal rules to marry a Protestant girl of preferably noble stock who was also a virgin. By 1981 such a girl was hard to find. The Prince’s attendants scoured the country with a growing desperation that reminds one of the search for the elusive girl in Cinderella. All too often the slipper did not fit. Diana succeeded where others had failed because she was so young, so naive and so old-fashioned. Earl Spencer’s daughter was a then unusual throwback to the sweet and blushing debutantes of three decades before.
She was born into an ancient English family of landowners and aristocrats, third daughter in a family in which the lines of succession had for centuries descended through the sons. On the usual assumption in such families that daughters did not need much education Diana was sent to an unambitious boarding school for girls, West Heath at Sevenoaks in Kent, where she failed all of the five O levels she took. After leaving West Heath she went to a finishing school in Switzerland. If the curtsey ceremony had continued as before, she would certainly have been in line to curtsey to the Queen – as indeed would the future Camilla Parker Bowles in her own debutante year of 1965. As it was Diana Spencer did not have a formal Season. But the flats in Chelsea and South Kensington shared with one or two other Sloaney girls; the socially acceptable but meagrely paid jobs babysitting for friends, cleaning, working as a waitress; the cookery course; the temporary teaching post at the Vacani School of Dancing; the job as an assistant at the all-too-appropriately named Young England kindergarten; the Old Etonian and Guards officer suitors; the girlish confidences and old-time practical jokes: it was as if even the sixties had not happened. Lady Diana’s peculiarly sheltered life as a single girl in London was precisely that of the debs of my own generation in the fifties, as was Diana’s remarkably determined sexual purity. She clung to her virginity as we had done, and with perhaps the same mixed motives of fear, ignorance and preserving one’s intactness for Mr or (ideally) Lord Right. Lady Diana Spencer was after all the step-granddaughter of the romantic novelist Barbara Cartland whose books she had read avidly through her teenage years, presumably absorbing a philosophy of love which is a curious blend of calculation and effusiveness. One of Diana’s flatmates quoted her as saying: ‘I knew I had to keep myself tidy for what lay ahead.’
Lady Diana Spencer leaving the Royal Academy of Arts in June 1981, after an evening party she attended with her fiancé, Prince Charles
The tragedies that lay ahead cannot quite have been predicted from the television interview given at Balmoral at the time of their engagement by a rather sheepish kilted and sporraned heir to the throne and the still childish beauty who gazed at him adoringly, the fiancé from a time-warp. Is it just with hindsight that one senses the unease? Diana was accepting the life of the consort, the admirer, the eternal looker-on in a world in which male privilege and prowess in battle and in sport was the long-accepted norm. She was entering the world accurately described by Beatrix Campbell in her book about Diana as ‘the sexist culture of masculine performance and female spectatorship’. It
was also a world of crude and cruel double standards in which kings and future kings were permitted infidelities – Edward VII and his high-and low-born ‘beauties’, Prince Charles and his long-running liaison with Camilla – with a tacit approval not extended to their wives. In the circles I grew up in it was more or less accepted that men from time to time would have their little fling and you were better to ignore it because when it came down to it, financially and socially dependent on your husband as you were, what was the alternative?
Diana herself had been reared in an environment in which, by and large, these conventions persisted. She was not, at least to begin with, a brave spirit. When, goaded to retaliation, Princess Diana found herself what appeared the perfect lover, the man she later claimed to have adored, it was James Hewitt, a career soldier, a Captain in the Life Guards, a very good rider and an expert polo player, a brave and handsome man who was a bit of a philanderer, a military hero who lacked the sense of irony to see that his professions of loyalty to Queen and country were in some ways contradicted by the fact he was committing adultery with the Queen’s son’s wife. One might claim that James Hewitt was a well-deserved diversion for Diana, but he certainly had his limitations. Reading his memoirs Moving On his antediluvian attitudes strike me as painfully familiar. This was just the sort of man I used to meet at house parties, watch at polo matches, fend off in dark nightclubs. Fundamentally James Hewitt was a debs’ delight of yesteryear.