Wait for Me!

by Deborah Devonshire

  Andrew’s father seldom gave him advice but when he did it was taken and used again and again. ‘There is something you should ram home,’ Eddy said to Andrew, ‘and you cannot repeat it too often. No government has any money of its own, the only money it has to spend is what it gets from you and me in taxes.’ You could see by the expression on the faces of some of Andrew’s audience that they did not believe it (and some people probably still do not). I remember another piece of advice Eddy gave, delivered in his usual dry manner. ‘Andy,’ he said, ‘mark my words, wherever there is trouble in the world there is a clergyman behind it.’

  I have always voted Conservative and would never do otherwise. When we were young, Decca used to say in a sarcastic voice, ‘There you go again. You’re a Conservative policeman,’ whenever I attempted to forestall a row with our parents. I was never tempted to follow any extreme cause, but I did get worked up in the 1945 General Election (and in subsequent elections), partly because of the personalities involved and partly because of my dislike of any Socialist government and their pretences. I was not interested in Communism or Fascism – I had had too much of them in my childhood.

  Nationalization of the coal mines was the main topic in the run-up to the 1945 election, and feelings ran so high that the police were often present at meetings. We were spat at and our car was rolled till it nearly turned over. Audiences were rowdy and the heckling sometimes aggressive. On one occasion, a man at the back of the hall shouted to Andrew that he wanted to shake his hand. Andrew was so surprised at this friendly gesture that he jumped off the stage and ran down the aisle, where an accomplice shot out his leg and sent him crashing to the floor. He picked himself up, dismayed but unhurt, and returned to the platform with the audience laughing. I always thought that the way the Socialists presented nationalization to the coal miners was grossly unfair. The miners were led to believe that their lives would be transformed from one day to the next when the National Coal Board took over. In the event they found themselves back underground, the old hierarchy still in place. The only change, it seemed to me, was that there were more managers, while the men who mattered came to the surface as grimy as ever.

  The election was a landslide victory for Labour, following the trend set in Derbyshire West the previous year. Andrew was beaten by over 12,000 votes, but he had whipped up such enthusiasm among his supporters that we had almost persuaded ourselves he could win. He stayed with Chesterfield after 1945 and spent a great deal of time in the constituency where he became well known. In the 1950 General Election, the boundaries of the constituency were changed to include the industrial district of Staveley and some of the worst housing in the neighbourhood. Labour won again with an even larger majority.

  In March 1946 we moved to Edensor House, less than a mile from Chatsworth. My father-in-law thought Andrew should be nearer the big house and the estate office, and learn how things were run. Eddy had no intention of going to live at Chatsworth himself – Billy’s death had seen to that. As far as I know, he kept his vow of never setting foot in the house again, with one exception: he gave away his daughter, Anne, at her wedding to Michael Tree in the chapel at Chatsworth in November 1949. But he did not sleep in the house and chose to stay with Andrew and me at Edensor, as he had always done since the end of the war whenever he came to Derbyshire on business.

  Even before the tragedy of Billy’s death, the house had never held happy memories for Eddy, and his childhood had been made miserable by continual criticisms from his mother, Granny Evie. He told me that every time he came home from boarding school his mother made him cry on the first day of the holidays. (Surprisingly, he later wrote affectionate letters to her, showing that his regard for his mother was ambivalent.) In 1925 his father, Victor Duke, had a stroke. He lived on for thirteen years but was very different to the benign person he had once been. He lost his temper with everyone and lay about him with his stick: station masters and footmen were his regular targets. When Victor became acutely ill, my old friend Dr Evans visited him daily and described the ordeal:

  Every morning the routine was the same. I must enter the sick room and sit down quietly in a chair at one side of the fire, His Grace would be sitting on the other side reading The Times. Whatever happened I must not make a sound until he lowered the newspaper and peered over the top. His temper was known to be uncertain. I was told that sometimes his valet had to crawl under the breakfast table to lace up his boots. In this position His Grace found it impossible to belabour him with his walking stick.

  Victor went on shooting after his stroke and was extremely dangerous, swinging round with his gun with no regard for his neighbours. Billy and Andrew were placed either side of him, which naturally put Andrew off the sport as he was in mortal fear of his grandfather’s gun. (Moucher even went so far as to buy the boys bullet-proof spectacles.) The only person at Chatsworth liked by the Duke was John Maclauchlan, the autocratic head keeper, who took him rabbit shooting, which Victor preferred to set-piece pheasant shoots. On one occasion, the Duke took a grandson, Peter Baillie, with him on this ploy. Peter, aged about six, created a legend in the family by turning a sackful of ferrets upside down on to the Duke’s head and, surprisingly, did not get into trouble for this bold action.

  No wonder Chatsworth was an unhappy place during those years. Granny Evie tried to carry on as if nothing had happened but the house and estate lacked a leader and it showed. Victor paid no attention to the head land agent and things gradually went downhill. Neither Eddy nor Moucher had the authority to run the many departments, including woods, farms, farm buildings and the hundreds of other houses and cottages on the estate. It was a relief to everybody when, in May 1938, Victor’s life came to an end. Eddy and Moucher delayed moving into Chatsworth while essential plumbing work was carried out and camped there the following Christmas before setting off in the New Year for a long tour of Australia and South Africa. Eddy was Parliamentary Under Secretary for Dominion Affairs, a post he held until 1940. As soon as war was declared, he and Moucher packed up Chatsworth and went back to Churchdale.

  After the war Eddy spent more and more time in London and Compton Place. In 1947 Francis Thompson, the long-serving librarian and keeper of the collection at Chatsworth, wrote to him warning him in no uncertain terms of the dangers to the family’s reputation and to Chatsworth itself if no action was taken to preserve the house and its collection. He advised the Duke that in his opinion Chatsworth should be opened to the public on a proper commercial footing. Eddy and Moucher had already started thinking about reopening the house on a small scale and Mr Thompson’s letter must have given them a jolt.

  During the war Chatsworth had been brought to life by the three hundred girls and staff of Penrhos College. In March 1946 they returned to their North Wales premises and Chatsworth was left empty. Andrew and I often walked along the footpath from Edensor and across the river to explore the cold, dank, echoing rooms. Basic maintenance was being carried out, and in the bitter winter of 1946–7 house carpenters were shovelling snow off the roof to forestall dry rot. Once a week the clocks were wound, so bang on the hour they struck and chimed in unison, but there was no one to hear them. The contents of the house had not been touched since September 1939, when they had been packed up to allow the Penrhos girls to start the autumn term in their new quarters. All manner of things, from the Memling Triptych to wastepaper baskets, were piled up in the library; Old Master drawings were stuffed into drawers and smaller objects had been stored in a walk-in safe.

  My parents-in-law decided that the garden at Chatsworth should be kept up and the house ‘maintained’ and, for the first time, the money paid by visitors went to the upkeep of the house instead of to local hospitals. When work on reopening the house began, the old generation of carpenters, electricians, masons and plumbers were all nearing retirement age but they knew every inch of the place and its contents, and their help was invaluable. The women’s side of things was less straightforward. No English women would do domestic
work in such a place; they had had enough before the war of ‘going into service’, the memory of the long hours and the old discipline was too much and they took other jobs.

  Moucher turned for help to two Hungarian sisters, Ilona and Elisabeth Solymossy, who had worked for Kick at her London house. To Moucher’s relief the Solymossys not only liked the idea of coming to Chatsworth, they also recruited a polyglot collection of nine other Eastern Europeans. To walk down the back passage when they were on their way to lunch was like going into the Tower of Babel, and the smell of goulash (or its first cousin) pervaded all. I often wondered how my family and I would have got on had we been in their shoes, turned out of our homes for ever and left to fend for ourselves in a foreign country. This wonderful team, dressed like Miss Moppet with cotton handkerchiefs tied round their heads, dusted, sorted, scrubbed, polished and sewed throughout the winter of 1948–9. The shabby, grubby rooms were slowly made presentable and were ready when the house reopened at Easter 1949.

  Eddy was drinking too much and risking his health for all to see, which created a worrying atmosphere at home. He was obsessed with chopping wood and had learned from the woodmen how to fell a tree and use the iron wedges that enabled the saw to cut without ‘binding’. At Compton Place he would disappear for hours on end to an outhouse where he worked away, sawing and stacking piles of logs. He came in for dinner but went back to the outhouse immediately afterwards and did not return until after midnight, his old velvet suit impregnated with sawdust.

  The physical effort, coupled with too much alcohol, was to prove a fatal combination. On 26 November 1950, while engaged in his favourite occupation, Eddy suffered a massive heart attack and just managed to reach the hall of the house before collapsing. He was fifty-five. (The death certificate was signed by the infamous Dr John Bodkin Adams, our GP at Eastbourne, who the following year was accused of murdering one of his patients; it was then discovered that more than 160 others in his care had died in suspicious circumstances. This suspected serial murderer had seemed very affable to me when he looked after Stoker and Emma while they had whooping cough during the war.)

  Andrew was in Australia when his father died. Eddy had asked him to look for suitable places for investment, as he had already done in Kenya and Tanganyika. I was staying with Aunt Weenie at her cottage near Stow-on-the-Wold. Moucher and Andrew’s sisters were at Compton Place, where I joined them to await Andrew’s return from the Antipodes. Even though Eddy had looked so ill lately, my mother-in-law was stunned and blamed herself for not doing more to stop him drinking.

  The effect on his family of Eddy’s death was, of course, immediate; the financial consequences, however, took years to unravel and absorbed almost all Andrew’s attention for two decades. In 1926 Victor Duke had formed the Chatsworth Estates Company and at the time of his death the majority of the shares belonged to Eddy, his son and heir. Eddy made a similar arrangement in 1946 and handed over the bulk of his fortune to the Chatsworth Settlement Trust for the benefit of his descendants. Five years had to elapse before this became free of death duties, which under Mr Attlee’s Labour government had soared to a dizzying eighty per cent. Eddy died fourteen weeks before the five years were up and Andrew was faced with raising millions of pounds to satisfy the Treasury’s demands. Four-fifths of the value of the land and investments, and of works of art that had been collected by the family for over four hundred years, had to be found. It seemed strange to me that the family of a man who had given a lifetime of public service should have to pay such a vast fine on his death.

  There was much heart searching, but as I knew little about the works of art at Chatsworth or the value of individual objects in the collection, I had nothing to do with the decisions. It was not my business and I did not see any of the reports of Andrew’s meetings with Currey & Co., the family lawyers who played such a big part in subsequent transactions. But, as was his habit, Andrew often left letters from Currey lying about, thrown down wherever they landed after breakfast; I regarded these as fair game and sometimes had a sideways squint at them to try to glean what was happening. It was the first time I had heard money spoken of so freely (like illness it was not discussed in my youth); now, suddenly, the value of everything was being tossed around. Andrew conferred with his mother but Moucher was not exactly the right person to talk to as she was unaware of the value of anything. I once asked her the price of some object she liked the look of: ‘£40,’ she said. ‘No, £4. No, £400,’ it was all the same to her. As a storehouse of sympathy, however, she was unbeatable.

  Andrew took the decision to sell 12,000 acres of agricultural land in Dumfriesshire, 42,000 acres in Derbyshire, town property and woodlands in Sussex, and a house in London. Most of the glorious furniture and books from Compton Place were sold and the house was let to a language school. The kitchen garden (scene of the strawberry theft just before D-Day) was built on and a brutish 1950s edifice took the place of that beautiful, productive garden. Nine of Chatsworth’s most important works of art went to the nation in lieu of duty and found their way to major institutions. The lion’s share went to the British Museum in the form of Claude’s Liber Veritatis, the Greek bronze head of Apollo, the Van Dyck Italian sketchbook (luckily Professor Michael Jaffé, who later worked on the catalogue of Dutch drawings at Chatsworth, found another at the back of a cupboard), the tenth-century Benedictional of St Aethelwold and over 140 early books, including fourteen works by Caxton’s head printer, Wynkyn de Worde.

  Holbein’s life-size cartoon of Henry VII and Henry VIII went to the National Portrait Gallery; Rubens’ The Holy Family to the Walker Gallery in Liverpool; the fifteenth-century Dutch hunting tapestries were allocated to the Victoria and Albert Museum; The Donne Triptych by Memling and The Philosopher by Rembrandt (which to Andrew’s delight was later relabelled by scholars a ‘studio production’) went to the National Gallery. There was a purple warning to the followers of fashion in art (and they are many): when the contents of the Sculpture Gallery, including several Canovas, were valued, the total lumped together (it was evidently not thought worthwhile to list them separately) came to under £1,000. The scrap of paper it was written on looks a bit ridiculous sixty years later.

  All this was still not enough to clear the debt. On 12 August 1954 Andrew was sitting in the train to London when he had the inspired idea to offer Hardwick Hall, the magnificent sixteenth-century house not far from Chatsworth built by Bess, progenitrix of the Cavendish family, to the Treasury in lieu of cash. Granny Evie, who was nearly ninety, was still living in the house at the time. She loved Hardwick very much, having always preferred it to Chatsworth, but to her credit she accepted the plan. Before the agreement was signed, Moucher kept reminding me of things I should take from the house. ‘You must go and get the Minton dinner service which is in the cupboard behind the kitchen,’ she said, and suggested a few other easily portable bits and pieces. I was pregnant with Sophy and could not trudge round the seemingly endless rooms to rescue some of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century items of furniture that were not contemporary with the house. But I did save the pretty, blue-ribboned Minton dinner service and we used it at Chatsworth during all the years we lived there.

  Protracted negotiations were finally completed and the house, together with 3,000 acres of surrounding farmland, was accepted by the government and handed over to the National Trust in 1959. The Trust has looked after it as we never could have done, and the family are eternally grateful both to Andrew for arranging the transfer of ownership and to the Trust for its fine stewardship.

  The final payment of death duties was made on 17 May 1967, but interest had been accruing since 1950 and the full debt was not cleared until 1974.

  12

  Edensor House

  W

  E SPENT THIRTEEN years at Edensor House, from 1946 to 1959. Emma and Stoker were three and two respectively when we moved in, and Sophy was born in 1957. While Andrew was busy sorting out the financial repercussions of my father-in-law’s deat
h, the day-to-day implications seeped more slowly into my life. Two occasions gave me a jolt and made me aware of what was to come. I was in the garden at Chatsworth one day and Bert Link, the head gardener, came up and asked me, ‘What would you like us to do?’ I realized then that the 105-acre garden was now part of my remit. And a few weeks after Eddy’s death, Moucher handed me an old Elastoplast tin fastened with a rubber band. When I opened it I was amazed to see some family jewels, including row upon row of pearls. The pearls were such an inseparable part of my mother-in-law – I had seldom seen her without them, town or country, day or night – that I could not imagine wearing them and gave them straight back to her. But I kept the other pieces, including a star ruby brooch which I had made into a clasp for my own cultured pearls. This necklace, together with a high-collared shirt that appears in many portraits and photographs of me, became my uniform. After Andrew’s death, I handed the family jewellery on to my daughter-in-law, Amanda. It was not mine, just as it had not been Moucher’s: it belongs to Chatsworth, to be worn by the wife of the Duke of Devonshire. I gradually began to take on more of the tasks of former duchesses of Devonshire, and found myself responsible for seven houses: Chatsworth, Hardwick Hall, Bolton Hall, Lismore Castle, Compton Place, a London house and Edensor. No wonder I put down ‘Housewife’ when filling in a form that demanded my occupation; I was wife to all of them. People sometimes ask what it is like being a duchess. The answer is that I honestly do not know because after it happened none of my intimates – either among the people who worked at Chatsworth or my friends far and wide – treated me any differently. I sometimes notice a change of gear, rather than attitude, when I am introduced to people but it does not last long – they soon see how unnecessary it is and behave normally.