Lady Catherine, the Earl, and the Real Downton Abbey

by The Countess of Carnarvon

  The Prince of Wales was exceptionally charming with perfect manners, and was unsurprisingly very popular. An early girlfriend was Miss Poppy Baring; very pretty with large dark eyes and short dark hair: the classic flapper. Like many of her contemporaries she was less closely chaperoned than would have been the case before the war. Prince George was also rather keen on Poppy, whom he had met when on leave from the naval duties that occupied him throughout the 1920s. The Highclere Castle visitor books record several weekend racing or shooting parties when both PG and Poppy were staying with Catherine and Porchey. The interconnecting bedroom doors meant that it was hardly even necessary to creep along the corridors.

  Highclere was full of life again. Or at least it was until the night of 16 July 1928, when Reggie Wendell wandered out of the Library after supper to take some air and suffered a massive brain haemorrhage. His prone form was found by Porchey, who came to look for him when he didn’t return. Doctors were sent for as Reggie was carried upstairs and laid in his bed. Catherine was beside herself with grief and panic, and refused to leave her brother’s side that night. Reggie never regained consciousness. He was two weeks older than Porchey: just thirty-two years old.

  Porchey telephoned Jac and his wife Eileen who, late that night, left their children with their nanny and drove to be with Catherine and Gar, who was also staying at Highclere.

  One can hardly imagine Gar’s anguish. Her beloved husband had sickened and died in a matter of days when he was in his prime; now her second son had been snatched away in a moment. It was senseless and heartbreaking. One of the most affected of the family was Catherine. She was devastated, and began to turn not merely to a sherry before lunch but to several rather strong gins.

  The funeral service took place a week later at Highclere Church. The mood was of desperate sadness. A stunned congregation of young friends as well as relatives could scarcely believe what had happened. There were more than fifty wreaths and floral tributes even before Catherine and Porchey, Jac and Eileen and Gar placed the family tributes on Reggie’s coffin.

  Following the service, the Carnarvons and Wendells left the church to drive slowly back through the sunny park to the chapel and cemetery, where Reggie was to be buried. The gothic chapel is a flint and stone Gothic structure, built by Henrietta, the 3rd Countess, ‘to comfort those in sorrow’. Reggie had died ten years younger than his father, and that had seemed unbearably young. Now he would lie in the graveyard beneath a redwood tree and shaded by a spreading beech. Catherine would be able to walk down to pray or leave some flowers on his grave as often as she wanted. It wasn’t a lot of comfort in her sorrow, but it was something.

  If Catherine was utterly inconsolable, Porchey was also devastated. Reggie had been a great friend, a co-conspirator at the races—more a brother than a brother-in-law. In years to come Catherine always said that the loss of Reggie was a bitter blow to her marriage as well as to her. Reggie had mediated between Porchey and Catherine in subtle ways, had given them an additional way to understand each other. He was also, being his sister’s natural ally, a check on some of Porchey’s more unthinking behaviour. With him gone, the grief that she had learned to weather after her father’s death turned into a permanent sadness. The consequences would be grave indeed for the Carnarvons.

  8

  Highclere in All Its Glory

  On 24 December 1928, Catherine climbed into the Rolls-Royce, which Trotman the chauffeur had drawn up outside the main door to the castle. She and Porchey were spending Christmas at Blenheim Palace, one of the greatest of all British country houses. Catherine could summon hardly any festive spirit. It had been just a few short months since Reggie’s death and she still felt low. The thought of the traditional family Christmas at Highclere had been weighing upon her for weeks. It could not possibly be the same without her brother, who had always spent it with them. In the end, Porchey had resolved that a change was required. Better to do something different than to struggle to replicate the beloved routines with heavy hearts. He accepted an invitation for him and Catherine to spend three days with the Duke and Duchess of Marlborough and their son and heir, his old friend the Marquess of Blandford. The children would spend Christmas with their aunt and uncle, Eve and Brograve, and their cousin Patricia, in a household where all the jolliness of the season was in full swing.

  Porchey tucked a blanket around his wife’s legs and sat beside her. It was a short journey to Blenheim but the afternoon was cold. Behind them his valet Van Celst was helping Charles the footman to load their bags into a shooting brake, which would transport both staff and luggage. Doll was supervising, to ensure that nothing was forgotten.

  Despite her gloomy mood, Catherine could not help feeling curious and even slightly excited. The Palace was a draw in itself, and then there were the inhabitants, whose notoriety preceded them. She knew the Marquess of Blandford well since he was probably her husband’s closest friend, and was acquainted with the Duke and Duchess of Marlborough, but she and Porchey had never before stayed at Blenheim. It is one of the largest houses in England, and the only non-royal or episcopal residence to be designated a palace. It was built on a monumental scale between 1704 and 1724 for the first Duke of Marlborough, the war hero who triumphed over the French at the battle that lent its name to his house. Catherine adored Highclere, which is both magnificent and beautiful, but she knew that Blenheim was a homage to glories on a different scale.

  In the years after the First World War, it also had something of a reputation for being a hotbed of sin. Before her marriage, Lady Diana Cooper, who was later a frequent visitor to Highclere on account of her husband Duff Cooper’s friendship with Porchey, had been prevented by her mother from attending house parties at Blenheim. The Duchess of Rutland was most reluctant to allow her beloved daughter, who was reckoned to be the most beautiful and brilliant girl of her generation, even to set foot inside the palace. Her Grace considered it an unsuitable environment for an unmarried lady, especially one with Diana’s famously wild tastes in stimulants and capacity to arouse passions.

  The Duchess of Rutland was perhaps rather suspicious of the tone set by the 9th Duke, who had turned around the sagging fortunes of the once-great house by marrying Consuelo Vanderbilt, the American railroad heiress, in New York in 1895. Marriages to wealthy Americans had become de rigueur by that point, but there was something almost distasteful about Sunny Marlborough’s total disregard for his wife’s feelings and openness about his motivation. He told Consuelo on their honeymoon that he was in love with another woman, and kept a string of mistresses throughout their marriage.

  Having spent millions of pounds of the Vanderbilt dowry on restoring the palace to its former magnificence, he settled down to an affair with Gladys Deacon. Gladys was also American but was born in Paris and her childhood was shaped by melodrama. When she was six years old, her father shot her mother’s French lover in the bedroom next to her own. Gladys and her siblings were sent to a convent, from which their mother abducted them on the eve of their father’s release from jail. Gladys grew up with her father in New York but, following his death in a mental hospital when she was twenty, she returned from the States to Paris in 1901. She promptly became the toast of Europe, pursued by princes and aristocrats of all nations, famed for her startling beauty, turquoise eyes and eccentricity. Marcel Proust said of her, ‘I never saw a girl with such beauty, such magnificent intelligence, such goodness and charm.’ Despite countless proposals of marriage, Gladys nurtured an old infatuation for the 9th Duke that she had developed as a young girl, on the strength of press coverage of his marriage to Consuelo. When she and Sunny finally married in June 1921, after his divorce, they had been lovers for fifteen years, a relationship that was considerably more successful then their marriage proved to be.

  Gladys, the new Duchess of Marlborough, arrived at Blenheim in 1921 and was comprehensively disliked by the staff and refused acceptance by Oxfordshire society. The Duchess of Rutland wasn’t the only one who found her be
yond the pale. It wasn’t so much the long-standing affair that rankled. Such relationships were in fact widespread among the aristocracy. Even the disapproving Duchess had never denied the widely held belief that her daughter, Diana, was the child of her lover rather than the Duke of Rutland. It was rather Gladys’s flagrant disregard for the rules of discretion and the good opinion of her peers that won her enemies and her house a reputation for louche living. Society may have been awash with extramarital liaisons (and even premarital ones as the 1920s drew on), but care must be taken to draw a veil over the consequences, even if it meant hiding a child’s true parentage in the plain sight of a husband’s name and acceptance. Gladys was indifferent to such niceties. She was prone to advise young girls who were worried about getting into trouble, ‘If you have any problems, go to the vet. That’s what I always do!’

  By 1928, when Catherine and Porchey visited, the Duke and Duchess’s marriage had descended into hostility. Gladys was reported to have once led the ladies into dinner before producing a pistol as she sat down, laying it on the table beside her. Asked why it was there by an alarmed guest, she responded breezily, ‘Oh, perhaps I’ll shoot Marlborough.’

  Judging by Catherine’s memories of her visit, both Gladys and Blenheim’s reputation might have been exaggerated for effect. Lord and Lady Carnarvon cannot have had too many qualms about accepting the invitation to visit, as they invited the Marlboroughs to Highclere in return, the following year. Perhaps the Duchess of Rutland had been over-cautious in her concern for her daughter’s virtue, or perhaps Porchey and Catherine were simply rather more sensible than Lady Diana, whose extravagances included not just a serious champagne habit but also (briefly) a fondness for morphine and chloroform.

  In any case, the entertainments on offer that Christmas were quite without scandal. It was more snowball fights in the park and games of sardines played all over the house than opium in the drawing room, pistols in the dining room and assassinated lovers upstairs. Once Catherine had got over her initial awe at the extravagant English Baroque architecture, the vast scale of the house and the splendour of the state rooms, she was grateful for the distractions of her surroundings. She remembered having fun at Blenheim but recalled it as a cold house, the wood fires burning in the bedrooms not equal to their task. She missed Highclere’s hot water radiators and other modern comforts.

  In fact, neither Blenheim’s palatial proportions nor the infamy of its current chatelaine were quite as alarming as the mannerisms of one of the Carnarvons’ fellow guests. Winston Churchill had been born at Blenheim in 1875 and was a nephew to the 9th Duke and cousin and lifelong friend to the Marquess of Blandford, who became the 10th Duke in 1934. Though he never lived there as an adult, Churchill regarded Blenheim as his second home and, naturally, he and his wife Clementine would sometimes spend Christmas there. He was the best part of a generation older than both Porchey and Lord Blandford, and already had an eventful and distinguished political career behind him, not to mention a reputation for fierce intelligence, hard drinking and pugnacious manners.

  On Christmas Eve 1928, Churchill was fifty-three years old and at the height of his powers. He had served as Chancellor of the Exchequer since 1924, under Stanley Baldwin’s premiership, which made him effectively the second most powerful man in British political life. Churchill had both the habit and the knack of dominating conversation and loved to talk politics, a subject that held little interest for Porchey, and about which he was at that point in his life largely ignorant. During a pre-dinner discussion of the relative merits of prospective prime ministers, Porchey offered a small contribution. Eddie Stanley, who had held various minor offices and was then Deputy Chairman of the Conservative Party, would, he thought, make a good PM. Churchill, who was by far the most conspicuous candidate for the office the next time it became vacant, stopped puffing on his cigar and, leaning over, said, ‘My dear Porchey, I can scarcely think of anybody who would make a worse Prime Minister.’ Snubbed, Porchey thought he had better stick to occasional remarks about racing.

  Porchey was certainly not alone in feeling rather frightened of Churchill, but the great man carried all before him with an endless stream of fascinating stories. During the course of their stay at Blenheim, Catherine realised that above all he should not be interrupted, although she was wise enough to spot that he granted more indulgences to his audience when it was made up of pretty women.

  Perhaps Churchill’s reaction to Porchey’s opinion could have been foreseen, for this wasn’t their first run-in over political matters. At the end of a dinner in 1926, hosted by the Aga Khan, Winston had leant back, brandy and cigar in hand and, turning to Porchey, asked him what he, as a racing man, thought about the Exchequer’s betting tax. The measure, the first of its kind, had been introduced in April of that year, levying a 5 per cent tax on all bets placed. Many in the Conservative Party were opposed and there was uproar among the racing community; bookies in Windsor had even gone on strike in protest. In July Churchill had moved to reduce the 5 per cent flat rate to a tax of 2 per cent on transactions at racecourses and 3.5 per cent at bookmakers’. This fudge was in the process of proving itself unworkable at the time of the dinner.

  Porchey responded promptly, ‘I’m sure there are more beneficial ways to raise revenue.’ ‘Well, I should be very interested in your suggestions,’ remarked Churchill, much to the younger man’s surprise and delight.

  It took Porchey six months and careful discussion with all parties to produce his proposal, which he personally delivered to Downing Street. Winston later told him that he hadn’t read it but his advisers thought it wasn’t a realistic plan and he had decided that the only thing to do was to scrap the tax entirely. It was in fact abolished by the Labour government that was returned to Parliament the following year. Porchey felt utterly put down, a sensation that was repeated, albeit on a smaller scale, during their discussion of Eddie Stanley’s prime-ministerial qualities.

  Despite – or perhaps even partly because of—the bracing effect of being at a house party alongside Winston Churchill, the Blenheim trip was a success. It had taken both Porchey and Catherine’s minds off the tragedy of Reggie’s absence. They began 1929 determined to be as happy as possible and spent a whirlwind of a year at Highclere, building up the stud and giving parties and shooting weekends, throwing open the house to their many friends.

  The autumn of 1929 had been unusually wet and there was no let-up as the year turned towards Christmas. Tremendous gales battered the cedars of Lebanon around the Castle lawns and brought down large branches from the beeches and oaks up on Siddown Hill, as a shooting party collected at Highclere for the first few days of December. The Duke and Duchess of Marlborough came, on one of the last social occasions they ever attended as a couple. Weeks later, when the Duke had finally tired of Gladys’s odd ways and her troops of Blenheim spaniels that messed all over the house, he would evict her and all her dogs.

  Despite the weather, the shooting party was a tremendous success, in large part thanks to Charles Maber, the head gamekeeper. Maber had inherited his position from his father, who had worked for the 5th Earl, and had spent years acquiring a deep familiarity with the land and honing his skills. He was determined to maintain Highclere’s reputation for being one of the best shoots in England, and the castle’s game book records that, on 4 December, the guns were shooting at the Beeches and the bag amounted to 672 game. Lord Carnarvon’s guests were delighted: that was excellent sport in strong winds.

  As well as Porchey and the Duke of Marlborough, there was Harry Brown, a close friend of Porchey’s and a superb shot and first-class rider. He was very debonair and marvellously handsome; every girl was head over heels in love with him, despite the fact he was married. Sir Hugo Cunliffe-Owen, Chairman of British American Tobacco, was another of the guns. He was a keen racing man; his horse, Felstead, had won the Derby the previous year and he was a frequent visitor to Highclere, while Porchey and Catherine often stayed with him at Newmarket. Sir Victo
r Mackenzie, who had been wounded and decorated for bravery in the First World War, was also staying. Sir Victor was something of a professional courtier; he went on to serve three successive monarchs—George V, Edward VIII and George VI—as a groom-in-waiting.

  Ladies did not shoot, though they sometimes accompanied their husbands, to enjoy the fresh air and exercise and to assist with collecting the game. On a similar occasion, Catherine was photographed out in the park with her great friend Lady Diana Mabey. They are giggling at one another, both in ankle-skimming tweedy skirts and feathered caps, the game birds dangling from their hands. One rather imagines that, between the bad weather and the bitterness that was finally sinking the Marlboroughs’ marriage, the ladies elected to remain indoors on this particular weekend.

  It is a mark of Catherine’s confidence that she was no longer daunted by welcoming a most eclectic mixture of guests to Highclere. Gladys might have been the wife to one of the grandest and richest dukes in the realm, but her reputation for idiosyncrasy meant she had not been received in Oxfordshire society for years. Socially, Lady Carnarvon was unassailable, her reputation beyond reproach.

  It’s impossible to know how Catherine regarded Gladys on a personal level. They were very different people. Gladys was one of life’s adventurers with a taste for being the centre of attention and a proclivity for drama at whatever cost. Catherine, despite her light-hearted love of dancing and fun, was wholesome and straightforward by comparison. But they were both intelligent American women who had married the English aristocrat they loved and settled into a world very far from the one in which they had been born. It’s possible that Catherine thought Gladys’s decline was predictable but more likely that she felt sorry for her.