Lady Catherine, the Earl, and the Real Downton Abbey

by The Countess of Carnarvon

  Only once the party had everything it needed could Gladys and the other housemaids and footmen go back downstairs for their supper. The visiting valets and lady’s maids, were seated depending on their consequence (or rather, their employer’s). Footmen, guests’ valets, kitchen boys and all other male employees sat on one side of the table in the main staff dining room, in order of seniority, with female staff down the other. Once the meal was finished, Mrs Mackie carried out the final checks on her kitchen maids’ cleaning, Widdowes made one last trip to see that there was nothing else the family required, and to clear empty glasses from the side tables in the Saloon and Drawing Room. Mr Fearnside checked that the front door was locked, as was his wine cellar, and then everyone trudged upstairs to their rooms and fell into bed, while the scullery maid finished off the last bits of washing up.

  If the work was demanding for Highclere’s downstairs inhabitants, their positions in a large and well-run household were nonetheless highly desirable. There was a community that provided a social life, and food and lodgings were excellent. There were possibilities for advancement, and ladies’ maids and valets enjoyed travel and variety. Domestic service in smaller or more chaotic establishments could be a far tougher proposition. If a servant worked alone or with just one other member of staff, they were vulnerable to the whims of their employers. At Highclere, the hierarchy was strict, but in the words of Matilda Hart, who joined as the fourth housemaid, the place functioned as ‘a well-oiled machine’.

  In 1979, Mrs Hart wrote to Lord Carnarvon, having read his first volume of memoirs, to share her reminiscences of Highclere. She remembered how, the moment they’d finished in the bedrooms, she and her fellow housemaids had ‘chased through the state rooms, plumping cushions and emptying ashtrays.’ They were always in a terrible hurry before the family and their guests came down to dinner. Their task was rendered more difficult by the fact that they had to ‘wipe their footprints from the carpets’ as they went. No indication of how such an operation might be performed is given, but it must have slowed them down considerably.

  Leisure time was great fun. Mrs Hart had learned to dance in the servants’ hall. The house must have fairly shaken with dancing, downstairs as well as upstairs. Matilda shared a room with Betty, who was flighty, and the two of them used to get into trouble with Nanny for playing their gramophone records loudly in their bedroom. When the girls were separated one night, Matilda awoke to a knocking on her window, an alarming occurrence since her room was right at the top of the castle’s turret. It was Betty, who had walked along the lead guttering just for the fun of it. Matilda was persuaded to do likewise in the opposite direction.

  Like Matilda, Gladys had mostly very happy memories of the house. She worked hard but enjoyed her weekly trip to the cinema or to a dance in Newbury with Gwen. There was one recollection, though, that still made her shiver, years later. One night, as she and Gwen arrived at the back door, having walked across the park after a dance in town, they were startled by the night watchman’s dog, which was snarling at thin air. Stratford, a typically stolid man, looked shaken. He claimed that the castle ghost had just processed along the downstairs corridor and ascended the back stairs towards the staff bedrooms. Gladys and Gwen were inconsolable and had to be persuaded that it was hardly practical to spend the night in the staff dining room. Hanging on to each other for dear life, and accompanied at their insistence by Stratford, they climbed gingerly to the foot of the stairs that ascended from the first floor to the second and performed the ritual knocking and calling out of a request for the ghost’s permission to enter that was taught to all newly arrived Highclere staff by their colleagues. It must have pacified the spirit, for the girls had a quiet night and woke the following morning to radiant sunshine and the blessedly familiar start of another long day’s work.

  The christening of Henry, the new Lord Porchester, Easter 1924.

  Henry’s nanny, Mrs Sambell, in the carriage on the way to the christening.

  Catherine’s family left to right: Her brother Jac, Dr Johnnie, Jac’s wife Eileen, and their mother Gar, Marian Wendell.

  Mother and son in January 1926.

  Penelope’s christening in 1925. From left: Sir Brograve Beauchamp; Reggie Wendell; Lady Carnarvon holding Penelope; Lord Carnarvon; Lady Evelyn; Arthur Portman; Mrs Portman holding little Lord Porchester and Catherine’s mother Marian (Gar). (Picture Acknowledgment i2.1)

  Catherine and Henry at Penelope’s christening. (Picture Acknowledgment i2.2)

  Catherine with her mother and Penelope in the pram.

  Catherine with her children.

  Catherine’s sister Philippa was a striking beauty.

  Philippa married Randolph Algernon Ronald Stewart, 12th Earl of Galloway, on 14 October 1924. The bride and groom had met at Porchey and Catherine’s wedding. (Picture Acknowledgment i2.3)

  Philippa with her husband the 12th Earl of Galloway.

  The Sketch announcing the birth of the Countess of Galloway’s son and heir in 1928. (Picture Acknowledgment i2.4)

  Alfred Duff Cooper and his bride, Lady Diana Manners, in 1919.

  Lady Diana Cooper in 1923. (Picture Acknowledgment i2.6)

  Catherine’s brother Jac married Miss Eileen Carr in 1923. (Picture Acknowledgment i2.7)

  Both Catherine and Porchey enjoyed spending time at the races with friends. They are pictured here at Epsom racecourse in 1928. (Picture Acknowledgment i2.8)

  Catherine with her sister-in-law Lady Evelyn. (Picture Acknowledgment i2.9)

  Evelyn Waugh was an occasional visitor to Highclere. He married consecutively two of Porchey’s cousins. The first, short-lived, marriage was to Evelyn Gardner in 1928 and he later married Laura Herbert (right) in 1937. (Picture Acknowledgment i2.10)

  Christmas Card 1936. HRH the Duke of Kent, with Princess Marina and their son Edward, remained friends with Catherine as well as Porchey for many years.

  (Picture Acknowledgment i2.11)

  Lord and Lady Carnarvon attending various race meetings.

  Lord and Lady Carnarvon outside the front door of Highclere Castle.

  (Picture Acknowledgment 9.1)

  9

  There May Be Trouble Ahead

  Gladys was not in a position to see much apart from sunshine and glitter in her employers’ lives; for her, the evident joy in Lady Carnarvon’s early morning visits to the nursery, or the glimpses of her silk dresses and her enjoying cocktails with Prince George, seemed proof enough that Her Ladyship’s life was charmed.

  Other members of the household knew that, in reality, tensions were building between Lord and Lady Carnarvon. From 1932 onwards Lord Carnarvon was often away from Highclere, without his wife. In previous years they had made many trips together to race meetings, a couple of times to Scotland to visit Catherine’s sister Philippa, Countess of Galloway, and of course they were often in London.

  Now Lord Carnarvon spent more and more time in town, alone. Van Celst would be informed that they were off to stay at His Lordship’s club, and would have to pack quickly. It would be left to Doll to console Lady Carnarvon, to look for ways to distract her beloved mistress from fretting, smoking too much and drinking.

  Catherine had suspected for some time that Porchey was not the sort of man who could live his life without intrigue. He sincerely loved his wife, but in common with other men of his era and social position, he did not believe that extramarital liaisons need compromise that love. Within a few years of his marriage, he was delighting in his reputation as a ladies’ man. He didn’t deliberately bring it to Catherine’s attention, but neither did he go out of his way to conceal his activities.

  Love affairs are of course a constant of human beings’ interactions, in all times and in all places, but they had some interesting particularities among the upper classes in Britain at the end of the nineteenth century and in the early decades of the twentieth. For a start, a great deal of licence was extended to those who observed the conventions that demanded discretion. Secon
dly, women were granted almost as much leeway as men, so long as they followed the rules: first of all, get married so you have a husband’s protection; then, stick to your own class, don’t cause a fuss with the wife and never, ever make a spectacle of yourself.

  The ultimate example of this sort of arrangement working out well was the Duff Coopers’ marriage. Lady Diana almost certainly confined her love affairs to the platonic realm but they could be passionate and emotionally intimate nonetheless, and frequently lasted years. Alfred Duff Cooper was quite open about his several long-standing love affairs, most notably with Daisy Fellowes, whom his wife knew and would meet at social events. Daisy was famously witty, caustic and fashionable and came to stay at Highclere several times, though with her husband rather than her lover. When Duff Cooper was later serving as British Ambassador in Paris, at the end of the Second World War, he and Diana even contrived to be in love with the same woman at the same time. Louise de Vilmorin was a bewitching figure, a novelist, poet and femme fatale. Diana gave full rein to her passionate admiration, Duff became absolutely infatuated and launched into a sexual relationship. Such arrangements might seem risky or at least unusual to some minds, but there is no doubt that Diana and Duff adored one another and though Diana sometimes suffered, despite her husband’s habitual discretion, she never doubted that he loved her above all other women.

  The success of this arrangement was surely exceptional, and yet such behaviours were not at all uncommon. Lady Diana came from a world in which her own discovery that she was not her father’s legitimate daughter, at the age of nineteen, had not seriously ruffled any feathers. She was glad to be a duke’s daughter in name since it conferred status and privilege, and also quite glad to be the product of an intense amour. The Duke and Duchess of Rutland were equally phlegmatic. Diana, her siblings and her mother spent summers at her mother’s ex-lover’s country house. The sexual relationship seems to have been well and truly over by then, but everyone was on the best of terms. No scandal had been caused and no rules broken.

  Catherine did not experience her husband’s infidelities in anything like the same way. She had none of Lady Diana’s racy charm, her taste for pushing the limits, or her uncompromising sense that she was unique and therefore could not be seriously rivalled. Catherine had spent her early childhood among the East Coast American upper classes, where quite different codes operated. In addition, she was personally unsuited to decadence. Porchey knew that, and it was one of the things he loved about her. She was an innocent, quite unlike the new class of sexually adventurous young women who began to emerge during the 1920s and 1930s among the society set. Premarital sex had always been taboo for such women, but as female emancipation took off in the post-war years and sexual mores shifted, there was a new type of worldly debutante, one who cultivated nightclub stars and dancers such as Tallulah Bankhead. Even Diana was slightly taken aback by her friend Polly Cunard’s frank appetite for sexual adventures. Where Diana loved to experiment, to flirt and to be adored, she considered Polly’s sybaritic enjoyment of sex, drugs and parties at her house in Bloomsbury distasteful. Diana cultivated an aura of ‘anything might happen’ daring, but she had her limits.

  Catherine was the total opposite of this high-Bohemian, liberated spirit. She was flirtatious but she adored her husband and their children and hoped that her devotion to their family life would be enough to make him curb his behaviour. It was not. Porchey’s liaisons continued, and grew more numerous as he started to spend more time in London. They were a torment for her, though when she discovered them she forgave him, more than once. Catherine had absorbed at least one element of the code: don’t make a scandal. Rather than challenge Porchey, she seems to have preferred to hope against the odds for him to reform himself. In the meantime, the sadness that had settled in her since Reggie’s death grew and grew. So too did her dependence on drinking as a means to muffle and control it.

  Catherine seems to have had a compulsive streak, judging from her propensity to place ever bigger bets and drink ever larger gins at lunchtime. By 1933 she was spending more and more time alone at the castle, often with not enough to do. Once she had visited her children, discussed the planning of the day’s meals with Mrs Mackie and had her meeting with Mrs Lloyd the housekeeper, she might take coffee in her sitting room and catch up on any correspondence, but that done, it was far too easy to drift into the Drawing Room and pour herself a drink. For those with untroubled minds there is something tranquil about its beautiful pale green silk walls, but this most feminine of all the state rooms at Highclere can also feel a little melancholy on an overcast day if one is not in the best of spirits and there is no prospect of them being lifted. Catherine discovered that one sure-fire way to dull her sadness, if not disperse it entirely, was to drink gin before lunch and afterwards retire to her bed for the afternoon. There was always sherry before dinner, wine with dinner and a later nightcap.

  Eve came down to cheer her up. She loved and supported her brother but could see that his actions were causing Catherine huge distress. Divorce had become a fact of life by the mid-Thirties but, even so, nobody looked forward to such a prospect and Eve was convinced that the Carnarvons could still make their marriage work.

  Catherine was grateful for the company but found it difficult to confide in Eve, out of loyalty to Porchey. She tried to be discreet about her problems but her misery and its causes were quite obvious to the whole family. Jac had always had his suspicions about Porchey and frequently remonstrated with his brother-in-law, which did little good. Philippa was a long way off in Scotland, which meant that though she had similar difficulties of her own, both sisters struggled alone rather than together. Gar was the obvious candidate for confidences, but Catherine had no desire to compromise her mother’s comfortable opinion of Porchey. It was often Doll she turned to, when no one else was there.

  If Catherine’s big problem was feeling lonely in her marriage, her great consolation was her children, Lord Porchester and Lady Penelope. Patricia, her niece, who grew up with the Carnarvon children, remembers that Catherine adored them but was careful not to mollycoddle them, especially Henry. She clearly enjoyed having them both with her at home. She and Porchey had decided to educate both children at Highclere until young Lord Porchester was eight years old, at which point he would be sent to board at Heatherdown Preparatory School in Berkshire, which would lead to Eton.

  The children saw their mother every day, but only at certain times. She made early morning and late afternoon visits to the nursery but didn’t stay for long. On Sundays Henry and Penelope would spend the afternoon downstairs with their parents. It was often the only time in the week that they saw their father, whom they adored but who was a far more remote figure than their mother. Porchey wrote in his memoirs that he had always dreaded the emotionally glacial tone of his own parents’ weekly visits to the nursery, and he was a far more jovial and relaxed parent with his own children, but there was simply no cultural expectation that he should be a hands-on father. He loved his children and relished spending time with them, but in very particular circumstances. He was insistent that both Henry and Penelope should ride well, and there is a lovely photo of Lord and Lady Carnarvon with a broadly smiling Penelope, aged about five or six, on her pony. One imagines that these were the moments that Catherine must have lived for.

  When the children were small, most of their day was spent in the care of Mrs Sambell, their nanny, who was their principal carer. Her place was later taken by Doll. Porchey was particularly keen that Henry and Penelope speak good French. His French was really outstanding, so much so that the Frenchmen he met were incredulous that an Englishman could speak their language so well. Doll, Catherine’s beloved lady’s maid, whom the children had grown up with, was consequently taken on as governess and was henceforth known to the household as Mademoiselle Huc. It seems to have suited everyone. The children had been apprehensive about a stranger coming to impose a new and potentially disciplinarian existence. Doll was a far b
righter prospect.

  A schoolroom was installed on the top floor of the castle, complete with chalkboard, books, globes and desks for both Lord Porchester and his little sister, who joined him in due course. They took classes in the morning, which left them plenty of time to roam all over the house and its grounds, to play and to get into mischief. Gladys the housemaid recalled that the children were so friendly that she once got drawn into playing railways with them in the nursery rather than carrying out her duties, and was reprimanded by Nanny when the three of them were discovered. Gwendolen, the second kitchen maid, remembered that Lord Porchester, Lady Penelope and Miss Patricia were forever fetching up in the kitchens, where the staff made a fuss over them. Mademoiselle Huc knew that if she had failed to locate her charges in any other spot, she might very well find them there and would bustle in, demanding in French that they return to the schoolroom. Gwendolen grew very fond of the children and considered applying to be a nursemaid, but was told somewhat sharply by Mrs Mackie that she was more use in the kitchen.

  During the first few years of the 1930s, Highclere was still outwardly a happy house, loud with the noise of children playing and frequent social gatherings, but it was shot through with an inner seam of uncertainty and melancholy. Catherine’s sadness increased after her son left for prep school. Her mother came often to stay at Highclere, as did Eve and Bro with Patricia, but she missed Henry terribly and also her brother Reggie—she was sure he would have steered her husband back towards her. She created a rose garden near the castle where she could go to sit and think. Its quiet setting soothed her. It was such a charming refuge that the staff would ask to be allowed to take their mending work out there on sunny days.