Lady Catherine, the Earl, and the Real Downton Abbey

by The Countess of Carnarvon

  Almina might have been flighty, but she also sincerely loved her husband and was grateful to Eve, who accompanied her to Ian’s funeral, for the support. Porchey had never warmed to the man or really forgiven his mother for putting everyone through the very public court case that arose from Ian and Dorothy Dennistoun’s divorce, so his reaction was much cooler. As so often before, they had also been at odds over money: Porchey thought she was spending most unnecessarily on these endless house moves.

  Almina’s response to sadness was, as always, to stay busy. She resolved to throw herself even more into work at Alfred House. She was now sixty-two years old, but still as energetic as she had been when she had been running her hospital at Highclere, twenty years before.

  Catherine wrote to Almina to express her sympathy. She knew only too well the sense of being bereft, though perhaps she underestimated the therapeutic effect of Almina’s vocation for nursing. Catherine had always been more introspective than her former mother-in-law, more inclined to analyse and less inclined to do.

  There was certainly little time for introspection for Catherine during 1938. On the contrary: she was living the London life that she had never known during the Twenties when she was busy being a wife, a mother and the Countess of Carnarvon down at sleepy Highclere. Catherine had always had a gift for friendship. Now that she was free to take up her social life again, she accepted invitations to dinner, to the theatre, to dances. She was as in demand as she had been when she and Philippa used to arrive arm in arm at parties in the golden years of the post-war celebrations. The only difference was that, this time around, she was a little wiser and a little more confident, a little more sure of what she wanted out of life.

  It seems likely that Catherine met Geoffrey Grenfell, a tall, handsome, highly amusing stockbroker with a slow smile that lit up his whole face, through his aunt, Lady Desborough. The Grenfell family was distinguished by a certain brand of upper-class Bohemianism, but also by incredibly bad fortune when it came to surviving into middle age. They had suffered more than their fair share of tragedy.

  By 1938, Ettie, Lady Desborough, was no longer the glamorous society hostess that she had been in her heyday. In fin-de-siècle London society, she and her husband had been at the heart of a circle of wealthy and artistic types nicknamed ‘the Souls’, for their habit of discussing any and every subject so long as it wasn’t politics, and their preference for dissecting each other’s innermost beings. The Desboroughs had five children, three sons and two daughters. The first two boys were killed in action in France in 1915, within two months of one another. The third son was killed in a car accident in 1926, an event that caused his determinedly robust mother to retire to her bed for two months. Lady Desborough, who had lost both parents and her brother by the time she was six years old, never quite recovered from the onslaught that afflicted her family, but her grief made her kind rather than bitter, and she loved her nephew all the more. She continued to welcome guests to Taplow Court on the River Thames, and it was probably there that Catherine, invited through some mutual friend, encountered the man who was to become her second husband.

  Geoffrey Grenfell was a gentleman broker who worked for the family firm of Grenfell and Co. and maintained houses in London, at Ovington Square in Knightsbridge, and in the Kent countryside. He was a couple of years older than Catherine and during the Great War had joined the navy at barely sixteen years old, in a fit of patriotic fervour that almost got him killed along with his cousins. He served on HMS Warspite and survived the ferocious Battle of Jutland that claimed Lord Kitchener, the Field Marshal and British icon.

  Geoffrey, like Catherine, had been married before and had a child, a daughter, whom he adored. He was the antithesis of Porchey in almost every regard, a man from a background much more like Catherine’s own. He was connected to the aristocracy but, as the child of a younger son, had gone into the City and held down a job. Unlike Porchey, he had a clear sense of purpose and of who he was. There is a steadiness in the tone of the letters he would write to Catherine when he was away on service during the Second World War that broadcasts what must have been his chief attraction for her. Quite apart from his matinée-idol rugged good looks, Geoffrey was a reliable man, a man who offered her straightforward devotion and no funny business on the side. If Catherine had married Porchey in part because his quickness with an anecdote and boisterous charm reminded her of her father, she married Geoffrey because he was the opposite of flighty. It proved to be a supremely happy match.

  In September 1938 the court circulars carried the news that Catherine, Countess of Carnarvon, was to marry again. The New York Times picked up on the story and reported the latest twist in the tale of one of its favourite descendants of ‘two of the oldest families of the United States of America’.

  Catherine married Geoffrey on 21 September at Kensington Register Office. Porchey wrote to congratulate her. Her immediate family, Jac and Eileen, Philippa and Gar all attended, as did her children. Henry was now fourteen years old and had recently started at Eton; Penelope was thirteen. They were both delighted with their ‘Uncle Geoffrey’. So too was everyone who knew Catherine. How could they not be, when her happiness was so plain to see? By now 38, Catherine wore a smart coat and very chic little hat on her second, far quieter and more intimate wedding day.

  It could not have been more different to her first, very public wedding to Lord Porchester as he had been then, sixteen years previously. Then the press had covered every detail of her wedding clothes, and crowds had gathered outside St Margaret’s Westminster to watch her emerge on Porchey’s arm. Now, after the brief ceremony, the ever-loyal Gertrude and Percival Griffiths hosted a small wedding breakfast at their home in Bryanston Square for family and close friends. But the mood of this second wedding day was every bit as happy as that first one had been. Geoffrey had restored the sunshine to Catherine’s days. After all the turmoil and tears of the last years at Highclere, she was basking in the love of a man who adored her just as she was.

  The terrible pity was that it was such an inauspicious time to be a newly-wed. Eight days after Catherine and Geoffrey married, Neville Chamberlain signed the Munich Agreement with Hitler and the world was set irrevocably on the path to war.

  (Picture Acknowledgment 13.1)

  13

  The Coming Disaster

  On 30 September 1938, Neville Chamberlain returned from Munich to rapturous crowds of relieved Britons who were desperate to believe the Prime Minister when he assured them that he had secured ‘peace for our time’, having signed the Munich Agreement with Germany, France and Italy. On hearing the news, US President Franklin D. Roosevelt sent Chamberlain a two-word telegram: ‘Good man’.

  Those cheering crowds are a salient reminder that, though it seems extraordinary now, there were plenty besides Roosevelt who still believed that Hitler’s ambitions had been satisfied and that a cataclysmic war had therefore been avoided. The irony of the Western powers’ terrible misreading of the situation is inescapable for us, who know what happened next. But at the time, Alfred Duff Cooper, who resigned in protest the day after Chamberlain’s now notorious declaration that Germany and England had agreed ‘never to go to war again’, was in a tiny minority. And even Duff Cooper had believed, right up to Chamberlain’s return from Munich with what he saw as a disastrously conciliatory agreement, that the Prime Minister’s conference would indeed succeed in averting war. It was Britain and France’s failure to secure the means for holding Hitler to his pledge to go no further in Europe that drove Duff Cooper’s decision, and not, strictly speaking, the abandonment of Czechoslovakia to its fate. The anti-war mood was again rampant, and Duff Cooper and Churchill were isolated in their belief that the agreement had made war more likely, not less. In his famous resignation speech, Duff Cooper concluded that he might have been persuaded to accept war with honour or peace with dishonour, but war with dishonour was too much.

  Reaction to Duff Cooper’s leaving was mixed, but MP Vyvyan Adams, w
ho also opposed appeasement, described it as ‘the first step back to national sanity’. Porchey, like many others, was stung into action by the resignation of his old friend. In October 1938 he wrote to Chamberlain expressing deep concern about the Nazi domination of Europe and urging that a programme of rearmament be adopted immediately.

  The post-Munich relief lasted just a few short months. In November 1938, SA Nazi paramilitaries went on an anti-Jewish rampage across Germany and Austria in which thousands of civilians also participated. The pogrom claimed ninety-one lives, destroyed countless homes and businesses, displaced 30,000 people, and signalled to the world that Hitler’s aggression was directed not just towards his neighbours, but also towards the resident Jewish population.

  In March 1939, amid a mood of sickened realisation that all the concessions had seemingly been in vain, Britain pledged to support Poland in the event of invasion by Germany. On 27 April, Duff Cooper had the satisfaction of seeing that conscription had finally been introduced, as he had been urging for more than two years, though only for men aged twenty and twenty-one. Still, something had shifted. Britain was now gearing up to a war footing. Churchill was no longer the rebel, crying wolf on the sidelines; he was emerging as the most consistent opponent of Britain’s past five years of foreign policy mistakes.

  In April 1939, Porchey was informed by letter from the Ministry of Health that, in the event of war, he must make immediate preparations to receive the children and staff of Curzon Crescent nursery school, northwest London. Up to fifty children between the ages of two and five would be billeted in relative safety at Highclere. Porchey was relieved, both to be providing a useful service if the worst should indeed come to pass, and also that the house had not been requisitioned by the Ministry of Defence, whose activities would certainly have been more disruptive.

  In between bad news, and despite the worsening outlook, life carried on. The Duke of Kent came to Highclere for a few days’ shooting in December 1938, and charmed the entire household, as usual. He brought reports of Catherine, who was apparently looking radiant, and her new husband Geoffrey, whom he had recently met and thought an excellent fellow.

  Porchey seems to have been sincerely delighted at his ex-wife’s new happiness. Catherine had not, like Tanis, got the upper hand at the last, nor had she ever behaved badly or exposed him to ridicule—quite the opposite. This meant that Porchey’s feelings were the far more straightforward ones of fondness and gratitude, rather than the lingering interest he felt towards Tanis Montagu.

  In June 1937, six months after he had collapsed in distress at Tanis’s desertion, Porchey wrote to Douglas Williams, a friend in New York, asking him to bring him some gramophone records (‘There’s a Lull in My Life’, ‘This Year’s Crop of Kisses’) when he next came over to London. He also slipped in a rather transparently casual enquiry after his ex-lover. ‘Naturally, I hear a considerable amount from mutual friends. It would be nice if you could make a point of seeing her prior to sailing, in order to give me the latest news of the whole situation.’

  Porchey seems to have suffered from that very common human weakness of remaining hung up on the one that got away, while slightly overlooking the depth of love once felt for the more significant but less turbulent partner. Having said that, towards the end of his life, Porchey referred to Catherine as his ‘beloved wife’ when he wrote his second volume of memoirs. He had loved her deeply for many years, a fact that must have come home to him with all the greater force in the wake of more romantic disasters to come.

  Catherine and Geoffrey were enjoying the bubble of newly-wed life. Geoffrey wanted to spoil her, and took her to the theatre and afterwards to supper and dancing at the Café de Paris or the 400 Club in a tiny cellar on Leicester Square, where London society could dance until dawn. These were Porchey’s old haunts; now it was Catherine’s turn to whirl with her love around the dance floor to the music of the resident jazz band.

  She and Geoffrey had decided to live in his house at Ovington Square, but Catherine retained Wilton Crescent, of which she had grown immensely fond, and which had been her gateway to this new fulfilled and fun-filled existence. She trusted her beloved Geoffrey completely, but life had taught her that it was impossible to anticipate troubles, and she valued her new independence too much to give up her home completely. Gar continued to base herself there, so she was close to Jac and Eileen.

  Porchey was just as keen as ever to find someone with whom he could share his life. He loved the company of women until his very last days and enjoyed love affairs immensely, but he continued to seek out the intimacy and comradeship of a potential wife. He was not a man who liked to live alone. In 1939 there were two candidates for the role of the next Countess of Carnarvon. Slightly predictably, given the track record demonstrated by his misadventures with Tanis, Porchey picked the wrong one.

  Jeanne Stuart came to Highclere for the first time in June 1939. She and Porchey had met earlier in the year through mutual acquaintances in the London theatre world. Born Ivy Sweet, the pretty daughter of a north-London copper-beater, she changed her name and became one of the most popular and successful actresses on the London stage. (Jeanne, who had refused to tell Porchey her age and glossed over her change of name, was infuriated when he later tracked down her birth certificate, which revealed both.) By the time she met Porchey, she had also made twenty films, had a three-month marriage to a wealthy businessman whom she divorced in 1935, and then embarked on a three-year relationship with Hollywood actor James Stewart. Like Tanis, she embodied for Porchey a glamorous movie-star world but, unlike Tanis, she was a genuine if modest success, and was sincerely fond of Porchey.

  Porchey’s son, Henry, met her on several occasions as a teenager and always maintained that she was lovely to look at, intelligent and kind, with a practicality and easy-going charm that made her a pleasure to be around and a potential asset to his father and Highclere. Naturally, given all this, Porchey preferred her rival.

  On Wednesday 26 July, Smith the butler took down a short list of names of those who would be arriving on Saturday to stay for two nights. Porchey aimed for casualness when he added, by way of afterthought, ‘Oh, yes, of course there’s also Miss Losch,’ and Smith, ever the professional, merely raised one eyebrow. ‘Very good, my lord, I will let Mrs Saunderson know.’

  By the time he’d delivered the list of rooms to be prepared to the housekeeper, and retreated to the wine cellar to check his vintages, the news had blown around the house on a gale of housemaids’ excited whispers. Tilly Losch was coming to stay. The famous Viennese ballet dancer turned legend of the London stage. The almond-eyed, exquisitely proportioned cover star of fashion and show-business magazines, who in her last interview had revealed a weakness for strong cigarettes and (improbably) Neopolitan ice cream. Tilly Losch, dancer, actress, singer, pianist, artist, would be here in just three days’ time.

  Porchey had known Tilly far longer than Jeanne. They had met for the first time at a party given by Jules Bache, financier and art collector, in New York in 1931. Porchey came across Tilly and Adele Astaire ministering to a guest who had passed out. On closer inspection, Porchey observed that it was Lord Charles Cavendish, younger son of the Duke of Devonshire. Tilly and Porchey went off to dance, leaving Adele to tend to the inebriated young aristocrat. (Adele Astaire must have made an impression on him because, the following year, she retired from her long-running dance act with her brother Fred and, as Lady Charles Cavendish, went to live at Lismore Castle in Ireland.) Porchey and Tilly, meanwhile, enjoyed themselves on the dance floor. Tilly complimented him by saying that, unlike most English men, he could actually dance. Porchey was still happily married to Catherine at the time, but he never forgot his encounter with this ravishingly beautiful creature.

  By that point Tilly was already a celebrity, feted in Vienna, Paris, London and New York for her performances and for her choreographies. At the time of Jules Bache’s party, she was dancing with Fred and Adele Astaire in their Broadway sh
ow The Bandwagon, and had previously been acclaimed for her performances as a soloist with the Vienna Imperial Ballet and then with the company of Europe’s most famous theatre director, Max Reinhardt. It was Reinhardt who told her he could make her a star if she would come to work for him, so in 1927 she had left Vienna and the Imperial Ballet and set out on tour. One of her early successes was with the choreography of the ballet in Reinhardt’s production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. When she fretted that she had never choreographed before, Reinhardt told her not to worry. ‘Talent is talent.’ His faith was justified and Tilly went on to create two more pieces for him.

  Tilly made her London debut in 1928 in Noël Coward’s musical revue, This Year of Grace, and spent the next few years starring in revues staged by legendary impresario Charles B. Cochran, marrying Edward James, millionaire financier and great champion of surrealist art, and dancing in the ballet company, Les Ballets, that he formed for her. In 1932 Tilly landed one of two principal parts in Max Reinhardt’s smash-hit London play, The Miracle, and she and James moved to a house on Grosvenor Square. The other star of The Miracle was Lady Diana Cooper, wife of Duff Cooper who, though an amateur, was a highly regarded actress and she was considered one of the great beauties of her age. There’s no doubt that Porchey the theatre fanatic must have seen this production; it was an unmissable event and, besides, Lady Diana was a friend of his. In May 1939, now both divorced, Porchey and Miss Tilly Losch dined together in London. Porchey found her just as bewitching as ever.