The Final Curtsey

by Margaret Rhodes

  In addition there were three housemaids, a footman, a kitchen maid, a scullery maid, a house boy; the ‘odd man’, who did the jobs no one else wanted to do, as well as a relic of a bygone age called the ‘Still room’ maid, who had her own kitchen. She was the last of several generations of such ladies and her job description was something of an enigma. One of her tasks was to make the porridge, which she did in the old-fashioned Scots way involving a whole night’s brewing. The male members of the family always had porridge for breakfast from wooden bowls, while standing up, an ancient Scottish habit dating back to the times of Clan warfare. She would also make the jam, and bottle the fruit. She was very old when I knew her and always had a drip on the end of her nose. I used to whistle a lot in those days and when she caught me at it she would shriek: ‘Whistling maids and cawing hens are fit for neither man nor beast.’ The butler, Mr Fox, was at the top of this feudal domestic pyramid and was almost like a family member, being allowed to reprimand us children for any infringement of the rules. He supervised the laying of the dining table, chose the wines; greeted visitors at the front door and served as valet for my father. His first job in the morning was to serve my father with early morning tea, together with small thin buttered slices of white bread. A full Scottish breakfast followed.

  My father depicted as ‘Carberry Tower’ in Vanity Fair

  The fire regulations for Carberry Tower

  There was a large kitchen garden with greenhouses growing peaches, grapes and figs; a bowling alley and an indoor tennis court. In the stable yard there were staff cottages and stalls for a carthorse and my pony. The carthorse did all the mowing, dragging a large mower behind him. There were fifteen cottages and a bothy where the unmarried men lived at a safe distance from the housemaids.

  Me with the family Labrador, Glen, at Carberry

  Fishing on the Findhorn at Glenmazeran

  I suspect that life behind the green baize door, which separated us from the servants ‘downstairs’, was rather jolly and probably there were clandestine romances which those of us ‘upstairs’ did not get to know about. I don’t know what the servants were paid, probably not a great deal, but I do recall my mother having to take on a new cook and being astonished when she asked for £50 a year, plus keep.

  My parents were both gardening mad, and I remember my mother as being almost permanently in an old Tweed coat tied round the waist with a piece of string and gumboots and bent double over something in the garden. On grand occasions, however, she could look wonderfully glamorous in a dignified way. She was middle aged when I was a child, but from photographs it was obvious to me that she had been a beautiful young woman.

  Every year, in August, we migrated to what I regard as the proper Scotland, to Glenmazeran, a shooting lodge in Inverness-shire bought by my father when my brothers were old enough to handle guns. When we were in London the journey north was by train. And I can still conjure up the marvellous sensation of boarding the night express for the far north at smoke filled Kings Cross and waking early in my berth after we had crossed the border, pulling up the window blind and seeing the purple hills and fast running burns, the scrubby birches and the dark pines. Lowering the window I could breathe in great gusts of heather-scented air. Sometimes we travelled by car with two regular stopovers, one at Welbeck Abbey, the home of the Duke of Portland to whom my mother was distantly related. The old Duchess was rather frightening and very deaf. She had an ear trumpet down which one had to shout. I remember being told that in a period of economy she gave up the Tatler and travelled by buses round London asking the conductors, whom she confused with chauffeurs, to deposit her at the precise number of her Grosvenor Square address. The other halt was equally ducal, Alnwick Castle, the seat of the Duke of Northumberland who was a family friend.

  Gannochy August 1938. My brother John is fourth from the right in the back row and I am seated at the front. My father is third from the right standing, my brother Andrew is third from the left in the back row and my mother is seated second in from the left. His Majesty The King is fourth from the left, standing, and Her Majesty The Queen is seated in the middle of the front row

  Glenmazeran was special. I caught my first salmon in the Findhorn river and my first trout in the Mazeran burn. I subsequently became a keen fisherwoman and skilful angler and a stretch of the river is still named after me: Miss Margaret’s Pool. There were eagles galore, and I once saw three sitting in the same birch tree. In those days they were classed as vermin and on a grouse shooting estate had to be controlled. I was allowed to use a 20-bore shotgun belonging to one of my brothers. Out one day walking in a fir wood, something flopped out of a tree. I went bang and to my surprise the ‘something’ fell to the ground. It was an eagle and I proudly carried my trophy home slung over my shoulders. I was immensely proud of myself and received the plaudits of the family. The downside was to be infested with ticks and lice.

  As I grew older I was introduced to stalking. I shot my first stag with a clean shot when I was fifteen and became hooked on the pursuit, only giving up when I was seventy-two. Deer have an incredibly sensitive sense of smell as well as sharp vision. To get near enough to shoot, one often had to crawl flat on one’s stomach for hundreds of yards gauging the direction of the wind, and watching for the sentinel hind, ears pricked and eyes scanning every inch of heather. The natural habitat can only support a certain number of deer and once the grass and heather off which they feed is exhausted, they then die a slow and horrible death from starvation, which is why they have to be culled annually. Others have a view about the morality of field sports, and, of course, they are entitled to their opinion. The Glenmazeran terrain was also populated by buzzards, peregrine falcons, badgers and large wild cats, brown furred with long black ringed tails. My sister Elizabeth had a coat made from their skins.

  The shooting season was one of the highlights of the Scottish social calendar and in the last few years of my childhood my parents were asked to act as host and hostess for their friend, the fabulously rich American banking, railroad and steel magnate John ‘Jack’ Pierpont Morgan Jnr, who each year between 1934 and 1939 rented the Gannochy estate from the Earl and Countess of Dalhousie for the grouse season.

  Gannochy was tremendous fun although, regrettably, I was too young really to appreciate it. There was an endless stream of visitors, all my parents’ friends included, and I can still remember the magnificent breakfasts. The hot plate had an enormous row of dishes: fried, scrambled and poached eggs, bacon, sausages, Finnan haddock or kedgeree, cold ham and grouse. Then there was the shooting lunch, another enormous meal which was eaten sitting out in the heather, with the butler and a footman, kitted out in tweed plus-fours, to wait on the guests. That was something not even the Royal Family did. A similar scene of aristocratic plenitude was depicted in the film Gosford Park, although we never had any murders! Looking back it seems unbelievable that people lived on such a grand scale, although at the time it never seemed remotely grand. The only comparison I can draw with the present day is the lavish lifestyle of so called celebrities, although their junkets are now much less inhibited.

  Sometimes I would stay at Glamis, the ancestral home of my maternal grandparents, the Earl and Countess of Strathmore. It is reputed to be the most haunted castle in Scotland and has a turbulent history. Shakespeare set the scene there of King Duncan’s murder in Macbeth and King Malcolm was also murdered within its precincts in 1034. There is the wraith known as the Grey Lady, an unhappy Lady Glamis, who my mother told me in all honesty she had seen on the Castle’s twisting old stone staircase. She de-manifested herself as she turned a corner and left my mother, who initially thought she was a housemaid, feeling a shiver down her spine. I grew up with the story that there was a hidden room in the Castle, in which some sort of ‘monster’ had been hidden – a tale told to a long ago heir on his twenty-first birthday – causing him never to smile again! The story was given emphasis when my mother’s generation, young and, believing the story, went round
placing white towels out of each window – and there always remained one towel-less window. I am reminded of Noel Coward’s anthem to the impoverished aristocracy, ‘The Stately Homes of England’, the lyrics of which speculated about the fate of ‘an extremely rowdy nun, who was bricked up in 1491’ and meeting the Queen of Scots ‘in a hand-embroidered shroud’. It helps, of course, to have an over-vivid imagination.

  The Elphinstone family on the steps of Glamis

  My Strathmore grandfather was an old-fashioned aristocrat in the best sense, deeply conscious of his heritage, unfailing in the discharge of his responsibilities, kind, courteous, and sporting too, regularly turning out for the Glamis cricket XI. Sometimes he would come down to breakfast practising bowling with a cricket ball along the castle corridors. He did not care much for a smart social life and was determined that his children as they grew up were not swept up into the set led by the then Prince of Wales, however alluring that might seem.

  My maternal grandmother was heavenly. She brought her children up without frills and they worshipped her. She had an unstuffy Christian faith and instilled in all her children her strong reliance on the Almighty, together with an equally strong sense of social duty. She was a brilliant amateur pianist and had a gift for gardening and a capacity for making friends. She made life at Glamis fun. The author of Peter Pan, Sir James Barrie, who lived nearby at Kirriemuir, would come to tea, and once on her birthday he was seated next to Princess Margaret, who was about five years old. Listening to her child-like attempts at conversation he promised to include some of her utterances in his next play, and would pay her a penny in royalties every time it was performed. A mock contract was drawn up, but the play The Boy David was not an overwhelming success despite containing some of Barrie’s finest writing.

  Princess Margaret, however, received her royalties, delivered in a bag to Buckingham Palace by the author’s secretary, Cynthia Asquith. In 1997, when the Princess opened the re-landscaped site of the Peter Pan statue in Kensington Gardens she was presented with a replica bag of pennies, which my sister, Jean, who was in attendance for the occasion took charge of, as Ladies-in-Waiting do on these occasions. It was a blazingly hot day and the elaborate confectionery prepared for the tea party which followed the opening ceremony, due to be served in a marquee, melted before they could be eaten.

  I seemed then to live in a very safe world. As a small child I was taught to say my prayers every evening with my mother and we all regularly attended church. On the reverse side of the coin we were prone to cracking disgusting lavatorial jokes, but never, ever those of a sexual nature. The facts of life were a closed subject and I was entirely innocent and genuinely wondered where babies came from. Perhaps we children were cushioned from harsh reality, although I knew poverty and disease were rampant in the slums of Edinburgh which was not so far away. But a good deal of charity work was undertaken by those more fortunate and my mother was pivotal in this, having adopted one of the worst areas in the city, called Niddrie. My father also undertook public works: my generation grew up to be obedient, respectful, and also tough.

  We were raised to believe that it was positively immoral to stay indoors regardless of the weather. One had to get outside and do something useful: chop wood, make a bonfire, pull out ivy, weed the garden or go for a bracing walk. The children of a nearby family who lolled around all day reading magazines and novels were cited as examples of degeneracy. To this day I feel guilty if I remain inside for any length of time. Good manners were high on the agenda and my brothers were taught to raise their caps to any woman they met, be she Duchess or the under gardener’s wife. And Carberry, despite its size and the servants, was a touch Spartan. There was no central heating and the water in the bowl on my washstand in my bedroom would sometimes freeze over in the winter. I never heard my parents swear and I remember my eldest brother being roundly reprimanded for taking the name of his Maker in vain.

  My brothers went away to school. John was sent to a prep school at Broadstairs on the coast of Kent, and tried to run away, boarding a ship as a stowaway. He was luckily caught before he disappeared over the horizon. He eventually went to Eton and Christ Church, Oxford. Andrew went to Eton too and then New College, Oxford. But school, or in fact any form of serious education, was never actually suggested for my sisters or me. I had a French governess called Sita Rivoir, who came from an obscure region called the Vallee Vaudoise where her father was a Protestant pastor. She was very small and deeply religious. I became pretty hot stuff at the Collects and the Epistles and much less hot stuff at arithmetic which Mademoiselle had never managed to master herself. I did however of course learn French.

  Tug of war. Princess Elizabeth at the front, then Princess Margaret and then me

  Many are the times I had to stretch my lips to say the word ‘belle’ so that it did not sound like ‘bell’. After about eight years dealing with me, poor Mademoiselle retired to a nunnery where I once visited her. It is etched in my memory because I was made to wear a veil which, needless to say, slipped off lopsidedly. Also my painted nails seemed inappropriate and I spent ages trying to pick the paint off, so that I at least had two white fingernails to hold my knife and fork while we ate and listened to readings from Holy Scripture.

  Princess Elizabeth’s governess was Marion ‘Crawfie’ Crawford, who was introduced to the Duke and Duchess of York by another of my aunts, Lady Rose Leveson Gower. She was very nice really, but then she wrote that sugary book about the childhood of Princess Elizabeth and Princess Margaret, which so upset Queen Elizabeth, who could not even begin to contemplate that anyone should commit such a breach of trust. Looking back over the years it was pretty innocent stuff, but in those days different standards applied. I haven’t read it, and I don’t think I shall.

  Princess Elizabeth and I were really the last generation of girls from families like ours who didn’t go to school. I thought school would be ghastly; you’d have to play hockey. I didn’t want to play hockey. I did, however, have dancing lessons and I was at the dancing school in Edinburgh the day the abdication of King Edward VIII was announced. To my eternal shame I hopped around the room chanting: ‘My uncle Bertie is going to be King.’ Very soon afterwards ‘Uncle Bertie’ became ‘Sir’. Princess Elizabeth became Heiress Presumptive, the ‘Presumptive’ inserted just in case she later had a brother. I believed she hoped she might have one and be let off the hook, but deep down she knew that wasn’t very likely. She accepted that she would be Queen one day, but thought it was a long way off. Sadly it came to her much sooner than she expected.

  Much has been written and said about the so-called bad blood between Queen Elizabeth and the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, but not once in all the years I was with my aunt — not once — did I ever hear her say anything remotely unpleasant about them. Becoming Queen was not what she wanted, or expected, but when it happened she accepted it, calling it ‘this intolerable honour’ and became the most successful Queen Consort in the history of the British monarchy.

  Many years later, when the Windsors’ house in Paris was restored after the death of the Duchess, a collection of Christmas cards from Queen Elizabeth was discovered, each of them inscribed affectionately, giving the lie to the popular view that my aunt bore a deep rooted grudge towards the Duke and Duchess for precipitating her husband into sovereignty, and therefore because of the stresses and strains involved, particularly during the war, prematurely ending his life. Strangely these cards and other correspondence were found in the Duke’s bath. Apparently, American style, he always used the shower. Tellingly the only card which retained its envelope was from a rather second rank royal who shall be nameless. It was addressed to ‘Their Royal Highnesses, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor’. The Duchess, of course, was never granted royal status and was buried at Windsor in a coffin with a brass plate inscribed ‘Wallis, Duchess of Windsor’.

  Guests at Carberry. The King and Queen and Princess Margaret watch participants in the game ‘Are you there Moriarty?’. My mot
her stands next to her sister, Queen Elizabeth, and in the background can be glimpsed the royal nanny, Clara Knight, known as Allah

  My parents would rent a house in London for the summer season when my two sisters would do the debutante rounds of balls and parties. This was known as ‘coming out’, which doesn’t mean what it does today, but being presented to the King and Queen at Court, wearing white dresses with trains, long white gloves and three ostrich feathers on top of the head. Crowds used to gather in the Mall to watch the cars containing the debutantes queuing to drop them off at Buckingham Palace. The presentation involved having your name announced by the Lord Chamberlain and then curtseying in turn to the King and Queen. The names of those participating in this ritual were then entered in an official register and they were then deemed to have a passport to so-called high society. The Queen finally brought the curtain down on it all in 1958, the demand for entrée having become unmanageable. As Princess Margaret was said to have remarked: ‘We had to end it. Every tart in London was getting in.’ Quite! By the time I was eligible when I was eighteen in 1943, the presentations were in abeyance, for which I was very grateful. It took a world war to save me from such an embarrassing rite of passage, although it was never regarded as such, only as a regular hurdle in the course of growing up.

  My memories of Queen Elizabeth started when I was about five with my annual visits to Birkhall, on the Balmoral estate. The house dates from the eighteenth century, and since 1930 it had been lent by King George V to the Duke and Duchess of York to use when the Royal Family migrated to Scotland for their summer and early autumn holiday. When I was very young I told the King and Queen that if I ever married I would love to spend my honeymoon there and when I did get married, to Denys Rhodes, a cousin of Patrick Plunket, in 1950, they angelically remembered and let us have the house for two weeks, generously installing a cook as well. Three years earlier Princess Elizabeth and Prince Philip spent part of their honeymoon there too. My cousin wrote to me from Birkhall, two weeks after her marriage describing its beauty under the December snows, the peace and quiet and how the local people left them undisturbed. ‘Scots are nice that way,’ she said. There were shooting outings, but the stalkers who, because of the eccentricity of their attire resembled a very mixed rag bag, rather took the Princess aback. ‘We were,’ she said, ‘confronted with the most scurvy-looking lot of ruffians that I have ever seen!’ Thereafter, having found her army boots and leather jerkin, ‘I looked more in keeping with everyone else.’ She added: ‘I couldn’t help wishing that a photographer would come along, just for once, as he would never have believed what he saw! I imagined that I might be like a female Russian commando leader followed by her faithful cut-throats, all armed to the teeth with rifles.’