by John Pearson
It seemed as if the grief created in the family by Margaret Spencer’s untimely death had genuinely scarred all Bobby’s children. Jack had come off best, but both his brothers ended sadly. Cecil was killed in a riding accident and sailor George - who was dismissed from the Royal Navy for an ‘unspecified offence’ - had a lifelong drink problem. In their different ways, Jack’s sisters all had unsatisfactory lives as well. Motherly Delia married a much older man, the banker Sidney Peel, who was very much on the rebound after Cousin Winston had stolen the true love of his life, Clementine Hosier. They never had the children she desperately wanted. Pretty Lavinia married the war hero, Lord Annaly, only to discover later that he was homosexual, and they lived apart. Margaret, the baby of the family, had a difficult life, including a marriage which ended in divorce, which was made no easier by her abiding sense of guilt over the death of her mother.
But however unsatisfactory their private lives may have been at home, all Jack’s sisters followed Cynthia’s example and found a second, more exciting life at court: Delia as lady-in-waiting responsible for Princess Elizabeth and Princess Margaret; Lavinia joining Cynthia as lady-in-waiting to the Queen; and Margaret becoming governess to Princess Alexandra.
So, while Jack’s wife and two sisters found another, more exciting world at court, he had Althorp to occupy his time. Now that he had saved it for the Spencers, it was time to restore the house to something of its former glory. The roof was watertight, the timbers sound and the house had a spare elegance about it, with its unrivalled works of art, and centuries old oak floors. He would take enormous trouble discovering exactly what colour paint had originally been used for a particular picture frame or surround. His aim was now perfection - to recreate the house as closely as possible to an eighteenth-century ideal of what a great house like this should be. It had now become the house of a highly discriminating and immensely knowledgeable old curator.
And it was essentially his house. It was Fortress Althorp, and he did not really want to share it with anyone. He would tolerate historians, although he liked to check them at work to make sure that they were not stealing any of the family papers. It was irritating that the house had occasionally to open for the public (he particularly objected to stiletto heels). He began embroidering seats for a set of eighteenth-century chairs and, together with Lords Bearsted and Ancaster, ‘became one of the three great post-war needle-working earls’, often working away in the evening at gros point or petit point in his own small sitting room, its dark green walls lined with paintings of the third Earl’s famous shorthorn cows. He became so expert at his hobby that he ended up chairman of the Royal School of Needlework.
According to the Duke of Devonshire, ‘Althorp had become his pride and joy. It was the one true passion of Jack Spencer’s life. He was in love with it.’
But it can be dangerous to fall in love with a house, especially a house as beautiful as Althorp. For the moment comes when one grows old and must accept that one is a tenant, not an owner, and that someone else is going to succeed you in the place you love. So you must have confidence in your successor and not resent him. At a certain point Jack Spencer realised he had no confidence in his son, Johnnie. He could have borne the thought of dying if he had been able to entrust the house to almost anyone other than his son.
Johnnie, who was charming and feckless, was not remotely like his father. Sir Roy Strong remembers him as ‘absolutely sweet, but there was always a touch of a P.G. Wodehouse peer about him’.
None of this impaired his prospects as a courtier. As a Spencer, with a mother who was a friend and a lady-in-waiting of the Queen, he too had close connections with the court. At eighteen he had joined the Royal Scots Greys, saw service in France and Germany, and was then appointed equerry to George VI.
As Viscount Althorp he enjoyed a busy social life in London. He always remained close to his mother but relations with his father steadily deteriorated. Jack transferred North Creake House in Norfolk to his son to avoid death duties. It had been the scene of happy summer holidays when the children were little but the house was now fairly dilapidated after having been used by the R.A.F. in the war, and Jack was hurt and angry on hearing that Johnnie had had it demolished.
Johnnie then did something that his father found still harder to forgive.
By now he had earned a reputation for falling in and out of love too often. He was one of the most eligible young bachelors in London, and in June 1951 he became unofficially engaged to the Earl of Leicester’s daughter, the seventeen-year-old Lady Anne Coke. But Jack had strong personal reasons for disapproving of this match, and finally made Johnnie break off the engagement.
Johnnie did not remain love-lorn for long. He was soon to fall in love with another seventeen year old - Frances Roche, the cool and remarkably determined daughter of Lord and Lady Fermoy, who were close friends and neighbours of the Royal Family. Friends remember Johnnie being ‘completely infatuated’ with Frances, and before long this would bring yet further discord to the house of Spencer.
Chapter 14
The Fermoys
Jack Spencer disapproved of the Fermoys. With his deep concern for families and antecedents he could ‘place’ almost anyone according to his or her social standing, by which standards the Fermoys were little more than rich Irish parvenus from America. He was irritated, therefore, by the favoured position Lord and Lady Fermoy had come to enjoy as friends of George VI and Queen Elizabeth, and he muttered darkly of the ‘bad blood’ of the Fermoys. As a family they were certainly different from the Spencers.
As he had discovered, these Fermoys had no connection with the ancient Irish family of that name. That illustrious title had been long extinct when in the 1850s Edmund Burke Roche, a landowner and politician from County Cork adopted it on being awarded an Irish peerage for political services. After this, the first Lord Fermoy had suffered badly from the disorder in Ireland. Having lost his large estates in Cork and Limerick, he moved to London, and became Liberal MP for Marylebone. He was succeeded by his spendthrift son, Edward FitzEdmund Burke Roche as second Baron Fermoy.
The second Baron was a gambler, who apparently lost his home in one single night at the tables. By 1881 the Norwich Union, as principal mortgager of what were left of his Irish lands, had put them up for sale. Since they failed to reach the asking price, the offer was withdrawn, and they were sold privately a few years later. Soon afterwards the second Lord Fermoy went bankrupt. But before disaster finally engulfed the family his younger brother, James Burke Roche, had sailed for America to seek his fortune. Contemporary photographs show James to have been a handsome man with a memorable profile. He chose as a companion one of the great Victorian no-hopers, Moreton Frewen (otherwise known as ‘Mortal Ruin’), who was always on to something new to make his fortune, which he never seemed to find. He and James Roche tried prospecting for gold in the Yukon and cattle-ranching in Wyoming. Tiring of Wyoming, they ended up in New York City.
Here it was open season for Europeans in pursuit of heiresses. Frewen soon found and married pretty Clara Jerome, daughter of the financier, Leonard Jerome, whose other daughter, Jennie, had recently married young Lord Randolph Churchill. Soon after the Frewen marriage, Leonard Jerome went bankrupt, leaving Frewen with little but a pretty wife and the honour of becoming uncle to the future Winston Churchill.
James Burke Roche must have thought that he was being smarter than his friend when he picked on vivacious Frances Work, whose father, Frank Work, a former dry-goods clerk from Dogsburg, in the town of Chillicothe Ohio, had made himself the millionaire stockbroker to the Vanderbilts. A man whose prejudices matched his fortune, Work strongly disapproved of idle foreigners preying on American womanhood for financial gain and, on first hearing of his daughter’s involvement with Burke Roche, informed a reporter that ‘international marriages should be a hanging offence’. So when strong-willed Frances continued with her plans to marry, her equally stronger-willed father promptly disinherited her.
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sp; Undaunted, James Burke Roche brought Frances back to London, and in 1881 they married, took up residence in Pont Street, Knights-bridge, and a year later Frances gave birth to identical male twins, Maurice and Frank, soon to be followed by a daughter, Cynthia. But the former dry-goods clerk had not been wrong about James Roche. All he had really wanted from Frances was the means to lead a life of leisure and, since she wanted much the same, when the money ended so did their marriage. Since Roche by now was treating her ‘abominably’, she felt the time had come to return to father.
Legend has it that James Burke Roche accompanied his wife and children to New York, then dumped the twins on his father-in-law’s fashionable doorstep on 74th Street. Shocked but not surprised at such behaviour, Frank Work helped his daughter secure a divorce, then reinstated her and all three children in his will - on strict conditions. The children were to be raised in America as good Americans, and provided they remained there, they would inherit their share of his substantial fortune when he died. Should they return to Europe or renounce their U.S. citizenship they would be instantly disinherited. The same applied to Frances.
The twins, Maurice and Frank Burke Roche, grew up much as was to be expected as grandsons of a New York multi-millionaire. They were educated first at the fashionable St Paul’s New Hampton, then at Harvard, and became rich young men about town who also dabbled on the New York Stock Exchange. When Frank Work died in 1911, he left sufficient money in trust for both of them to live the rest of their lives in considerable comfort on the income.
They came to Europe once - in the First World War, with the U.S. forces - but this was not considered grounds for disinheritance, and in 1918 they returned to their happy bachelor existence in New York.
It was there that in 1920, they heard that their uncle, Edward FitzEdmund, second Lord Fermoy, had died in darkest Bournemouth, leaving their long-estranged father, James Burke Roche, to assume the title of third Baron Fermoy. But not for long. Five months later, early in 1921, the old man died and his title was suddenly going begging.
It was a curious situation. As American citizens neither twin was eligible for the title, and if either surrendered his citizenship to adopt it, he would forfeit his inheritance. As first-born twin, Maurice had first call on the title should he want it, but he was not sure he did and reputedly offered it to Frank. Only when Frank declined did Maurice finally decide that, despite his love of America, and despite the risk of disinheritance, he could not resist the lure of returning to England and picking up a peerage - even if it was an Irish one.
He must have discussed this with his lawyers, and also with his sister Cynthia, for soon afterwards he and his brother both left America for Europe, and launched a case in the U.S. high court to set aside the terms of their grandfather’s will as being ‘both unreasonable and unjust’. Since none of the other beneficiaries to the will objected, the request was granted, leaving them free to live where they wanted on the income from the grandfather’s trust funds which were over a million dollars each.
By now their mother Frances was also back in Europe, having also broken the terms of her father’s will by marrying Auriel Batonyi, ne Cohen, a Hungarian riding master. As this marriage also ended in divorce, she was no great social asset to her son, who was enjoying his role as Lord Fermoy. Frank went to live in Paris and worked in a leisurely manner for the bankers, Morgan Guaranty. According to a member of her family, he was highly anxious and neurotic, and remained unmarried.
Maurice was more personable and ambitious. Being rich, titled and good looking, he spent several years enjoying life and numerous love affairs, living between Paris, London and New York. Then in 1931 at the age of thirty-six, he married the twenty-year-old pianist Ruth Gill from Aberdeen, who had been studying music at the Paris Conservatoire. He decided it was time to settle down in England. Someone advised him to go into politics ‘as a means of integrating with the country’. Because of his Irish title, he was free to stand for the House of Commons and, having failed to get himself elected as Conservative for the Liberal seat of Woodhall Spa, he rented Hillingdon Hall in Norfolk in order to contest the next election at neighbouring Kings Lynn. He was duly elected and would represent Kings Lynn until the war. But for the future of the Fermoys what mattered was not so much his role as an MP as the fact that Hillingdon Hall was on the edge of the royal estates at Sandringham.
It has been said that it was ‘not entirely fortuitous’ that the Fermoys got to know the Duke and Duchess of York so quickly, and that they had moved to Norfolk in the first place with the intention of getting to know the Royal Family. If so, they must have been extremely smart and certainly made the most of their opportunities to get to know their royal neighbours. Like the Duke of York, Lord Fermoy was a first-class shot, and his bonhomie and Irish charm partly explain the friendship that grew up between them. But only partly. Rich Americans, even titled rich Americans like Lord Fermoy, were not the sort of company the Yorks normally enjoyed and the true strength of the friendship undoubtedly came from the close rapport developing between the two strong-willed and in many ways like-minded Scottish ladies, the former Elizabeth of Glamis and the former Miss Ruth Gill of Aberdeen.
When the Yorks became King George VI and Queen Elizabeth, most of their friends at court tended to be traditional grandees like Lords Radnor, Stair, Scarborough, and the Duke of Portland, making the continuing close royal friendship with two relative outsiders like the Fermoys all the more remarkable. With the birth of the three Fermoy children - Edmund, Frances and Mary - the King and Queen invited the Fermoys to become their tenants at Park House, a twelve-bedroomed mansion in the grounds of Sandringham.
Lord Fermoy died a year after the marriage of his daughter. Almost at once, the Queen Mother offered his widow a permanent place at court by making her one of her Women of the Bedchamber. Hew new role at court and her enduring friendship with the Queen Mother now became the mainspring of her life. It was a friendship that would be of great importance in the life of her granddaughter, Diana Spencer, forging a further link in the chain that would one day draw Diana to the very centre of the House of Windsor.
Ruth Fermoy could be extremely charming, and particularly to Jack’s wife, Cynthia, who became a close friend through the court. So did young Lord Althorp, who after the war was appointed equerry to George VI. Good-natured and amusing, Johnnie was a successful courtier and rumour has it that Princess Elizabeth herself was particularly fond of him before she fell in love with Prince Philip, and had written to him regularly while he was on active service in Germany.
It is hard to tell what part the ambitious Ruth Fermoy had played in bringing the twenty-eight-year-old Lord Althorp into such constant contact with her seventeen-year-old daughter, Frances. Certainly he fell deeply in love with her. Lord Leicester’s daughter was forgotten and a year later Johnnie Spencer and his child bride were married at Westminster Abbey, with the Royal Family in full attendance.
It was a very grand affair indeed, but instead of improving father and son relations, the marriage seems to have made them worse, partly because of Jack’s dislike of the Fermoys and also because of disagreements over where the newly-weds should live. Finally Jack did lend his son a farmhouse on the Althorp estate, but after constant disagreements, many of them involving Frances, it was clear that this would never work. At which point, Lady Fermoy came to her son-in-law’s assistance.
As Lord Fermoy had died in 1955, she suggested that Johnnie should take on the lease of her old home, Park House, Sandringham, and she actually lent him the furniture as well, since Jack was disinclined to let his son remove anything from Althorp.
It seemed that Ruth Fermoy was taking Johnnie from the Spencers and bringing him yet closer to herself and the Royal Family. From then on, Johnnie rarely went to Althorp or saw his father. As a friend said, ‘They were barely on grunting terms by now’, but Johnnie remained close to his mother. To occupy his time he decided to farm in as undemanding a way as possible and, after enduring the s
o-called ‘gin and tonic course’ at Cirencester Agricultural College, he started farming 600 acres near Sandringham, with the aid of a £20,000 contribution from Frances.
To start with it was a happy marriage. A daughter, Sarah, was born in March 1955, followed by another daughter, Jane, two years later, making it a matter of importance for Frances to produce a son to inherit Althorp and the title. In 1960 the longed-for heir was born, only to survive a brief ten hours. Johnnie’s dreadful disappointment lifted only when Frances was once more pregnant. But once again Frances gave birth to a daughter. She was born at Park House on 1 July 1961 and christened Diana Frances.
Diana’s arrival was the point at which the marriage faltered. For although Johnnie soon became extremely fond of his new daughter, he remained desperate for an heir. Frances was persuaded to submit to examinations by specialists to see if there was any reason why she had only daughters. She found this humiliating and, although in 1964 she did give birth to a boy, who was christened Charles Edward Maurice, with the Queen as godmother, the arrival of the heir to the Spencers failed to bring back his parents’ love for one another.
Now that Johnnie had his heir he seemed to lose interest in his wife. The marriage dragged on four more years, with Frances becoming increasingly bored with Johnnie and with life in the country. Having money of her own, she was free to please herself and spent more time in London; it was only a matter of time before she met the charming but already married Peter Shand Kydd, and fell deeply in love with him.
