by John Pearson
Their love affair was too intense to remain secret for long, and when Johnnie learned about it he was deeply shocked, and at first could not believe that Frances seriously wished to leave him. Upper-class divorce was still deeply frowned upon at the time, especially in royal circles, where the stigma was enough to banish divorcees from the court and from the Ascot royal enclosure. But in Johnnie’s case, divorce seemed unavoidable once Shand Kydd’s wife named Frances in her own divorce petition. With considerable reluctance, Johnnie began proceedings too. As the rich owner of his own wall-paper business, Peter Shand Kydd made it clear that he would marry Frances and provide a home for her and all her children.
The news that his son was divorcing Frances upset Jack Spencer, for however deep his disapproval of his daughter-in-law, he disapproved still more of the whole distasteful business of divorce. He would not deny that he and Cynthia had had their troubles, but they had soldiered on. His son should do the same.
But in spite of the Earl’s disapproval the divorce took place, and Frances got her freedom. At this point Frances was still hoping for an amicable arrangement over the children, and she and her lover had made arrangements for the children to live with her in London, visiting their father at weekends and in the holidays.
At first Johnnie had agreed, but after the Christmas holidays he changed his mind, and abruptly insisted that the children were to stay with him. Since Sarah and Jane were now at boarding school this would make little difference to them, but he wanted Diana and Charles to remain with him at Park House and attend day school in Kings Lynn.
At first, Frances could not believe that he was serious, but when she realised he was, a legal battle began for custody of the children. Since Frances was generally regarded as a good and devoted mother whose children loved her, it seemed inconceivable to her that she would lose them. But the easy-going Johnnie suddenly revealed a very different side of his character. Having grown extremely bitter, he was determined he would keep his children at whatever cost, and persuaded a number of impressive friends to testify in court on his behalf.
Although judges had been known to side with the aristocracy over questions of custody, particularly where an heir to the property was involved, everything finally depended on Frances’s fitness as a mother. To start with this was not disputed, but then a devastating witness took the stand against her. Her own mother, Ruth Fermoy, courtier and friend to the mother of the nation, told the judge that in her opinion her daughter, Frances, was not fit to have custody of her children.
It was typical of Ruth Fermoy never to give her reasons for her action, but she was clearly determined to do anything she could to ensure that her precious grandchildren were brought up by an Earl rather than a wall-paper manufacturer, however rich. But she had more important reasons still. Having taken so much trouble to advance herself and her family into the royal circle of Sandringham and the court, she had no intention of losing all that she had gained because of divorce within the family. All too conscious of the traditional royal disapproval of the stigma of divorce, she intended to make it clear that she was renouncing her own daughter and everything she stood for.
By doing so, she ensured that the blame for the divorce could be safely heaped on Frances, leaving Johnnie more or less unsullied in the eyes of royalty. So it was really thanks to his mother-in-law that Johnnie’s name at court remained untarnished, and he and the children could remain together at Park House, Sandringham. The marriage may have broken, but due to Ruth Fermoy the close connection with the House of Windsor had not.
Chapter 15
Raine’s War
Lady Fermoy had much to answer for when she helped her son-in-law to win his custody case, for Johnny was not cut out to be a single parent and the children would almost certainly have been happier and more settled with their mother after she remarried. Johnnie still missed his wife as much as he professed to hate her, and winning custody of the children had not made him happy.
He did his best with them. Nannies and then a governess were engaged; the two elder girls were now at fashionable West Heath School near Sevenoaks in Kent, and he tried to keep the family at Park House happy.
But divorce had hit the children hard. Their weekends with Frances would usually end with her in tears. At home six-year-old Charles would sob himself to sleep with Diana doing her best to comfort him. And when Frances had married Peter Shand Kydd, their loyalties were split between the two separate homes. There were the usual problems of a broken family - divided loyalties, children journeying between separate establishments, and ‘the two younger ones terribly spoiled by both sets of parents vying for their love and affection’, as one of their relations put it. Soon they discovered how to get exactly what they wanted by playing one set of parents off against the other.
By all accounts Johnnie’s private life was far from satisfactory, nor was it even very comfortable once Frances had removed her furniture from Park House. Without Frances, he was also rather short of money. He had girl-friends in London, but none of these relationships lasted and, now that he was in his late forties, he was beginning to appear a touch pathetic, somewhat bowed and looking older than his years.
Although Jack had disapproved of Frances, after the divorce its stigma would not go away, and Johnnie’s relations with his father remained as fraught as ever. Because of this Johnnie hardly ever took the children to Althorp, and they lived in virtual ignorance of the house and all it stood for. Even Christmases were spent apart from the rest of the family. Johnnie’s sister, Lady Anne Wake-Walker, and her husband were close to the old man, and would take their three children to Althorp for a traditional Christmas with her parents, while Johnnie did his best to entertain his children on his own at Park House. On Boxing Day they would be invited over by the Royal Family where the children were shown the film of Ian Fleming’s Chitty-Chitty Bang-Bang. This happened every Christmas and they came to hate it.
Then the situation at Althorp changed abruptly. Lady Cynthia was taken ill with what proved to be a tumour on the brain, and Jack became the most solicitous of husbands. When Cynthia died in 1973, he was broken-hearted. Now in his early eighties, he was no longer the dominating figure of his prime and it was now that he came beneath the spell of one of the most extraordinary women in the country.
As a pretty teenager, Barbara Cartland’s daughter, Raine, like one of the heroines in her mother’s historical novels, had decided that one day she would marry a duke, or, failing that, an earl. Her own origins were firmly middle class, being the daughter of Barbara’s first husband, Alexander McCorquodale, who was not even a baronet, but the wealthy owner of a firm of Scottish printers.
But while Raine may have seemed like a Cartland heroine, this was deceptive. Feminine she was, but soft she was not. She once said of herself, ‘there’s pure steel up my backbone’, and she was not unlike her mother in her determined attitude to life and her extraordinary capacity to get exactly what she wanted. At the same time, her obsession with the aristocracy was rather like that of the actress Maxine Elliott, who once advised Winston Churchill to ‘always remember that a lord is just that little bit better than anyone else’.
Putting this into practice, Raine married - for the first time - the Hon. Gerald Legge, the so-called ‘never-never Earl’, who, after years of waiting for his inheritance, finally became the fifteenth Earl of Dartmouth, making Raine a Countess. In the meantime, Raine had poured her considerable energies and ambitions into local government and bringing up her children. But when she was elected to the Greater London Council her interests widened, as she concentrated on the heritage and preservation lobby, chairing the council’s Historic Buildings Board. She wrote a book entitled What Is Our Heritage?, and in 1975 became the heritage queen of England as head of the UK Executive on the European Heritage Year.
This involvement in preserving Britain’s architectural legacy may have made her conscious of a certain lack in Gerald. He was a kindly, witty man, but he did not have a stately home.
Through her involvement with English Heritage she naturally knew all about Althorp and its treasures, so that when she met Johnnie Spencer, as a friend says, ‘it certainly helped that his father was already in his eighties, and that he was heir to a stately home’.
By now, Raine had become a regular visitor to Althorp, where she used her considerable charm upon the octogenarian earl who was feeling sad and lonely after the death of Cynthia. Raine finally arranged a reconciliation between him and his son.
Within the family, bearing in mind what she did to Althorp after he was dead, her friendship with Jack Spencer while he was alive will always be a source of bitterness. She flattered him and made a fuss of him, she brought him expensive chocolates which he loved and antique walking sticks which he collected. Being knowledgeable about old buildings, she was the perfect audience for the Earl to talk to about the overriding passion of his life, his house, and he came to feel that in this feminine, decisive woman, he had found somebody at last who truly sympathised with all he had done to save Althorp from disaster. He came to believe that with her deep involvement in the nation’s heritage she would use all her influence to protect and preserve the house in the future. He seems to have hoped that she and Johnnie might marry, believing that with Raine installed as chatelaine of Althorp, the house and the treasures it contained would be safe for ever, and he could die content.
In April 1975 die he did, at the age of eighty-three, disappointed to the last that he was the first Spencer Earl for many generations not to have received the Garter, and Johnnie succeeded him as eighth Earl Spencer. Johnnie’s son and heir, eight-year-old Charles Spencer, became Lord Althorp; and the family decamped from Park House, Sandringham to take possession of their lost domain which the children barely knew and had rarely visited.
Charles has put on record how much he hated Althorp as a child: ‘it was like an old man’s club with all those clocks ticking away’. He has said that for him, as an impressionable child, he had at first found it a ‘nightmarish place’. But the fact is that together with governesses and servants and a large flat in Grosvenor Square, the family soon adjusted rather well to the ancestral world of Althorp with its air of melancholy and all the treasures the Curator Earl had left them. Johnnie had inherited the house and its possessions, while the land was left in trust to Charles. Death duties came to £4 million, but they could be dealt with by the judicious sales of land or property.
Soon, the children came under the spell of Althorp, so that in retrospect this came to seem a sort of golden interlude when they had their father and the great house to themselves, with the old family servants still present to look after them.
All this was soon to change. Despite the children’s opposition, Johnnie’s affair with Raine continued. And once she was divorced Johnnie married her at Caxton Hall in July 1976, without informing the children in advance or having them at the ceremony. Almost overnight the children discovered that they had a stepmother. What they already knew of Raine they hated. War began in earnest.
Any woman entering Althorp as stepmother to the four children would have had a tough time of it, but someone as positive as Raine was clearly in for trouble. Both sides were well-matched, and neither would tolerate defeat. The children’s advantage lay in numbers, mendacity and the inborn ruthlessness of the English upper classes, while Raine relied on will-power, Johnnie’s total adoration, and the well-established fact that in the end she always seemed to get her way. As for gentle Johnnie, there was little he could do except watch the battle from the sidelines like an ineffectual referee.
At first Raine did her best to win the children over, supplying Diana with quantities of Barbara Cartland novels, which she loved. This did not work for long, and all four children made it very clear that Raine was not their mother and that they deeply resented her. The fight continued with no quarter given or expected.
Instead of improving with time, the situation at Althorp steadily grew worse, particularly for the adolescent Diana and her younger brother Charles. Their hatred of their stepmother and all she represented became unrelenting. For them there was something quite horrendous in what they saw as a take-over of their father and their home by their stepmother.
In some ways Raine was a considerable help to her husband, especially over the running of the estate. The easy-going days of Jack’s reign were past and she encouraged Johnnie to hire a new agent, Richard Stanley, and dismissed a number of old employees.
‘As far as running the estates was concerned,’ says Stanley, ‘I’m afraid I had to blow the whistle, signalling that the party was over. So they ran to Johnnie, but Raine made him do what was necessary. She was a ruthless woman, and I say that admiringly.’
Within the house, Raine also made her presence firmly felt, taking charge of the kitchen, insisting that the bed-linen was changed every day, sacking any member of the staff who failed to meet her rigid standards, and making every servant sign a confidentiality agreement. The children proved less amenable than the servants and never succumbed to Raine’s attempts to gain their affection. Twelve-year-old Charles was outraged to return from boarding school to find that Raine had consigned him to a box-like bedroom in the attic.
Raine has a strong sense of decorum, with clear ideas of how she thinks the upper classes should behave. Being fairly besotted with his wife, Johnnie generally agreed with anything she said. Not so the children. They emphatically refused to change for dinner; they never had before and had no intention of doing so now. Nor would they be taught manners by what they saw as this overdressed middle-aged outsider who happened to have become their step-mother. Mealtimes became a nightmare. When Sarah burped in front of Raine at dinner Johnnie felt the time had come to send her to her room. Out of solidarity Diana accompanied her sister. For long periods, the children refused to address a single word to Raine during meals and Johnnie was too weak to make them.
By now Raine must have needed all the steel in her backbone to survive. She particularly hated it when the children tried to treat her as a joke. Their appalling behaviour was the reverse side of something which Diana herself demonstrated frequently to others, and was in contrast with the show of perfect manners which is normally the aristocrat’s reaction to inferiors.
One of Diana’s closest friends from West Heath School, who was invited several times to stay at Althorp, was shocked by the way the children treated Raine. Both were then fourteen, and she says that, coming from a thoroughly middle-class family, she felt so overwhelmed by her first sight of Althorp and the Earl that when she was introduced to him, she curtseyed: ‘but he was so very nice that he didn’t make me feel that I’d done anything ridiculous. He was in fact a lovely, lovely man. He may have been stupid. Certainly as far as Raine was concerned he was. But to me he was extraordinarily kind, and I remember him writing to my mother after my visit saying what a perfect guest I’d been.’
At school, she says, she had found Diana ‘a very likeable but insecure character. She could be so funny and was always a great disobeyer. We were both good swimmers and we used to go on midnight swims in the school swimming pool, which was very much against the rules, but she loved the naughtiness of it all.’
She says that at Althorp she found Diana made a show of being very offhand about everything, but soon she realised how very proud she was of the house and all it represented.
‘During my first visit, Raine had only recently married Johnnie, and Diana absolutely hated her. She hated what she was doing to her father and to Althorp. Being Diana’s friend I naturally thought Raine was dreadful too. Even to me she seemed manipulative, and with all her frills and flounces seemed terribly overdressed in the understated world of Althorp. But for Diana what was absolutely unforgivable was the fact that her father clearly loved her.’
Thanks largely to the insecurity caused by her parents’ divorce, Diana remained deeply possessive of her father and it seemed that this would be a battle which even Raine could never win. But suddenly she benefited from a quir
k of fate which came disguised as an absolute disaster.
One Tuesday morning, early in September 1978, Johnnie woke with a bad headache, which was something he almost never did. In fact he was overweight, with high blood pressure - which the tensions between his wife and his children cannot have helped.
Raine was going up to London to lunch with her mother, but offered to put her off and stay at home. Johnnie would not hear of it, but his headache worsened during the morning, and just before midday, while talking to Richard Stanley, he was violently sick, collapsed and was rushed to Northampton Hospital. By now he was unconscious, and a major brain haemorrhage was suspected. Raine and all four children were summoned to his bedside and were told by the doctors that his chances of survival were slender.
Although no one would have admitted it, it must have been obvious to everyone gathered round his bed how much was at stake. Should fifty-four-year-old Johnnie die, as seemed extremely likely, fourteen-year-old Charles Althorp would instantly become the ninth Earl Spencer and Raine would disappear from Althorp and the children’s lives for ever. None knew this better than Raine herself.
But all was not lost while Johnnie clung to life, and Raine did everything in her power to make sure that his grip on it was not allowed to weaken. If any wife could force a husband to recover from a stroke by will-power, it was Raine.
With time running out, and Johnnie’s life at stake, she felt that there could be no question of consulting the four children over what should be done. The hospital doctors had warned that it would be dangerous to move their father. Raine disagreed. She was convinced that if he was left at Northampton he would die, and on her sole authority she took the risk of having him driven to London by ambulance to the Hospital for Nervous Diseases in Queen Square. She then took the decision of asking the doctors to operate - which they did.
Johnnie lived, but he was very weak and soon developed complications which kept him in hospital for many weeks, during which Raine rarely left his bedside. After the first shock, the children, not unnaturally, began to feel totally excluded and, had their father died, as at times it still seemed likely, they would undoubtedly have blamed his death on Raine. But Johnnie did not die. After a serious relapse, Raine mounted an extraordinary campaign to save him. Believing in the power of prayer, she asked everyone she knew to pray for him. Even her obsession with titles came in useful now. She happened to know the Duke of Portland who was head of a German drug company, and with difficulty the Duke found Johnnie an experimental drug called Aslocillin, which may well have saved him.
