The British Author - Nancy Mitford (Mrs Peter Rodd) (1904–73)
The Farmer - Pamela Mitford (Mrs Derek Jackson) (1907–94)
The Gay Soldier - Major Thomas Mitford (1909–45) (killed in action)
The Fascist - Diana Mitford ( Lady Mosley) (1910–2003)
The Nazi - Unity Vallkyrie Mitford (1914–48)
The American Author - Jessica Mitford (Mrs Robert Treuhaft) (1917–1996)
The Duchess - Deborah Mitford (now the Dowager Duchess of Devonshire) (born 1920)
.Mitford Sisters.
I currently find myself absolutely fascinated by the Mitford family. From most of my reseach, I'm well behind the curve, but the entire family has individually, and collectively, caught my attention. I originally stumbled across the following article in the NYT and the rest is history...
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Andrew & Debo Cavendish
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| .debo. |
By SARAH LYALL
Originally Published: November 5, 2010
EDENSOR, England
YEARS after the fact, Deborah, the Dowager Duchess of Devonshire, looked in her mother’s engagement book to see what had been written on the momentous day of March 31, 1920.
Nothing.
“She didn’t refer to my birth at all,” the duchess said. “There was nothing for five days, and then, on the fifth day, in capital letters, it said ‘KITCHEN CHIMNEY SWEPT.’ ”
“No one took any notice of me except Nanny.”
Maybe so, but not for long. Now 90, the duchess is doubly famous. First, as the lone survivor of the six celebrated Mitford girls, who included Nancy (the renowned comic novelist), Diana (the renowned beauty and wife of the fascist leader Sir Oswald Mosley) and Jessica (the renowned Communist, author and naturalized American). Second, as the woman who transformed Chatsworth, one of the grandest of England’s grand houses, from a museumlike relic into a family house and self-sustaining business that is visited by 600,000 people a year. Along the way, Deborah Cavendish, to use her civilian name (her friends call her Debo), has become something of a national treasure, as grand as the queen but as approachable as anyone, effortlessly bridging the gap between Us and Them in this perennially class-conscious society.
“It is so kind of you to come all this way,” the duchess said recently, greeting visitors in her driveway. Straight-backed and chic in a deceptively simple green wool skirt and black pumps, she proceeded to shake hands with everyone, including the taxi driver.
She led the way into the drawing room of her house, the former vicarage in this hamlet (pronounced Enzer), part of the 35,000-acre Chatsworth estate. Books were everywhere. Birthday cards filled an entire wall of one room, many reflecting two of her pet passions: chickens (she raises them) and Elvis (she worships him).
Chatsworth loomed outside in the background, grand and imposing with its 297 rooms, its 1.3 acres of roof and its 18 staircases. The duchess had to move out several years ago, after the death of her husband, Andrew, the 11th Duke of Devonshire, and the accession of her son, the 12th. “It was rather a relief because the passages were so long,” she said.
She has written a dozen books, most recently the memoir “Wait For Me!” (Farrar, Straus and Giroux), which coincides with a Deborah-themed exhibit at Chatsworth. Items include the diary in which she recorded dancing with a young John F. Kennedy (“rather boring but nice”); great swathes of couture clothes and eye-blinding jewels; photographs of her by Cecil Beaton, Norman Parkinson and Henri Cartier-Bresson; and a portrait by Lucian Freud.
Like all of Freud’s work, the painting was not created to flatter. When her husband first went to see it, there were several other men in the room, the duchess relates in her book. After a while, one said, “Who is that woman?”
“It’s my wife,” Andrew answered.
“Well, thank God it’s not mine,” the man replied.
THE duchess grew up in happy eccentricity in rural Gloucestershire. Her father, the second Baron Redesdale (famous in Nancy Mitford’s fiction as the fearsome Uncle Matthew), had an erratic relationship with finance and a “horror of anything sticky”; hunted his own children with bloodhounds; referred to foreigners and his daughter’s beaux as “sewers”; and hated socializing. (Once, when confronted with a group of Nancy’s guests at lunch, he loudly asked from the far end of the table, “Have these people no home of their own?”)
“I had a marvelous time,” the duchess said. Even when, in a scene in her book, her siblings surrounded her and chanted “Who’s the least important person in the room? You!”?
“It’s hard for people to understand, that these things were all turned into jokes in our family,” she said. Sounding genuinely perplexed, she added: “There is this extraordinary thing called self-esteem which is pumped into the children now.”
She was famously lovely; her husband was famously dashing. He inherited the dukedom only because his older brother, Billy, was killed in World War II. It was a time of constant loss. “Two of my brothers-in-law,” she said. “My only brother; Andrew’s only brother; my four best friends — all killed within a month of each other.”
But her generation believes in self-pity about as much as it believes in self-esteem. “What can you do?” she asked. “Blow after blow came, but there was absolutely no reply, was there?”
AFTER the death of Andrew’s father, in 1959, the tax amounted to 80 percent of the value of the estate — estimated to be about $285 million in today’s money. Nine works of art, including a Holbein, a Rubens and a Rembrandt, went to museums, as did a Van Dyck sketchbook (luckily, someone later “found another in the back of a cupboard,” the duchess writes). The debt was finally settled in 1974.
Raising the money, and making Chatsworth sustainable, required a top-to-bottom reorganization, presided over by the duchess. She put in central heating and plumbing for 17 new bathrooms. She opened an educational farm that is visited by about 200,000 children a year. She opened a farm shop, one of the first of its kind in the country, selling produce and meat from the Chatsworth farm, and later expanding into a restaurant. She opened another shop selling Chatsworth souvenirs.
Her memoir is full of encounters with famous people, including President Kennedy, whose sister Kathleen had been married to Andrew’s older brother before his death in the war (she died several years later in a plane crash). Kennedy, who became a close friend, coincidentally occupied the White House when Andrew’s uncle, Harold Macmillan, was Britain’s prime minister.
Soon, the duchess said, President Kennedy acquired her habit of referring to Macmillan as “Uncle Harold,” and, in calls to Downing Street, liked to follow references to NATO and Seato by inquiring, “How’s Debo?”
Her marriage lasted 62 years, surviving Andrew’s long bout with alcoholism, as well as his discreet dalliances.
“It was absolutely fixed that we shouldn’t divorce or get rid of each other in any way,” the duchess said. “It’s completely different to Americans, who all divorce each other the whole time. Such a bore for everyone, having to say who’s going to have the dogs, who’s going to have the photograph books.”
Andrew was great company, she said, which went a long way, and he shared his wife’s facility for drawing humor from challenging situations. Being married to a Mitford, he once said, “inevitably imposes a certain Denis Thatcher element in my life.”
THE duchess has always been a great letter writer; volumes of her correspondence with her sisters and with the writer Patrick Leigh Fermor have recently been published. Now, she is besieged by letters from members of the public. She always answers.
She picked up a thick stack of mail.
“It’s because they know where I live,” she said. “That’s the trouble.”
Inevitably, she has slowed down. Her brilliant blue eyes are slightly dimmer now, and she suffers from macular degeneration, which allows her to write but not read. By way of illustration, she pointed to the photographer. “I can’t see his features,” she said, “He’s just a very amiable sponge.”
She paused. “Haven’t we had enough?” she said, making it somehow sound gracious.
As it happened, the same taxi driver arrived to take the visitors away and was treated to a second sight of the duchess, this time waving goodbye.
“That were the duchess, weren’t it?” he asked, recalling the thrill he got years ago when, taking his family on an outing to the Chatsworth farm, he spotted her feeding her chickens. “We all love her to bits.”
