At Belvoir Castle before the war, a kitchen staff of 20 catered for the ninth Duke of Rutland and his family.
Teenage
boys scrubbed copper pans, standing on duckboards to lift their feet
out of the suds. Maids made everything from jam to crystallised violets.
In rare moments of leisure, the Scottish cook, Mrs Anderson, read tea leaves.
At
the centre of an estate of more than 15,000 acres, Belvoir was the
Duke’s private fiefdom. His Sunday morning routine included a visit to
the dairy to sample the cheese after a service in the castle chapel.
This
was the world — lavish, aristocratic, rarefied — in which Lady Ursula,
the eldest of the Duke’s five children and now 98-year-old great-aunt of
the present 11th Duke of Rutland, spent much of her childhood.
Lady
Ursula’s memories range from Downton-style Christmas parties for estate
workers — at which, one year, every servant was given a gift of an
orange and a lemon — to being photographed in an antique silver wine
cooler large enough to hold two children.
In
the castle Muniment Room, she discovered a letter from Charles II in
which he addressed his downtrodden wife Catherine of Braganza as ‘my
dear little whiffy-whoffy’.
Lady Ursula did not go to school, but was educated at home.
Lavish childhood: Ursula and her sister Isabel sitting in a 17th-century silver punch bowl
Aristocratic upbringing: A portrait by Charles Edmund Brock of Ursula, her brother Charles and sister Isabel
In
London she took swimming, ballet and piano lessons. She was ‘finished’
in Paris. She officially ‘came out’ when she was 17, at a grand ball at
Belvoir, wearing a dress by Worth.
To
mark this, her father presented her with a large, heart-shaped
aquamarine brooch he had designed himself. It featured her name in
diamonds.
She
describes her education as ‘all the traditional home pursuits: cooking,
sewing and running a large house’. With hindsight, she recognizes the
degree to which she was spoiled, but dismisses it simply as ‘just the
way it was’. As a child, Ursula envied her younger sister Isabel’s
boisterous and easy manner with young men. Pale-skinned, with ink-dark
hair, Ursula adored her father and felt uncomfortable with men of her
own age.
Estate of 15,000 acres: Ursula on horseback outside Belvoir Castle lodge for a meet of the Belvoir Hunt
From
early in her life she was drawn to father figures. Later she would
famously live with John Paul Getty, who asked her to marry him — she
declined. In 1976, People magazine reported that Getty had left her
shares worth $165,000 in his will.
DID YOU KNOW?
There were 40,000 children at the Coronation procession in London
It was the
coronation of George VI that changed her life. Ursula Manners (as she
then was) was one of the train-bearers to Queen Elizabeth.
It
was a nerve-racking experience, despite so many other family members
also being involved: her father carried the orb, her mother carried the
Queen’s canopy, two of her brothers were royal pages.
The beautiful Lady in Waiting: Ursula (third
from left) with King George VI, Queen Elizabeth, Princess Elizabeth and
Princess Margaret on the Buckingham Palace balcony in 1937 after the
coronation
But it was Ursula who was photographed
standing behind the King and Queen on Buckingham Palace balcony. Those
photographs were printed in newspapers across the globe and Ursula, with
her distinctive widow’s peak hairline, became famous overnight.
Happy existence: Ursula at home in her Kensington flat in 1997
An
American magazine published a poem in which each verse began with the
line: ‘Who is that beautiful Lady in Waiting?’ Celebrity, however, had
never been the Duke’s aim for his daughter. He intended her to marry a
man like himself, preferably another duke.
One
of Lady Ursula’s boyfriends was, indeed, the future Duke of Buccleuch.
Instead, she married a handsome barrister called Anthony Marreco.
After the
war, they were divorced and she married her second husband, Erland
d’Abo, with whom she had three children. Later Erland’s nephew Mike
d’Abo became famous as the lead singer with Manfred Mann.
Aristocratic
memoirs invariably combine unimaginable privilege with hefty dollops of
dysfunctionalism, emotional suffering and, often, addiction or
substance abuse in some shape or form.
Not
so The Girl With The Widow’s Peak. Though Lady Ursula’s personal life
has included its share of heartache — divorce, widowhood, the death of
the father she idolised aged only 53, and a car crash that involved
extensive reconstructive facial surgery — her autobiography depicts a
happy family existence. It is a precious window on to a vanished world.
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