The Final Curtsey Read online

  My father had been destined for the diplomatic service and was in attendance at the court of the last Tsar of Russia, Nicholas II, in St Petersburg at the turn of the nineteenth century. I have always been fascinated that I had this tiny, tenuous link with Russia before the revolution, and I remember as a child my father telling me about the opulence of the Russian Imperial court, the Fabergé style brilliance of St Petersburg’s high society, and his glimpses of the Imperial family who, despite the formal grandeur of their official position, in private lived very simply, the children being brought up in a very English, austere way, as befitting the great grandchildren of Queen Victoria.

  Of course they were all brutally murdered by the Bolsheviks in July 1918, but years later I was told that during their imprisonment they displayed striking courage in the face of the tragedy of their situation, and the letters, diaries and memoirs of those who were in contact with them during the last year and a half of their incarceration unanimously attest to this. The Emperor Nicholas at first hoped that his family would be able to leave Russia for exile in Britain, but his cousin King George V was advised by his ministers that there was strong opposition to this proposal among his people, and the offer of a refuge with their British relatives was withdrawn. The best motives of kings and queens are often constrained by realpolitik, but George V continued to seek assurances through the British ambassador in St Petersburg concerning the safety of the Imperial family, and always hoped that they would find safety. He was devastated by their cruel deaths, and in his diary wrote: ‘May [Queen Mary] and I attended a Service at the Russian Church in Welbeck Street in memory of dear Nicky who I fear was shot last month by the Bolsheviks. We can get no details, it was a foul murder, I was devoted to Nicky, who was the kindest of men, a thorough gentleman, who loved his Country and his people’. A photograph of the Emperor, signed ‘Nicky’ is displayed on a side table at Sandringham.

  In the spring of 1919 the King sent the Royal Navy cruiser Marlborough to the Crimea to rescue the Romanov survivors. There were only a few, and among them was the Tsar’s sister, the Grand Duchess Xenia, who spent forty years in exile in Britain and who Queen Elizabeth liked. I encountered the Grand Duchess in 1940, when she was staying at Craigowan, a house on the Balmoral estate, often used by the Royal Family for short private visits to avoid opening up the castle.

  I cannot remember much about her, but indelibly printed in my memory is the image of her severe Lady-in-Waiting, a Russian Orthodox nun called Mother Martha, who wore black robes and black boots. When Princess Elizabeth, Princess Margaret and I were in the vicinity of Craigowan we would break into the Volga boat song, a traditional Russian folk number associated with the peasant barge-haulers on the mighty Volga river. I only hope the Grand Duchess never heard us, because we would surely have been on the receiving end of a rocket if we had been reported to higher authority. We thought that the serenade would remind her of her homeland, but looking back I suppose our behaviour was less than sensitive, bearing in mind her tragic experiences during the revolution. Her son-in-law was Prince Felix Yusupov, one of the murderers of that degenerate mystic Rasputin, who had exerted such an unhealthy influence over the Tsarina.

  Somehow, I never really knew why, a career in the diplomatic corridors of power eluded my father. Instead he travelled all over the world, big game hunting and exploring. I suppose his philosophy seemed to be ‘have gun, will travel’. He potted grizzly bears in Alaska and Canada and I grew up with a stuffed eight foot high grizzly standing on its hind legs in the hall at Carberry, ten miles south of Edinburgh, one of our two homes in Scotland. I loved every inch of Carberry, but after 1961, when my mother died, my brother John handed it over to the Church of Scotland as a conference centre. They found it too expensive to keep up, and it passed to an organisation called the Friends of Carberry who run it in a more ecumenical fashion. After the family left I never returned because I want to remember it as it was — every stick and stone of it. It had been in the ownership of my family since coming to the Elphinstones through marriage. We also had a smaller house in Surrey, Maryland, my father’s wedding gift to my mother, and at one time a London house, which my father had to give up in the Depression of the early 1930s, because, he said, ‘something happened to Swedish matches,’ which, I suppose was an oblique reference to a failed investment.

  He had, however, a fascinating life exploring the most remote and wild regions; the Tian Shan mountains on the Chinese-Russian border, for instance, and he also spent a lot of time in India chasing tigers. When he wasn’t doing that, he was shooting duck in Egypt, pheasant, partridge and grouse in Scotland and England. How the Animal Liberation Front would have loved him.

  Carberry Tower

  He first went to India when he was twenty-five in 1894, and stayed with the Maharajah of Cooch Behar, who had succeeded to his throne at the tender age of ten months. I don’t know how he got to know His Royal Highness, but in those days the Indian princes regularly flitted between their states, European capitals and places like the French Riviera. He was a frequent visitor to London and moved around in society and so I suppose they might have met in that way. There were three other big game hunting trips in 1895 and 1896 in the foothills of the Himalayas, Bengal and Assam. I have his game book, in which he precisely recorded for the three visits a bag of thirteen tigers, three leopards, twenty-one rhino, thirty-nine buffalo, ten bison, three python, and many deer, pig, quail and peacock. In 1898 he crossed the Atlantic to shoot duck in the south of Mexico, followed by fishing off the west coast of Florida. His greatest adventure was in 1901. He took the Trans-Siberian railway, alighting on the banks of the river Ob near the present modern town of Novosbirsk. The road petered out at Birsk so he took to horseback for the next three hundred miles into the mountains. This ride took twenty days and ended at Kosh Agach, close to the Sino-Russian-Kazakhstan border. My father’s companions for this trek were two experienced big game hunters, Philip Vanderbyl and Charles Radcliffe, both army captains.

  They hunted in the Kosh Agach area for three weeks, and then headed south for the Tian Shan mountains. Their explorations took them to Zaysan in Kazakhstan and to Yining in China in the Xinjiang province, southwest and deeper into the mountains. They returned to Yining in the autumn and started for home. Their expedition lasted for over six months to regions almost unknown to Europeans. In 1907 my father and the other two men joined the legendary F C Selous, whose real-life adventures inspired Rider Haggard, author of King Solomon’s Mines, to create the fictional Alan Quatermain, in founding the Shikar Club, the big game hunters association. My father then more or less eschewed adventure, but it was another three years before he entered into marriage and family life.

  My father at the funeral of King George V in 1936. My father’s braces snapped and he had to walk four and a half miles holding up his trousers with his elbows

  After he settled down, he became Governor of the Bank of Scotland and Captain General of the Royal Company of Archers, the Sovereign’s bodyguard north of the border. As Captain General he marched behind the coffin at the funeral of King George V in 1936. There was a strong wind and my father thought the long eagles’ feathers in his cap were going to blow away. He lifted his arms to secure them and his braces snapped. He had to walk four and a half miles desperately holding his trousers up with his elbows. That’s the kind of story my aunt, Queen Elizabeth, loved. If something could go wrong on a formal occasion, it made her day.

  My father gave me little or no advice, but I can remember him telling me that the only things in life to be regretted are the things you don’t do. That was a wonderfully powerful incentive to have a go at almost anything, and a piece of wisdom I took to heart. I suppose I inherited his passion for exploration and adventure, and I have certainly had some sticky moments, like being arrested in a coup in Bhutan, of which more later.

  My sister Elizabeth, my brother John and my sister Jean, with my Granny Lady Strathmore and Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon, circa 1914/15

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sp; My father was regarded by society as a confirmed but exciting and adventurous bachelor. He confounded his family by marrying just before his fortieth birthday. His bride was the twenty-six-year-old Lady Mary Bowes-Lyon, known always as May, who was the eldest daughter of the 14th Earl of Strathmore and Kinghorne, and the eldest sister of Queen Elizabeth. When she was ten years old, Elizabeth Elphinstone, my eldest sister, was one of the bridesmaids at Queen Elizabeth’s wedding in 1923, solemnized at Westminster Abbey.

  My parents had five children, and I was the youngest, born in 1925. Elizabeth, the eldest, was born in 1911; John, the Master of Elphinstone, a Scottish honorific given to the eldest sons of peers whose titles were granted before the 1707 Act of Union, in 1914; Jean in 1915 and Andrew on 11 November 1918, Armistice Day. As a result he had Victor added to his other Christian names. My parents adored each other, and as a teenager I resolved to try and make as happy and loving a marriage as theirs. It is difficult, in old age, to look back dispassionately at one’s parents. They were just mother and father and totally distinct from the rest of humanity; far more remote from their children than modern parents. Of course, having nannies and nursery maids on call made a lot of difference, but I cannot remember either parent actually playing any sort of game with me.

  My mother seemed far more interested in the garden than in the activities of any of her children. Years later, when I was grown up, I rushed to tell her the earth shattering news that my then boyfriend had proposed marriage to me. She said: ‘Oh, Darling, really, and what did you say? So sorry, Darling, I must go out now and do some work on the rockery.’ She had taken little notice and it was not the response that my news deserved.

  Unlike her two younger sisters, Rose, who married Commander William Leveson-Gower, who became Earl Granville, and Elizabeth, who both had a highly developed sense of humour and a strong streak of mischief, my mother was in contrast more serious, probably because she was the eldest girl of the Strathmore clan. I have two of her diaries, written when she was in her early twenties before she married in which she regularly recorded going out before breakfast to dig in her garden. Often the rest of the day was spent writing letters, practising her singing, and doing a little drawing and sketching. It was a gentle and rather dull life. The only time I can remember my parents having even the smallest row was when my father asked me, when I was about twelve, to find out what was wrong, because my mother had thrown a copy of The Times at him. That was what domestic violence amounted to at Carberry.

  I must have been a great surprise to them, born nearly seven years after their last child, when my mother was forty-two and my father fifty-six. Perhaps they wanted another son, as I remember being given presents of toy swords, bows and arrows and even a suit of armour. Dolls were definitely out. I made very efficient missile launchers by slitting the ends of bamboo canes and inserting stones in the slit ends. I was a lone child, but not lonely; there is a difference. Andrew was the nearest to me in age, and I hero-worshipped him for a long time. He would do exciting things like making bonfires in winter on the ice of the Carberry pond, to see how long it took to melt through and he put up with me tagging along behind him when he was shooting rabbits and pigeons.

  Myself as an infant

  Clara Knight, first my nanny and then nanny to the Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret

  My first Nanny was Clara Knight, known as Allah, but not for any Islamic reason. She was not with me for long. Previously she had been the nursemaid to my aunt, when she was Lady Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon, and after her daughter Princess Elizabeth was born she claimed her back, telling my mother: ‘Remember, I had her first.’ Allah was succeeded by a lady known as Doddy, whom I can scarcely remember, and at the end of her tenure a nursery governess was installed, the awful Miss Campbell. She was horrid and I hated her. My mother was largely unaware of what went on in the nursery, and as a small child it never occurred to me to complain about the petty tyranny of Miss Campbell’s regime. One of her less pleasant tricks, when bathing me, was to say: ‘Now shut your eyes and open your mouth, and I will give you a lovely surprise.’ Night after night, like a gullible trout, I would obey her and she would stuff the cake of soap into my mouth. That just goes to show how unquestionably stupidly obedient I was. But that was the way things were: as long as I appeared clean and tidy for the hour with my parents after tea, no questions were asked. One of my ordeals was being presented spick and span to the guests when my parents gave a luncheon party. My entrance into the dining room was timed for the end of the meal. The babble of conversation would die down, and I would have to march round the long table shaking hands with everyone. I felt as if every eye was upon me. It was virtual cruelty.

  Many people now will probably think that allowing your child to be brought up by a nanny is an abdication of maternal responsibility, but I would argue that teaching the early lessons of childhood to reluctant offspring are rarely achieved without pain by the present generation of busy and impatient mothers. I was certainly grateful, as a mother of four, to have a proper working nursery, although my children did manage to pull a few tricks. My younger daughter, Victoria, was particularly adept at fooling nanny. During potty training she once substituted what should have been in the bottom of the pot with small fir cones. Nanny was taken in and she was allowed out to play.

  Granny Strathmore

  Lord and Lady Strathmore, my grandparents

  But whatever the ups and downs of life in the nursery, I was from an early age imbued with a sense of history. No Elphinstone or Strathmore can escape that legacy. The first Lord Elphinstone, of the Peerage of Scotland, was killed fighting the English at the battle of Flodden in 1513. King James IV of Scotland was cut down in the thick of the battle, together with the flower of the Scottish nobility. The second Lord Elphinstone was killed in 1547 at the battle of Pinkie Cleugh, which was another disaster for Scottish arms in the long-running wars with the English. This battle took place within the grounds of Carberry, and was certainly not an event for Scots to boast about, as 28,000 men commanded by the Earl of Arran were defeated by 14,000 English led by Protector Somerset. The trenches are still visible and the occasional cannon ball is still recovered. I loved that part of the estate and soaked up the history that drenched the area. The fourth Lord was Lord Treasurer of Scotland and died in 1638. A younger Elphinstone son was created Lord Balmerino and beheaded on Tower Hill for having supported Prince Charles Edward’s bid to regain the English and Scottish crowns for the House of Stuart in 1745.

  On her father’s side my mother was descended from the family of King Robert the Bruce, and as legend has it, from Macbeth, who was a much better King of Scots than Shakespeare gave him credit for. Another Strathmore ancestor was Janet, the widow of the 6th Lord Glamis, who was burned alive as a witch on the castle hill of Edinburgh ‘in the prime of her years and of singular beauty’. My maternal grandmother, Nina Cecilia Cavendish-Bentinck, was the great granddaughter of the 3rd Duke of Portland, who was twice Prime Minister in the reign of King George III. Had she been a son she would have succeeded as Duke. My grandmother also counted among her forbears King Henry VIII’s favourite sister, Mary Tudor, widow of King Louis XII of France, and that ill-fated teenage dupe, Lady Jane Grey, ‘the nine days Queen’, who was beheaded on the orders of Queen Mary — Bloody Mary — the legitimate heir to her brother, King Edward VI.

  Carberry was set in unremarkable countryside, but it took at least two hours to walk around the perimeter of the estate, and inside we were in our own little world. In the winter we skated and played ice hockey on the pond, which, in my view didn’t quite qualify as a lake. There was also a hill called Mary’s Mount, because it was exactly where Mary, Queen of Scots surrendered to the Confederate Lords and began her long trail to the scaffold, via plots and counter plots, at Fotheringay. It was from there too, that Bothwell, her third husband, fled, later dying quite mad in a dank prison cell in a Danish castle. There is a stone monument on top of the hill commemorating Mary’s capture.

>   The house was built around a square fourteenth-century keep and had large additions. The front hall was the ground floor of the keep and had a huge fireplace. Off that were the billiard room and the gents’ loo. A passage led to the garden hall with a door into the sunken garden. My father had a smoking room nearby, and one flight up was the drawing room, a big L-shaped chamber with three elegant Adam mantelpieces; the north and south libraries and the dining room. Another staircase led to the armoury, the first floor of the original castle. The walls were covered with weapons of every kind and in a tiny anteroom was the supposed entrance to a tunnel used as an escape route in time of danger. As a child I found this rather scary, yet definitely exciting, though I would try to avoid ever entering it alone.

  There were ten spare bedrooms for guests; my parents’ bedroom and dressing room; a bedroom each for us children, and tucked away, staff bedrooms. The servants had their own upstairs and downstairs regime, as always happened in the big houses of the day. At the top of the pile were the butler and the housekeeper, who was entitled to double deference because her sister was the housekeeper at Buckingham Palace; the cook, and my mother’s personal maid. These last three ladies were given the honorific of ‘Mrs’, regardless of their marital status. If the feminist movement had been in existence then, I do not doubt that they would have a word or two to say about that. Equally I can imagine the formidable ladies concerned rising up in horror if anyone had addressed them as ‘Ms’.