LADY IN WAITING - LADY ANNE GLENCONNER
Maid of Honour to the Queen, Lady Anne revealed the secret of the special dress much to everyone’s alarm
When Helena Bonham-Carter was cast as Princess Margaret in ‘The Crown’ she paid a visit to her closest childhood friend Lady Anne Glenconner. “As Helena walked through the door, I noticed a resemblance between her and Princess Margaret., a similar glint of micheivous ntelligence in her gaze. “ With her was the actress Nancy Carroll who was to play Anne. “ I found myself reflecting back on our childhood spent together in Norfolk, the thirty years I’d been her Lady in waiting, all the times we had found ourselves in hysterics, and the ups and down of both our lives” when they left, she decided to tell her own story, ‘both hilarious and awful. . Even to me unbelievable”
Seldom does anyone begin her own memoir as a colossal disappointment. Lady Anne was. As a female she could not inherit her father’s estate, its farms, its land its pictures its silver or its money. She grew up in the knowledge that the place would never be hers, and with a father who as he had two further daughters, realized that the line was ‘lost’ and his estate would go to strangers.
Holkham Hall and its grounds along with a staggering 27,000 acres of land was her home. She was the eldest child of the Earl of Leicester and his wife also the daughter of an Earl, whose countryseat was Wimpole Hall. Her book is an account of a life of aristocratic privilege. The Hall itself was so large that raw eggs in a bain-marie would be cooked by the time the ‘children’s footmen’ brought them to the nursery. Anne’s 19-year-old mother never bathed, changed or fed her when she was a baby, in common with any lady of her class. The world they inhabited was crowded with servants on a colossal scale
Princess Margaret was a constant playmate and the two little girls would ride their trikes down the corridors of Holkam’s great house, whilst sister Princess Elizabeth looked on disapprovingly, she is five years older than Anne whilst Princess Margaret was a mere three. The Earls of Leicester had not always been so found of the close royal neighbours ‘ a mere half an hour’s drive away’ at Sandringham, although they ‘shot’ together on each other’s estates. In my favourite quotation of the book, Lady Anne recounts how Queen Mary had once rung proposing she and the King come over to see them only for her great grandfather to be heard bellowing ‘Come over? Good God no! We don’t want to encourage them!’ Yet the next King and Queen attended her coming out ball at Holkham. That’s how grand the family was.
Lady Anne and Princess Margaret, stayed close friends, cycling their trikes around the long gloomy corridors of the vast house, until the outbreak of the Second World War when Anne and her sister Carey went to live in Scotland with their cousins to avoid the feared invasion of Britain through Norfolk as was generally feared. Anne’s father was in the Scots Guards, and set off for Egypt to fight, her mother went with him ‘ to help with war work’. It was a sad parting. Her mother told seven year old Anne to ‘take charge now. “If we had known how long she was gong to be away, it would have been even harder, in fact she and my father would be gone for three years’. Play with her cousins along with a plot to assassinate Hitler with poison hatched with her sister, took up the years in Scotland. But there were dark patches. A new nanny took over. Miss Bead was cruel, she punished Anne every night, ‘whether she had been good or not all day’, by tying her hands to the bed head. Her little sister was too terrified to undo her, and Anne imagined her mother must have ordered this treatment. Like so much abuse, it went on and on stifled by the children’s fear. Only later, still undiscovered, Miss Bead was dismissed. Lady Anne does not disclose exactly how long it lasted. For a child it must have seemed forever.
With her millionaire husband Colin Tenant, Lord Glenconner - never half so grand as the Coke family
Shocking episodes emerge in Lady Anne’s account of her life, disclosed with little drama. Her coming out ball was a post war affair but a spectacular event with wonderful food prepared for days despite the meager rations everywhere, yet she remember it as lonely with a dearth of young men. Whilst ‘coming out’ as the process of mixing with fellow aristocrats was called, a time for a young woman to get a husband, she fell in love for the first time, with Johnnie Althorp, the future Earl Spencer. ‘I was treading on air for days’ she reports of her adoration of this handsome young marquis. He propsed marriage and they were quietly engaged , they only told parents for the time being. Lady Anne was a paying guest at the London house of Lady Fermoy ( recall her from ‘The Crown’?) who had a cottage on the Sandringham estate. Lady Fermoy encouraged Anne to bring her fiancé round to meet her. “That was my mistake” remarks Lady Anne. Lady Fermoy quickly got her own daughter, only fifteen years old at the time, back from school and introduced her to Johnnie. At the next large social occasion Royal Ascot; Lady Anne had a royal invitation to stay at Windsor Castle and join the King and Queen in their coach ‘it was like being in a huge pram’. ‘The crowds cheered as they set eyes on the Royal Family.’ Anne expected to meet up with Johnnie but he was nowhere to be seen. There was no word from him “ I spent the day managing to pretend to be as happy as everybody else “but back at Windsor Castle” I realized he must have been avoiding me. I felt awful. I did a lot of hard swallowing in a bid not to cry”. Something was very wrong.
‘Later I found out that his father Earl Spencer had told him not marry me because I had Trfeusis blood. Labeled ‘mad blood’ or ‘bad blood ‘because the Bowes Lyons girls, Nerissa and Katherine had been put in an asylum and were never visited by anyone in the Royal Family to whom they were related through Queen Elizabeth’. Johnnie went on to marry Frances daughter of the aforementioned Lady Fermoy, a woman who later was to testify against her own daughter when Frances was divorced from the charming Johnnie, so that custody of her daughter’s children, including the future Princess Diana then aged only five years old, went to their father.
Lady Anne ‘spent the summer in a very gloomy mood’ and eventually after many months, her mother suggested she go off toe American to try and the pottery that the struggling Oldham estate had begun to produce (the idea of a German Prisoner of War who had made his own kiln whilst incarcerated on the estate and surrounded by guards. Although this business began to thrive and get the Leicester family out of a hole, this man remains nameless.) Lady Anne had already been successful as an unlikely travelling salesperson all round England (hard to believe but she did it) and set off on the Queen Mary with a suitcase of samples for the Yanks. ‘ I was travelling steerage’ Lady Anne tells us sweetly and shared a cabin with four other girls” all of whom spent the passage in their quarters, ‘they were terribly sick’ but I wasn’t. I went and slept outside in the corridor which happened to have a sofa.”
No one could accuse Lady Anne of being either stuffy, out of touch. Her most valued part of education was in London at the House of Citizenship where the girls would visit engineering projects, libararies, law courts, factories, schools everything to do with how the country was run. Nor is she afraid of telling awkward stories, straight and without drama. She recalls the visit of the Duke of Edinburgh in 1948 when she was sixteen, ‘he was rather intimidating. But he was very handsome’. He often came to shoot with my father. He rang up my mother one day with an unusual request. He explained he was inventing a new game, inspired by Battleship, and that as part of the game he needed photographs of Carey and me dressed up as maids.” My mother thought nothing of it and my father who was totally in love with the Royal Family would have said yes to anything’
The Duke took the pictures, Lady Anne as a maid with a feather duster and Carey, then fourteen years old with an apron,” I’m not sure what happened to the finished game. He never mentioned it again.”
Her book is entirely enthralling, a world we know nothing of, and a life lived between immense grandeur and glamour – and its opposites . Lady Anne tells her story straight. To read this book is to enter into a world of surprises and often nasty shocks. Anne’s husband Colin Tenant was a ‘dastardly’ charmer. His treatment of her was so appalling , a misogynistic sadist I concluded and I nearly put the book down half way through..I began to realise that birth into the world of the aristocracy was more of a curse than a privilege, something that viewings of ‘The Crown’ have revealed at an even higher level. The hierarchy clearly breeds resentments, unhappiness and an unrealistic existence its members cling to even as they often feel trapped within its Byzantine rules and procedures. Lady Anne was thrilled to become a maid of honour to the Queen at her Coronation, but it was just this status which attracted the errant Tenant and all his exhausting hang-ups. She got the news when she was a super successful travelling saleswoman in the United States. You cannot help but think it life would have been much better for lovely Anne had she never had that ‘exciting call’ and had gone on to marry an American.
Her life with Colin Tennant was anything but ordinary. And used to eccentric tantrum prone men, she deals with him with admirable cool. Once thwarted on a British Airways flight to Mustique because he was not in First Class with Princess Margaret and his wife, he hurled himself into the aisle in ordinary class and threshed about screaming . Anne heard his desperate cries and was about to go and mediate but Princess Margaret pulled rank and told her ‘Sit down Anne’,Colin left the plane under Police escort and arrived three days later. Not a word was said.
Actually Princess Margaret emerges really well from this memoir. Lady Anne remembers her a great fun , a real piano playing entertainer . Her love life was very sad and if anyone appears as a ‘right bastard’ it is Tony Armstrong Jones who persecuted his wife ; he would leavie her unspeakably cruel messages in her drawers, “I hate you “ and rev the engine of his super charged bike outside her window when she had a migraine. Everyone appears to have got the wrong partner although Lady Anne makes. in the second part of the book, a heroic job out of the many appalling catastrophes life dealt her - tragedies which made the antics of Colin appear minor. As a mother she has to rise to heartbreaking crises few people could handle as devotedly..
Even so , her last outing with Colin, now Lord Glenconner was back to his old tricks. He had promised to take her to Verona to the glamorous al fresco opera there for a gala production of Nabucco. It didn’t begin well. He objected to the seats but they were moved the the front row of the massive theatre. But when the highpoint of Nabucco arrived , the world famous Chorus of the Hebrew Slaves, a sublime but subdued hymn of great beauty, soothing and spiritual ,Colin had other ideas He began to moan and protest. He wanted his butler Kent . Lady Anne was beyond embarrassed when other opera goers began to object to Colin’s increasingly loud protest. She put a blanket over his head to quieten him down (like a demented parrot). It worked. But at the end of the chorus, the Conductor stepped to the front of the stage and announced
“I think we should do that over again “
They did. Unfortunately life is something you have to get right the first time. And Lady Anne certainly did her best with that, very much against the odds.
