Wednesday 24th September 2014
We mourn the loss of Debo. Robert Nevil couldn’t bear her but she wrote the best opening of any newspaper article in the Graph ever: ‘What are tiaras for?’
She couldn’t stand reading. Evelyn Waugh gave her a copy of his biography of Ronald Knox;she remarked, ‘I would have looked no further but a friend who was with me at the time happened to notice that all the pages were blank: the perfect present for the non-reader.’
Non-reading turned out to be an excellent starting point for writing at which she was very good.
It must have been in 2010 that I went all the way in my Official Car to Chatsworth from London and back in a day because someone told me that if you went to Edensor village open day and fete you would see her and she’d give you eggs (or her butler would). But by the time I got there she’d gawn in and there was a notice saying, ‘The house isn’t open this year – sorry.’ I always meant to go again the following year to Edensor village fete but never did.
Now she will lie in the churchyard next door to her final residence. As she used to say latterly, ‘Not far to go.’
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I’m rather with Robert Nevil. Surely this must mark the end of PLRG nob-worship, which is so last century.
Shall we go Mao-ist? Madame Mao was a perfect dear
Unfort Poor Little Rich Gays here and thoroughout the world have come out in support of Debo: Rufus Pitman, Harry Rollo, Reggie Cresswell and Sebastian Archer in New York. Robert Nevil favours Nancy as more Leftie and thought Debo was horrid to Jessica about the supposed missing photographs from the album at Chatsworth. Debo made remarks and money. She put all her husband’s unacknowledged mistresses together on one table at a Chatsworth function and said he was never boring. She would have been perfect for the new English Parliament. Really she should have been its Speaker
My objection to Debo is that everyone said she was ‘the nice one’, which wasn’t true. Nancy not exactly Left, but much much funnier. You forgot to mention Debo’s complaint that Jessica’s house in America had a ‘peculiar smell’ because of a black family living in the basement. Such a card!
I thought the black family were living underneath the house rather than in the basement. Harry Rollo will know because he’s been there. Yes, Debo was a fearful old racist, just as Diana said even latterly ‘I don’t much care for Jewish people.’ Debo also rather beastly about Nancy never being loved and not having a husband when her own marriage was a bit criked with Andrew plastered and multi-mistress-ed. Wilfully over-looked that Nancy wrote some lasting books. All the same, Debo’s book ‘The House’ containing the sentence ‘This wallpaper was here in Granny’s time’ and the other one about the highways and by-ways of the Chatsworth estate where she says, ‘It used to be one car per house now it’s one per bedroom’ are such bliss and in those letters with Paddy Leigh-Fermor hers are much more fun.