Debo Looking Rather Dead «

Debo Looking Rather Dead

Monday 7th March 2016

No figure divides Poor Little Rich Gays more violently than Debo. Robert Nevil and Laura Malcolm could’t stand her on account of her cold treatment of other members of her family and general arse and grandeur. I have not cared: she did so much for decor, wrote a book called ‘The House’ (or ‘Hice’ in her pronunciation) all about doing up Chatsworth. Absolutely riveting especially for those that love possessions and antiques. Her every word was priceless. When Evelyn Waugh sent her an advance copy of his life of Ronald Knox, he wrote on the fly-leaf: ‘There is nothing here that will offend your Protestant sympathies.’ ‘I would have looked no further,’ Debo remarked, ‘but a friend who was with me at the time happened to notice that all the pages were blank. The perfect gift for the non-reader.’ A few years ago, I drove all the way to Chatsworth on a Saturday in my Official Car because I’d heard that at the Edensor Open Village Day (that’s the village for Chatsworth where she lived latterly) she was fully on view and you could go in her house and ask for eggs, whereupon she would enquire of her Butler whether there were any. But I was too late. By the time I got there she’d already gawn in and the house wasn’t open. I think she was beginning to fail. I heard a youngish woman saying to a small boy lower down in the village that they’d go up and see ‘Granny’. Then she was saying to someone else, ‘She’s getting rather vague.’ I’m sure they were talking about Debo and she must have been a Cavendish. To me it is beyond belief that Ducals are in the street and can be overheard.

So last week, I heard that her things were up for sale at Sotheby’s. I absolutely dashed last min to catch the viewing. They were putting Debo up for Auction. Well, I’ve heard that she didn’t get on with the new Duke, her son. The first thing I saw was her Lanvin denim gardening coat, plus a rather awful old chimney pot in which she kept walking sticks. Then there was the glass case room, with jewellery, bits of chicken junk, some dusty quite common glasses etc. You could imagine the heirs deciding what to discard. Debo’s dining room was mocked up in the next room except it was more of a garden room, all flimsy painted Regency furniture and a lot of floral and country fabric, even gingham. Some quite good, perfectly ordinary, antique sideboards or so on. Her drawing room, as mocked up, was almost at a three-piece suite level. Most bizarre was the bedroom. The suite was cane. Not particularly important and the bed presumably the one in which Debo died. They’d put a breakfast tray with eggs and toast on it. No, the whole effect couldn’t have made Debo look more dead and house-clearance.

I left bids on three pieces: a tapestry fender stool (big flowers on a chocolate ground), a tapestry carpet (chicken border) and the breakfast cups from Thomas Goode – they were lovely and I’ve been craving breakfast cups for ever and these were the Platonic ideal… they went for £6500. None of this stuff was actually worth a great deal but everything went for ten times the estimate, total £1.8 million.