Outrageous Fortune: Growing Up at Leeds Castle (5 page)

Christabel Hart, whose father died leaving little money when she was fourteen, enjoyed every aspect of life to its fullest extent except sex, to which she had an aversion. She adored the company of men but infinitely preferred brushing down one of her hunters after a long day out chasing the fox to even contemplating the act of physical intimacy with a man. Both before and after her marriage to Stilts, she stayed the night with a number of different men, including two of the corespondents in the first trial of summer 1922—Flick Bradley and Capt. Lionel Cross—but she never shared a bed nor had intercourse with any of them. Her proof lay in the examinations she underwent after discovering she was expecting a baby, by several eminent Harley Street gynaecologists, which revealed she was still, in medical terms, a virgin.

What got the papers, king, and country all in a lather were the intimate details produced in evidence during the first two trials, evidence that was available uncensored for the entire world to scrutinize and elaborate upon at its leisure. My grandmother’s letters, some of which contained phrases such as, “I need hardly say your wife has a vast following of adoring young men. I’ve four in the Bucks Light Infantry. They are priceless and so naughty: so is wife!” did not help her cause. Christabel loved using the word “naughty.” For her it was in tune with the absurdity of the whole sexual charade between a man and a woman. When Stilts was still serving in his submarine in 1919 and Christabel was in Switzerland with her mother, she wrote to him, “Darlingest old thing, I am so in love with a Dago young man. You’d have spotted him as my future fate the moment you set eyes on him … he is very slim and has lovely hands. Your very naughty wife, C.” It was comments such as these, read out loud during the prosecution’s opening statements in the first trial, that caused a lady juror to come over faint and ask to be excused.

Sir John Simon made my grandmother write down the names of all the men with whom she had stayed the night in a hotel. This she was obliged to do in silence in front of the whole court. Ultimately, though, it was the sex talk that pricked up all ears. In the early 1920s it was considered as raunchy as it gets. “Penetration” was not then a word used in polite society—indeed, any society—but it got tossed around in court (along with all its associated actions) like current-day footballers discussing a night out at a brothel.

On the weekend of December 18–19, 1920, Stilts and Granny A went to stay at Oakley House, where Stilts’s mother, Lady Ampthill, in an effort to be encouraging, put them in the same bedroom. According to my grandmother, Stilts proceeded to force himself upon her (essentially to try to rape her—as he had apparently done on a previous occasion), but she refused him. She described what took place, in court, under oath, as “Hunnish scenes,” and her testimony was simplicity itself: “He attempted to effect penetration but I would not allow it.”

In the morning Christabel took a bath in the same water recently vacated by her husband, and it was this occasion which led some to speculate that she had made “injudicious use” of a sponge with which her husband had just “washed himself,” thereby absorbing his sperm. Whatever the method of conception (and it will forever remain a mystery as to how far Stilts’s penis had made progress the night before), my father was born October 15, 1921, and the doctors all agreed the ten-month pregnancy was possible.

*   *   *

The first trial was inconclusive on the paternity question, but in the second my grandmother was found guilty of adultery with an unknown man. The opposing legal team, this time headed by Sir Edward Marshall Hall, a barrister known for his grandstanding approach, had tried tricking her in court:

“I would die for my child,” Christabel had said.

“You would lie for that child?” Marshall Hall asked.

“Die,” she said.

“And you would lie for the child.”

“Lying for a child is not necessary.”

“You would do everything: you would die for it; you would lie for a child.”

“No, that I would not.”

“You would die for a child, but you would not lie for a child?”

“Exactly.”

Marshall Hall did succeed, though, in tricking her into finding a resemblance between my father and pictures of children he hinted might be Stilts’s but were not.

John Wells wrote in his book
The House of Lords
:

Whether it was the effect on him of Christabel’s high-spirited performance in court or Marshall Hall’s oratory, Mr Justice Hill clearly felt the need to influence the jury against her. He asked them to consider which was the stronger character: if Mrs Russell was bent on having her own way, she usually got it. Her letter about the rows of co-respondents suggested a frivolous attitude to adultery. He asked them to imagine her in the arms of a more persistent Hun than her husband: ‘If the respondent gave herself to another man, is he likely to have stopped short of complete possession?’ This, in view of the unanimous findings of all the doctors of her technical virginity, was scandalous misdirection.

My grandmother refused to accept being branded an adulteress, and she appealed to the High Court; but the appeal was dismissed. So in March 1924, having scraped together all the funds she could, she took her case to the House of Lords—the final appeal.

*   *   *

Everything turned on a judgement given in 1777 by the 1st Earl of Mansfield, who had once dismissed charges against a witch accused of walking upside down in the air stating that anyone who’d seen her doing so was perfectly entitled to do the same. He was a leading barrister and judge in the mid-eighteenth century, and one of England’s most respected lord chief justices. In
Goodright v. Moss
, the best-known paternity case of its day, he stated: “The law of England is clear that testimony of a father or mother cannot be admitted to bastardize the issue born after marriage.… It is a rule founded on decency, morality, and policy, that they shall not be permitted to say after marriage that they have had no connection.”

The Law Lords agreed with Lord Mansfield, and two months later my grandmother emerged victorious and my father was restored as the legitimate heir to the Ampthill title. “I knew I would win eventually,” she said. “Right always triumphs in the end.”

The case saw the introduction into law of two new Acts, the Legitimacy Act of 1924, and the Judicial Proceedings (Regulation of Reports) Act of 1926, which restricted reporting of English divorce cases solely to the facts given in the judgement and banned making public the actual evidence itself. King George was rumoured to have been pleased by that.

The Ampthills were now in poor financial shape after spending a fortune on legal fees and private investigators, but my grandmother continued to do well with her dress business and was able to afford to give my father an excellent education at Cheam prep school (where the Duke of Edinburgh went) and the newly (1923) established Stowe School (where, in my day, Sir Richard Branson and Roger Hodgson of Supertramp fame went), previously a Georgian ducal palace one-sixth of a mile wide with six hundred rooms.

*   *   *

The reopening of the whole painful affair by John Russell in 1973 obliged my father once more to suffer the indignities associated with the horribly awkward “Russell Baby” saga and to resume battle-stations for his family title and his mother’s honour, one last time. True to form, Christabel, aged seventy-eight, straightaway decided to take off for Australia and ride across part of the outback, leaving my father—all man, no hint of jelly—to handle the matter. So while Granny A was cutting out snakebites from her arm with a giant knife and driving a bus across Asia back to England without a driving licence or any form of insurance, my father went calmly and methodically about preparing the rebuttal to his half brother’s tendentious claim.

In February 1976 the Committee for Privileges, a select committee of the House of Lords, heard the case. The Committee was made up of Lord Wilberforce, three law lords, and five lay members of the House. A spirited effort was made by John Russell’s barrister, Harry Law, to introduce the old Lord Ampthill’s blood tests, but it was refused by the Committee, which agreed with Sir John Foster, my father’s counsel, that admitting such records would be to put my father in “an Agatha Christie situation” (the tests could have been tampered with or mixed up in the laboratory). In April the Lords ruled, for a second time, in my father’s favour, and he was confirmed beyond doubt as the 4th Baron Ampthill. As the icing on an ancient cake, my father was deemed by fair-minded observers to be the spitting image of the man who claimed not to be his father.

“If ever there was a family blessed by fortune, where the birth of a child was attended by an evil spirit bearing a baneful gift, liable to frustrate all the blessings, it was the Ampthill Russells,” said Lord Simon of Glaisdale, one of the nine peers on the Committee. Lord Wilberforce concurred, insisting that it was time to close this chapter in our family’s history.

My grandmother did not live long enough to hear, or witness, this final scene in her amazing life story. She died peacefully in a Galway hospital on February 16, 1976, aged eighty, close to the hunt country she had loved for so long. “I think it might be a good thing for the world to know that I have not one backward look that saddens or distresses me,” she had said before departing for Australia. “I have loved every hour from one day old to seventy-eight.” No more appropriate epitaph could there be.

*   *   *

On Tuesday, October 26, 1999, Britain’s Labour Party, under the leadership of Tony Blair, passed the House of Lords Act and, in the words of Lord Strathclyde, the Conservative Party leader in the House of Lords, “took a knife and scored a giant gash across the face of history.” Over seven hundred hereditary peers (the old aristocracy) were summarily banned from taking their seats and voting in the Upper House as they had done for seven hundred years. However, ninety-two of them were permitted to remain until the next round of “reform”—when the tumbrels could once again be summoned—and my father was one of those who received a vote of confidence from his fellow peers.

The amusing Harrow-educated (Eton & Harrow, Oxford & Cambridge, Tweedledum & Tweedledee) Marxist journalist Francis Wheen had a thing or two to say in
The Guardian
about titled grown-ups vying for space in their favourite, once entitled, institution: “the pathetic, hilarious spectacle of these lumbering beasts sleepwalking towards extinction would make a perfect sequel to Walking with Dinosaurs.” Because all the hereditary peers had been asked to write a brief summary of the reasons why their fellow peers should vote for them, their natural inclination not to blow their own horns left them open to ridicule. “It would be as vainglorious to proclaim a personal manifesto,” the Earl of Onslow wrote, “as it would be arrogant to list any achievement.” Having no time for, nor wishing to give credence to, the scope of the aristocracy’s contributions to Britain over a millennium, Wheen turned his attention to my father:

“He joined the Upper House in 1976 after a two-year battle with his younger half-brother—who pointed out that the marriage of Geoffrey’s parents was unconsummated, as the baroness had revealed at the time of her divorce. She spent only one night in bed with her husband [not true] during which he engaged in Hunnish practices, otherwise known as masturbation … I fear he [my father] has missed a Unique Selling Point here. Of all the candidates in next week’s election, Ampthill is the only one who can justly claim to have earned his seat in parliament by proving that his father was a wanker.”

4.

T
HE
L
AUNCHING OF THE
D
UCKS

My mother, Susan Winn, grew up between Leeds Castle and Nostell Priory, where her father’s family had lived for three hundred years and which is now the property of the National Trust. It is a testament to her wonderful character that with two such extraordinary places to call home she did not turn out to be remotely spoiled. She was a beautiful woman who dressed immaculately, but usually not in the latest fashions because she considered such things to be extravagant. She had refined manners (she never used coarse language) and odd habits. When something bad happened—for instance, some woman once crashed into our Mini as we were driving down Egerton Terrace when I was nine—all one would hear from her, even at her most strident, would be a heavily emphasized, “Oh, but how
maddening
!”

Some say it’s an English trait to exaggerate in a downward direction. It is. Across the great class divide, when the wind howls and temperatures drop below zero it is “a little chilly outside.” According to one of my uncles, obscenely frigid conditions were inevitably “a lovely day to be out!”, especially if there were some pheasant, woodcock, or duck to be shot. I liked the way my mother shook hyperbole on its head. I tend to do the same.

Much to my father’s amusement and annoyance, frequently in equal proportions, my mother hoarded newspapers and magazines and was often to be seen reading the
Daily Express
not just from the previous day but from the previous year. As time passed, her collection grew, and cupboards started to fill up with editions of
Tatler
and
Harper’s Bazaar
from the 1940s. On the weekend drive down to the castle, suitcases and newspaper bundles fought for available space in the trunk of the Bentley R Type, a gift to my parents from Granny B. Later in life my mother frequently opted to wear eccentrically colourful ensembles and usually carried them off with style. Her dazzling, alluring forget-me-not blue eyes radiated warmth and kindness, and her personality, though given to moods, was generous and imbued with a contagious sense of fun. When discussing the American branch of the family she enjoyed referring to us as “the poor cousins,” which amused and confused me greatly. If we were poor, living between a large house in Knightsbridge, London, and a fairy-tale castle in Kent, where, exactly, did that place everyone else?

*   *   *

What she meant was that in comparison with John Hay (“Jock”) Whitney, Granny B’s first cousin, who was U.S. ambassador to the Court of St James from 1957 to 1961 and founder of the world’s first venture capitalist firm, J.H. Whitney & Co., we were poor. During the 1970s Jock was considered one of the world’s richest men, with a fortune that would almost place him in Bill Gates territory in today’s terms.