DIANA’S GRANDFATHER DEVOTED his life to the preservation of Althorp. He had little time for frivolity and had no patience with fools or children. A blunt man, “he would say and do precisely what he thought true and right without the faintest regard for the reaction his words or deeds might produce.”
Educated at Harrow and Trinity College, Cambridge, he had been wounded in the shoulder and leg in the First World War. His experiences at the front and the brutality of battle marked him for life. His wounds, though not life-threatening, had caused him considerable and lasting pain and might have accounted in part for his frequent ill-humour. He became the 7th Earl Spencer in 1922, aged thirty, on the death of his father, Charles Robert, Earl Spencer, three years after he and Cynthia were married, and two years before the birth of his son and heir, Diana’s father.
When he was eight Johnnie Spencer was sent away to board at St. Peter’s Court School in Broadstairs. The regime was strict, the dormitories unheated, curtainless and grim. Parents were allowed to visit only once a term. Johnnie recalled that his mother made these trips alone or with his older sister Anne. At thirteen, in the summer of 1937, he went on to Eton. He was not popular there, perhaps because he liked playing tricks on his fellows—he once put a worm in another boy’s food.
In his senior year, as was customary, he had a “fag,” a younger boy who had to do chores for him. “He wasn’t as fierce as some one heard about,” said John Bovill, “and didn’t beat me much. I had to light the fire in his room, make his toast for tea and run his errands. There was a tuck shop where you could get some fried bread, which we called rafts, with an egg or sausage on it. In wartime, though [coal and sticks were scare and a fire was difficult to start]—woe betide you if you didn’t get it going … Toast was cooked in front of the fire, and when on one occasion I burned it, Johnnie gave me six of the best with a leather belt.”
After Eton, Johnnie went to Sandhurst for a year before joining the Army in 1942 at eighteen. After his initial training he received his commission and, in the spring of 1944, joined the Royal Scots Greys. He fought in Normandy with the Tank Corps, a traumatic experience. “We have been existing in a world of noise, ruin and the choking dust of a boiling summer,” he wrote in his diary. “Evil sights and the stench of burned flesh have become more and more commonplace.” In August 1944, when his regiment was fighting near Caen and overcoming German forces, he recorded, “Everywhere in ditches, in carts, in streams and on the roads lay scattered hundreds of German bodies rapidly decaying under the August sun.” Like many others, he tried to obliterate the haunting images in heavy drinking.
He fought hard and well, but even so he was unable to win the admiration of his company. “He had all the signs of never having been given his head,” his senior commanding officer confessed. “He was very nice but very stupid, very slow and lacking in go … It was all squashed out of him by a domineering father. He had beautiful manners and was always correct, but was one of the stupidest officers I had at that time met. I recall a private soldier remarking to me that you could set his trousers on fire and it would be ten minutes before he realized his bun was burning—though the word used, needless to say, was not bun.”
During the war, Althorp was used by the armed forces as temporary headquarters for soldiers about to be sent to France. The park was a mass of tents and although Jack Spencer considered himself a patriot, he was not pleased at the presence of the troops. He claimed they blocked his view of his estate and demanded that the men run past windows that faced the best vistas.
His father’s wartime injuries and their shared experience of war might have brought Johnnie Spencer closer to his father, but they were always at loggerheads. The Earl was a domineering father and Johnnie never seemed able to please him. Jack Spencer was accustomed to having his own way.
In the early 1950s, when Jack Spencer heard that the family vault under St. Mary’s Church in Great Brington, which adjoined the Althorp estate, was overcrowded and that many of the coffins were disintegrating, he cremated the remains of his ancestors, to the disapproval of “his more conventional neighbours.” The villagers felt he had committed an act of desecration. However, Earl Spencer dismissed their objections as misguided.
One of the few amusing stories told about Jack Spencer had to do with his penchant for dark green Rolls-Royces. His chauffeur had strict orders “never to turn his head when the Earl was in the car, but to start the car and move off when he heard the door slam.” One day Jack was being driven to Buckingham Palace, in his official attire as honorary sheriff of Northampton. On the return journey he ordered the chauffeur to stop near some thick bushes by the roadside and got out to relieve himself. A strong wind was blowing, the car door slammed shut and the chauffeur drove off, “leaving the Earl stranded and he had to hitch a lift in full regalia from a passing motorist.” The story became part of family lore but was never repeated in front of the Earl himself.
Another anecdote recalls how Jack once entered the Long Library at Althorp where his cousin Winston Churchill was researching a book on the Duke of Marlborough. On finding Churchill smoking a cigar, the Earl “ripped it right out of his mouth”: he allowed no one to smoke there for fear of damage to Althorp’s wealth of rare books.
Cynthia’s soft nature did not offset her husband’s gruffness, but it did contribute to his social acceptance. More importantly, in personal terms, it had given her son, Johnnie, who she tried desperately hard to protect from his father’s ill-temper without much success, a home where love and warmth was accessible and where Jack Spencer’s authoritarian rule could be somewhat modified, if only in small ways, by her intervention. But she had long ago given up trying to mediate between her grown son and her aging husband. Rather, Cynthia turned her attention to her grandchildren who she sensed, with great sadness, were presently caught between two warring parents.
The Honourable Diana Frances Spencer was born in her parents’ bedroom at Park House on 1 July 1961, as the sun was setting and shadows falling across the vast rear lawns and the open fields where her father’s cows grazed. Her mother had been in labour since early that morning. Diana was her third daughter; her only son, John, born eighteen months earlier, had lived just ten hours. Frances knew that unless she could deliver a son, Althorp, the Spencer fortunes and the title would pass on Johnnie’s death to his nephew.
Her first words to the midwife who had attended Diana’s birth were, “Is it a boy?”
When she was told she had a girl, weighing seven pounds twelve ounces, it is claimed she said, “Johnnie will be so disappointed.” And, indeed, although he loved his three daughters, Viscount Althorp badly wanted a son.
“Diana wasn’t many hours old,” Ray Hunt, the former groundsman at Park House recalled, “[When] Viscount Althorp sent for me and asked if I would put the lounge television in the bedroom for his wife so that she could have a telly to watch in bed. [He] and I carried this monstrous console television up the staircase and put it in the bedroom. Lady Althorp was in bed with Diana and said to me, ‘Come have a look at the little brat, right?’ She was laughing because she didn’t mean it and I went over and had a look—and she was beautiful, a beautiful baby.”
Shortly after Diana’s birth, Frances visited a series of Harley Street specialists to undergo tests to determine why she could not deliver a healthy boy. In the early sixties it was not yet commonly known that a child’s sex is determined by its father. It was a painful and humiliating experience for her, compounded by post-natal depression. Johnnie and Frances quarrelled endlessly, their raised voices echoing through Park House, and Frances suffered constantly from migraine headaches, which made the sound of her three children at play unbearable.
Before her marriage to Johnnie Spencer, the eighteen-year-old Frances Roche, daughter of Lord and Lady Fermoy, had been free-spirited, cheerful, attractive and popular with her “set.” She was a skilful dancer, but not gifted in any of the arts—a disappointment to her mother who was a talented musician.
It was in 1953, at a dance at Holkham Hall, the nearby home of the Earl and Countess of Leicester, that Frances met Johnnie Spencer, Viscount Althorp. He was slim and tanned, his red hair slicked back to frame his high forehead and his well-defined features. He had recently completed a tour of duty as equerry to Queen Elizabeth II and the Duke of Edinburgh, and was at Sandringham for the weekend as a guest. He was about to become engaged to Lady Anne Coke, eldest daughter of the Leicesters. Anne had been a maid of honour to the Queen at her coronation and there was much excitement in the county over her expected betrothal.
However, from the moment Johnnie set eyes on Frances as she whirled around the dance floor in her escort’s arms he was drawn to her. At one point she caught him staring at her, came over and asked if he wanted to dance with her. He accepted and hardly left her side for the rest of the evening.
“It was a terrible scandal when Johnnie Spencer ran out on Lady Anne,” a contemporary recalled, and added, “The Fermoys were nothing”—at least, not in comparison with the Leicesters, who had held their earldom since Elizabeth I had granted it to Robert Dudley. However, Johnnie was smitten and had never before been pursued in quite the same fashion. In fact, until he had met Anne, who was far more reserved than Frances, he had not had much success with women. Now thirty, twelve years older than the impetuous Frances, he was being urged by his father “to settle down with a girl of good stock and raise a family, to include a male heir.” Johnnie proposed a few months after their fateful meeting.
Frances was the youngest bride to be married at Westminster Abbey since the turn of the century. Only two or three weddings are held there each year: to qualify for the privilege you must be either a member of the Royal Family, or closely connected with it, a holder of the Order of the Bath, or have served the Abbey in some capacity. At Lady Fermoy’s request, the Queen agreed that the wedding could be held at the Abbey, most likely because Frances was marrying the future Earl Spencer. His family, after all, had served monarchs for centuries.
Lady Fermoy devoted her time for the next three months to directing the wedding preparations, like a general preparing for battle. Her headquarters were at her London home in Wilton Place, Belgravia. Seventeen hundred people were invited to the service but only eight hundred to the reception. Weeding out the unlucky nine hundred without offending some of England’s “best” families was Lady Fermoy’s hardest task.
Frances and Johnnie were married on 1 June 1954, in the presence of nine members of the Royal Family—the Queen, the Duke of Edinburgh, the Queen Mother, Princes Margaret, Marina, Duchess of Kent, Princess Alexandra, the Duke and Duchess of Gloucester, and the Princess Royal.* The Daily Mail called it “the wedding of the year,” and Lady Fermoy watched proudly as her daughter signed the register just two pages after Princess Elizabeth and Lieutenant Philip Mountbatten.
Frances looked young and ethereally lovely in a white faille wedding gown embroidered all over with crystals, which were interspersed with small floral sprays of hand-cut diamonds on the bodice. The magnificent Spencer diamond tiara held her veil in place. Bride and groom walked under the raised swords of a guard of honour mounted by Johnnie’s regiment, the Royal Scots Greys. The reception was held at St. James’s Palace. Lady Fermoy was bursting with pride: her daughter had married one of the country’s most eligible men.
Lady Fermoy, née Ruth Sylvia Gill, was the daughter of an Aberdeenshire landowner. She was a talented pianist and as a young woman had been accepted as a student by the piano virtuoso Alfred Cortot. After four years’ study at the Paris Conservatory under his personal instruction, she returned to Great Britain and began what appeared to be a promising career with a performance at the Royal Festival Hall in the presence of King George V and Queen Mary. Shortly afterwards, however, she met Maurice Burke Roche, the 4th Baron Fermoy, who was considered somewhat exotic, having been raised in New York City by his American mother, the divorced heiress Fanny Work.
Frank Work, Fanny’s father, was one of America’s wealthiest entrepreneurs. He was born on 10 February 1819, in Chillicothe, Ohio, the son of John Work, a civil engineer, who died when Frank and his younger brother, Clinton, were still in their teens. Frank had three great loves: horses, swimming, and an overriding ambition to make enough money to move his mother from Dogsburg, the poorer section of Chillicothe, and make all the townsfolk sit up and take notice. He also loved to shock the town elders.
As a young boy, he would gallop naked astride a gaunt grey horse the length of the main street of Chillicothe on his way home from swimming in the river. As he passed the market house, people would throw fruit and vegetables at him, but the barrage never slowed him down. When a teacher at his school whipped him for his behaviour, Frank took his small savings and ran away from home. He never saw his mother again—she died before he had made his fortune.
He went to New York where he found a job in a gas fittings store and ended up owning the company. As soon as he began to make money, he bought horses, which led to his friendship with Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt During the panic of 1873, the old Commodore lent Frank money to keep his business afloat then persuaded him to sell out and operate in stocks under his guidance. Within five years his fortune was estimated at $15 million. Frank was now an eminent member of New York society.
He married Ellen Wood, also from Chillicothe, and had two striking daughters, Fanny and Lucy. Nothing was too good for his girls, but Frank set down certain rules for them. Besides their presidential connections, one of his wife’s ancestors had been the American Revolutionary War hero Nathan Hale, who was hanged by the British as a spy and whose last words had been, “I regret that I have only one life to give to my country.” The American flag flew proudly over the Work mansion on Fifth Avenue and his daughters warned that they must marry American men or lose their rights to their inheritance.
Fanny, a lively young woman with luxuriant auburn hair and “amazing brown eyes,” was a childhood friend of Jennie Jerome Churchill, Winston Churchill’s American mother. On a four-month tour of Europe and Great Britain with her sister and her mother in 1879, Fanny was introduced by Jennie, at one of her large social gatherings at her London home, to the impoverished heir of the Irish barony of Fermoy, James Boothby Burke Roche. James had both seductive charm and devilishly good looks. Fanny fell wildly in love and accepted Fermoy’s proposal shortly before the family’s scheduled departure for New York. Despite her parents’ objections and warnings from friends that James would never settle down they were married in 1880.
The voices of doom proved right. James was both a philanderer and a spendthrift, and lost his wife’s money in extravagance and gambling. After eleven years of marital disharmony, when their son Maurice was eight Fanny returned to New York and divorced her husband. Frank Work reinstated her in his will. Fermoy’s attempt to win a large settlement for himself so infuriated Frank that he added a codicil stating that his grandson might inherit his fortune only if he never again set foot in Great Britain.
In 1903 Fanny, as great a rebel as her father, shocked society again by choosing as her second husband Aurel Batonyi, the Hungarian who managed her father’s stables. Once again Frank cut her out of his will, but reinstated her three years later when she divorced Batonyi, after he lost what money she had given him in poor investments and high living. Frank Work died in 1911 leaving Maurice heir to millions.
In 1929 the father Maurice had not seen since childhood died, making Maurice 4th Baron Fermoy, a title he relished although it came with no great house, property or income. Despite Frank’s stricture that none of his heirs leave the United States, Fanny went to Paris and became prominent in the “fast” international set of wealthy foreign divorcees and pleasure-seekers, while Maurice returned to Britain to adopt his impoverished barony.
Ruth Gill met Maurice Fermoy in 1930. She was twenty-two while he was forty-five and still considered one of Britain’s most eligible bachelors. Ruth was dazzled by his wealth, title and royal connections. One of his closest friends was the Duke of York, the future King George VI, and King George V, as a favour to his son, granted the new Lord Fermoy the lease on Park House, close to Sandringham. Ruth was so thrilled at the prospect of becoming Lady Fermoy and moving into this enchanted circle that she agreed to give up her musical career to marry Maurice. With her support he became Conservative MP for King’s Lynn, then mayor of the ancient coastal town.
Widowed at forty-six, which was too late for her to return to the concert stage; Lady Fermoy gave her time and energy to establishing an annual music festival at King’s Lynn with distinguished musicians like Yehudi Menuhin, Benjamin Britten, Peter Pears and Gerald Moore, with appearances by theatrical greats such as Dame Edith Evans, Dame Sybil Thorndike and Emlyn Williams. She inaugurated monthly noonday concerts in the town and contributed some of her collection of paintings to start the Fermoy Art Gallery, in what is now the King’s Lynn Guildhall. She always remained a close friend of Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother.
The lease of Park House, which Lady Fermoy found too large after her husband’s death, was given to Frances and Johnnie, who were then living in Gloucestershire. Lady Fermoy, as Woman of the Bedchamber to the Queen Mother,* travelled back and forth at various times of the year between the royal residences: Clarence House in London, Balmoral in Scotland, Sandringham in Norfolk and Windsor. She had small but comfortable private quarters on the Sandringham estate, and retained her London home where she entertained, when time permitted, with musical evenings.
Diana never knew her maternal grandfather, but Lady Fermoy was an important figure in her life. Like her older sister Sarah, Diana displayed an aptitude for the piano, which Lady Fermoy encouraged. She helped Diana with her early lessons, and played Mozart to her. As a treat she would take her grandchildren into King’s Lynn for tea at Ladyman’s—“the place to go for such an outing. Not too fancy, very homestyle,” recalled Elsie Byre, who worked there as a waitress. “There was a large balcony where the children liked to sit. There would be a big fuss if a child threw something down, even though it happened frequently. You know, one child would throw something over the railing—a wad of paper, something like that—and another would follow suit. Lady Fermoy came fairly regularly with the girls. She would order buns to go round. Diana—she was the youngest—always begged for and got a cream-filled bun when I would be taking their order.”
“I always felt different from anyone else,” Diana once said. “It was a very unhappy childhood. Parents were busy sorting themselves out Always seeing my mother crying. Daddy never spoke to us about it [and] we never asked questions.”
It wasn’t long before food became both solace and reward.
*The Princess Royal (1897–1965) was Mary, the younger sister of Edward VIII and George VI. She married Henry, Viscount Lascelles, 6th Earl of Harewood.
*Woman of the Bedchamber is an honorary position in the Households of the Queen and the Queen Mother. It involves some minor secretarial duties, writing letters or notes, and accompanying the Queen to public events, on tours, or simply as a companion.