Chapter Seven ‘We Fully Respect the Heritage…’
Chapter Seven
‘We fully respect the heritage…’
I have introduced Park House as a home, and now it is time to see it in a different light – as the place that brought Diana into the royal orbit from the day of her birth.
The pampered prince lavished further huge sums of his mother’s money on his Sandringham estate, rendering it a place of easy living.
One of Edward’s friends, the Marquess of Lincolnshire, reckoned Sandringham ‘the most comfortable [place] in England’, and generations of monarchs warmed to their royal rural idyll.
George V would call it ‘Dear Old Sandringham, the place that I love more than anywhere else in the world’, while his son George VI stated, ‘I have always been so happy here, and I love the place.’ The late Queen’s husband, Prince Philip, chose to see out most of his final years, after retirement, in a house on the Norfolk estate.
Park House, a mile from Sandringham House, had originally been built in the 1860s by the future Edward VII as a home for Lord Knollys, a favourite soldier-courtier whom he wanted on hand during his frequent stays at Sandringham.
Park House was a place you could put a trusted friend, without having to put up with them under your roof.
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A generation later George V offered use of Park House to my maternal grandparents, Maurice and Ruth Fermoy.
The King knew of the Fermoys’ close friendship with his second son, who would become George VI, and thought they would be good tenants for such a key property on the Royal Family’s favourite estate.
My grandfather Maurice had an interesting lineage, being related to eight US presidents, as well as figures as diverse as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Louisa May Alcott.
General George S. Patton, Humphrey Bogart and Orson Welles were among my American grandfather’s eclectic group of twentieth-century cousins.
Although he grew up on America’s east coast, Maurice’s paternal line was drawn from the Irish aristocracy.
His father, James Fermoy, was something of a maverick in his youth, an obituarist noting how he had been ‘a revolutionist in South America, a gold miner in Alaska, an explorer in Patagonia, and a blockade runner during the Russo-Japanese war’.
James added to his exotic résumé by becoming a cattle rancher in Wyoming, one of several commercial ventures that failed.
After that, he decided that the easiest route to money lay in marrying it – his unfortunate victim was Frances (‘Fanny’) Work, the socialite heiress of a stockbroker who had become a multi-millionaire by working closely with the Vanderbilt family.
The marriage for money failed, and Fanny cited James’s gambling addiction and womanizing when divorcing him in a scandalous New York court hearing a few years later.
Shockingly, James gave up his right to maintain contact with his children (including my grandfather) in return for a pay-off from his father-in-law.
This wanton, wastrel existence did not stop James becoming a Member of Parliament, and an Irish lord – Baron Fermoy.
Maurice inherited that title on his father’s death in 1920.
Because he was an Irish – as opposed to British – nobleman, and since he happened to have been born in London, Maurice was able to follow his father into the House of Commons as an MP.
His constituency was north Norfolk, which included Sandringham.
My Irish American grandfather enjoyed a cosmopolitan existence. He would, at different times, be educated at Harvard, see service as a First World War soldier in the US Army, be attached to the RAF in the Second World War, and serve as mayor of King’s Lynn.
As George V had anticipated, Maurice made for a genial Sandringham neighbour to George VI.
He was also an entertaining one. Celebrated for his charm and wit, Maurice was a brilliant mimic, and was noted for his great kindness to children, including the young royal princesses, Elizabeth and Margaret.
Drawing on his days playing ice hockey for Harvard, he taught the girl who would later become Queen Elizabeth to skate, on Sandringham Lake.
Other links between the Royal Family and the Fermoys were more surprising.
By the strangest of coincidences, when my mother was born at Park House on 20 January 1936, George V breathed his last across the park in Sandringham House on the same day.
In turn, when George VI died unexpectedly, aged fifty-six, on 6 February 1952, he did so having spent the previous lunchtime sitting happily next to my maternal grandfather, halfway through a day’s shooting together.
My grandfather Maurice died two and a half years later – we Spencer children were never to know him – after a stroke, and the two men’s widows became closer after the Queen Mother asked my grandmother, Ruth, to join her household.
My grandmother, who came from a prosperous middle-class Scottish background, very much enjoyed being a royal courtier. She would remain a friend and confidante to the Queen Mother for the rest of her life.
My widowed grandmother moved out of Park House in the mid-1950s, and my parents succeeded her as its tenants soon after my sister Sarah was born.
Given the proximity of Park House to Sandringham House, and the Royal Family’s particular love of their Norfolk estate, my sisters and I saw them from time to time when growing up.
This was generally at a distance, when we all attended the parish church of St Mary’s, Sandringham, on those Sundays in the year when the Queen and her family were in residence.
But we had little direct interaction with the Royal Family, bar the occasional invitation to children’s parties in Sandringham House.
The two youngest of the four children in each family were near to one another in age: there were a matter of months between Prince Andrew and Diana, and between Prince Edward and me.
Diana and I went to tea at Sandringham House for children’s birthday parties, dropped there by our nanny in our smartest clothes, always reminded to be on our best behaviour.
A private screening there of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang was a particular treat, the projector set up in a cavernous room, while we children perched on high-backed antique chairs.
The grandeur of it all failed to stop Diana and me hiding behind our seats during the terrifying appearances of the Child Catcher.
The royal children came across to us at Park House for tea a couple of times: I was mortified when one of them, playing roughly with my treasured pop gun, broke the string on it, before throwing it aside.
The first time I remember registering the then Prince Andrew was when he was perhaps seven, and I was with my father in his car. We came across Andrew on a back road near Sandringham House, where he was struggling with good-natured determination to get his broken-down go-kart to start again.
I also remember one Sunday, years later, when he was a teenager attending Sandringham church in the royal pews.
Diana and I both saw Andrew raise his eyebrows with theatrical exaggeration and a smirk, after the priest referred to ‘the virgin’s womb’.
He was clearly greatly amused by a reference to that part of a woman’s anatomy in such a solemn setting.
Equally awkward was an unannounced visit to Park House after church one day by Princess Anne.
My father happened not to be at home when she pitched up.
The cellar, which secured all the house’s alcohol, was locked, as usual, and only my father knew where its key was hidden.
In desperation, our nanny offered the princess some filthy sherry from a bottle my father had recently won in a charity raffle. She never returned.
There was, therefore, an acquaintanceship between the younger members of the two families, but not a friendship.
That said, my family treated the whole concept of royalty with huge respect, on a level that would be extremely rare to find nowadays. Some might even find it absurd. But my father was brought up to revere the institution of monarchy, which was always part of his life.
He had, of course, served as equerry to George VI – photographs of the King’s funeral show him marching, handsome in full uniform, beside the coffin – and then to the young Queen Elizabeth.
In addition, the general attitude to royalty was quite different then, globally, as news footage of the time records.
Accompanying the Queen on her Coronation Commonwealth Tour of 1953 to 1954, my father witnessed the mass of loyal subjects to the Crown who turned out to greet their very pretty new young queen.
Even on a miserable rainy day in Auckland, tens of thousands of New Zealanders thronged the streets, vying to catch a glimpse of their monarch.
I have also met perfectly sane elderly South Africans who remembered, as children, waiting for hours by a railway track in the bush, just to marvel at the royal train as it passed by.
It was a very different time from today, when royal tours rarely garner more than a paragraph in a national paper.
So, with his own royal household experiences, and with my maternal grandparents having been friends to the Queen’s parents, I can begin to understand how my mother and father felt that royals were so special as to be – and I realize this must sound quite ridiculous to most people today – superior forms of human being.
‘Mystical’, as an aged cousin once said to me, when I asked him to describe the quality he felt the Royal Family possessed.
Indeed, the only times I ever saw my father nervous – this man, who could otherwise make anyone of any background feel quite at ease in his presence – was when talking to the Queen or Prince Philip. Then he simply was not himself. He seemed desperate to please those he viewed as his superiors.
I imagine it meant a great deal to my parents, therefore, to secure royal godparents for three of us: the Queen Mother for Sarah, the Duke of Kent (the Queen’s first cousin, and a good friend of my father) for Jane, and the Queen for me.
Inexplicably, there had been no such royal link for Diana.
But, well, she certainly made up for that . . .