Deborah Cavendish, the dowager duchess of Devonshire and the last of the six eccentric Mitford sisters, who has died aged 94, turned her husband’s ancestral estate into one of England’s grand country houses and wrote books about it and her own fairytale life.
On the jacket of her 2010 memoir, Wait for Me!, is a photograph, taken in 1952, of the regal duchess. In a long black gown, against portraits and period furniture, she is a figure of alabaster loveliness from another epoch – one of country estates and foxhunts, furs worn to bomb shelters and clever talk over tea with dictators.
Being a Mitford, Deborah could have hardly been conventional. Diana married the fascist Sir Oswald Mosley in the presence of Goebbels and Hitler. Jessica was a communist and wrote witty books. Unity Valkyrie, in love with Hitler, shot herself when Britain declared war. As a child, Pamela wanted to be a horse; she was fortunate enough to marry a fabled jockey. Nancy’s books satirised the upper classes. And Deborah, tentatively, became a connoisseur of fine poultry.
They had little formal schooling. Their emotionally detached parents thought education was wasted on girls, who were expected to marry well. Deborah, the youngest, called Debo, grew up with governesses, tutors and servants in country seats, a London house and on an island in Scotland.
From the age of six , Deborah had a passion for chickens. In their drafty old Oxfordshire manse, she and her sisters hid in a linen cupboard heated by water pipes and made up secret languages. Her father, an irascible baron, hunted his children on horseback, with hounds.
Visiting Munich with Unity in 1937, Deborah, then 17, wrote home: “We have had quite a nice time here & we’ve had tea with Hitler & seen all the other sights.”
Lismore Castle
At 21, she married Andrew Cavendish, second son of the 10th Duke of Devonshire, who, when his father died in 1950, became the 11th Duke - inheriting vast wealth, including Lismore Castle in Waterford and Chatsworth, a 35,000-acre Derbyshire estate that had been in his family for generations. Chatsworth’s magnificent 16th-century mansion had 297 rooms, 112 fireplaces, 68 lavatories, 26 baths, 32 kitchens and workshops, 17 staircases and 1.3 acres of roof. But it came with a catch: inheritance taxes of nearly €16 million, not to mention huge maintenance costs.
The duke and duchess sold artworks and land to pay taxes totalling 80 per cent of the estate’s value: €226 million in today’s money. Transforming Chatsworth from a museum-like relic into a self-sustaining family business, however, was a more long-term project that, because of the duke’s alcoholism and other problems, fell largely to the duchess. She made it the core of her life’s work, putting in central heating, phones, new wiring and plumbing for 17 new bathrooms, opening gift shops and a market that employed 100 people and sold meat and produce, including the Duchess’s Marmalade and the Duke’s Favorite Sausages.
She began lecturing on farming, drawing 200,000 people a year. Later came restaurants, catering services, boutiques and other moneymaking enterprises, including two hotels. She took a hands-on approach to running the house, greeting and leading tourists through the public rooms, teaching classes and feeding her chickens: Leghorns, Rhode Island Reds, Buff Cochins, Welsummers and other breeds that ran loose in the grounds like marauding gangs. In 2002, Chatsworth became self-sufficient for the first time.
Down to earth
Visitors found the duchess gracious and down to earth, a straight-backed, silver-haired aristocrat who spoke animatedly with anyone about interior design, livestock, gardening, fine arts and Elvis Presley, whom she adored and whose memorabilia she treasured. She was properly “your grace”, but regarded herself as less exalted. “I’m a housewife,” she told a reporter for the
New York Times
in 2003.
With the death of her husband in 2004, she became the dowager duchess, and her son, Peregrine, became the 12th Duke of Devonshire. Later, she moved to a nearby village, Edensor, and continued writing.
Since the early 1980s, she had written a dozen books, many on Chatsworth, along with volumes of essays, reminiscences, cookbooks and a volume of letters exchanged with the travel writer Patrick Leigh Fermor.
She was born Deborah Vivien Freeman-Mitford in 1920 on the Oxfordshire estate of her parents, David Freeman-Mitford, the 2nd Baron Redesdale, and the former Sydney Bowles. She and her sisters developed a rich fantasy life, creating a secret “Society of Hons” which met in the warm linen cupboard at Swinbrook, another stone-cold family mansion. There, they divided the world into “Hons” – or honorables, as barons’ daughters are known, and others they liked – and “Counter-Hons”, that is everybody else.
They invented secret languages, Honnish and Boudledidge, which mimicked rural Oxfordshire accents, with distorted vowels and softened consonants, all pronounced in tones of hopeless yearning. A governess taught them the joys of shoplifting in the village.
They went their ways: Nancy (1904-1973) wrote The Pursuit of Love, and Love in a Cold Climate. Pamela (1907-1994), married a horseman who later became a physicist. Thomas (1909-1945), was killed in the war. Diana (1910-2003) married Oswald Mosley and was imprisoned with him for most of the war.
Eva Braun’s rival
Unity (1914-1948), who was Eva Braun’s rival for Hitler’s affections, died a decade after her attempted suicide with the bullet still in her head. Jessica (1917-1996) eloped with Churchill’s nephew, who was killed in the war, moved to the United States and wrote
The American Way of Death
and other books.
Unlike her siblings, Deborah knew little of politics growing up. But her marriage to Lord Cavendish brought her into political circles. His uncle by marriage was the future prime minister Harold Macmillan, who found government jobs for him, and they had long been friends of the Kennedy clan (the two families were related by marriage) and attended the inauguration and funeral of President John F Kennedy.
Three of the couple’s six children died shortly after birth. Besides her son Peregrine, her survivors include two daughters, Lady Emma Tennant and Lady Sophia Topley; eight grandchildren and 18 great-grandchildren.
In 1999, Queen Elizabeth II named the duchess a Dame Commander of the Royal Victorian Order for her services to preserving Britain’s residential heritage.