Anne with
her father, Lord Glenconner, in 1953.
Lady in Waiting by Anne Glenconner review –
fascinating portrait of English repression
Observer
book of the week
Autobiography
and memoir
The marriage and social milieu of Princess Margaret’s
childhood friend reveals a vanished era of upper-class eccentricity
Rachel
Cooke
@msrachelcooke
Sun 24 Nov
2019 07.00 GMTLast modified on Sun 24 Nov 2019 18.24 GMT
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/nov/24/lady-in-waiting-anne-glenconner-review
Being very
common, I have something of a mania for aristo-lit: a passion for stories about
big houses and the wanton eccentrics who inhabit them that began in childhood
with Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden, continued into my teenage
years with all things Mitford, and now finds ongoing sustenance mostly in
diaries (Chips Channon, I salute you, and all who sailed in you). Nevertheless,
I have to admit to being somewhat unprepared for Lady in Waiting, in which Anne
Glenconner muses on her stiff upper lip and how it saw her through a marriage
lasting 54 years to a man whose idea of a honeymoon treat was to take her – a
girl who had been a virgin only hours before – to a fleapit of a hotel to watch
two strangers having sex (“That’s very kind, but no thank you,” she said when
invited to join in). Is her memoir a horror show or a delightful entertainment?
A manual for how to live, or how not to live? In truth, I’m not sure even she
would know the answer to these questions.
The eldest
child of the fifth Earl of Leicester, Glenconner was maid of honour at the
Queen’s coronation and lady-in-waiting to her childhood friend Princess
Margaret. She grew up at Holkham Hall in Norfolk – a house so huge that if the
footmen put raw eggs in a bain-marie as they walked from kitchen to nursery,
they’d be boiled on arrival – and, aged 23, married Colin Tennant, later Lord
Glenconner, the owner of a Scottish castle called Glen and of the Caribbean
island of Mustique. Tennant was, she tells us repeatedly, great fun and so
generous. But it can’t have been too much fun when he deliberately trapped her
in the fold-up bed in their cabin on a train, or when he took her to a cock
fight (one of the cocks attached itself to her head, causing it to bleed; far
from being sympathetic, he was furious that she’d ruined the betting).
It’s impossible not to admire her fortitude as
she deals with her fear and her grief
What of his
generosity? Well, there were certainly lots of parties, attended by Bianca
Jagger et al. My favourite story, however, involves the visit to Glen of his
aesthete kinsman, Stephen Tennant. Uncle Stephen being not at all keen on the
purple of the heather, Colin kindly sprinkled the moors with blue paper
flowers. “Oh, darling!” said Uncle Stephen. “That’s much better, isn’t it?”
Glenconner
knows that she’s privileged, and if the staff, the houses and the holidays come
with a price in the form of a man who lies in the foetal position when he
cannot get his own way, and who wears paper knickers (in order to be able to
eat them for a party trick), so be it. She can cope. She has a Gypsy caravan
into which she can escape when it gets too much – and later, she takes refuge
in her duties for Princess Margaret, that great lover of prawn cocktail and Antiques
Roadshow. (HRH, incidentally, is another of those she insists was great fun, in
spite of all evidence to the contrary.) Additionally, she has her stoicism –
which is where it all gets interesting. Much as I loved reading about the way,
say, that she and her mother, the countess, would gather jackdaw eggs using a
ladle attached to a walking stick (apparently, they’re as delicious as plover’s
eggs, though since I’ve tasted neither, I can’t possibly comment), after a
while there’s no ignoring the painful and widening disjunction between the
outward whirl of her life and the repeated tragedies that befall her family.
Her first
son, Charlie, a heroin addict, dies of hepatitis C. Her second son, Henry, dies
of an Aids-related illness at just 29 (as a photo caption helpfully reminds us,
her husband informed her that Henry was ill just moments before the couple
donned fancy dress for the Peacock Ball they were throwing to celebrate his
birthday). Her third son, Christopher, following an accident during his gap
year, ends up in a coma for four months; it takes him years to learn to walk
again. These are unimaginably terrible events, and it’s impossible not to
admire her fortitude as she deals with her fear and her grief; as she patiently
sits by Christopher’s bedside, refusing to believe he will never wake up. But
as she admits, her two older boys were also the victims of a system, cold and
inflexible, that insists on nannies, boarding schools and a certain emotional
distance on the part of their parents (“There I was, immersed in royal life,
while my eldest son was running wild,” as she understatedly puts it).
As a girl,
Glenconner spent years away from her mother and father, having been evacuated
during the war; they left her with a nanny who tied her by the wrists to her
bed every night before she went to sleep. But though she remembers vividly the
pain this caused her, somehow she cannot avoid visiting on her own children a
similar fate. When they cry as she drops them at boarding school, she weeps too
– and yet still she drives away. In the end, her book isn’t only a record,
funny and sometimes dazzling, of a way of life now almost disappeared. It’s an
unwitting examination of English repression: both of how it gets you through
and of how it can slay you.
• Lady in
Waiting by Anne Glenconner is published by Hodder & Stoughton (£20).
Lady in Waiting by Anne Glenconner review – a
bestselling glimpse of the royals
Book of the
week
Autobiography
and memoir
The candid life story of Princess Margaret’s aide,
which has proved a publishing hit, provides insights into the aristocratic
system and the real life behind The Crown
Kathryn
Hughes
Sat 7 Dec 2019 09.00 GMT
Nothing
goes down better with a section of the British public than a posh old lady who
isn’t afraid to talk dirty. It’s the contrast between the drawling vowels,
blossomy complexion, sculpted cheekbones and sexual frankness that turns us
into what Nanny would probably call “giggling ninnies”. Anne Glenconner, who at
the age of 87 has published a bestselling memoir, was a big hit this autumn on
The Graham Norton Show, Loose Women and all manner of breakfast television
sofas. One of her plummiest anecdotes concerns her mother, Lady Coke, trying to
explain sexual intercourse in terms of canine coupling. “Do you remember
Daddy’s labrador getting on top of Biscuit? Well, that’s what happens when you
get married and have sex, except you will probably be lying down in a bed.” Cue
peals of shocked laughter from the studio audience.
In fact,
there’s nothing especially odd or even socially elevated about Lady Coke’s
advice to her eldest girl on the eve of her 1956 marriage. Anne belonged to the
generation of girls who were too young to have served in the WAAF and, instead
of jitterbugging with young men, spent their chaste teenage years knitting socks
for them. You didn’t need to have been brought up on the 27,000 acre Holkham
Hall estate, nor been crowned “Deb of the Year” by Tatler, to have arrived at
your courtship years without knowing much about men beyond a vague rule of
thumb that some were “safe in taxis” while others most definitely were not.
Colin
Tennant, the man Anne was marrying, really wasn’t safe anywhere, which
doubtless explains his appeal. The evening after her disastrous wedding night
to the mercurial banker, the blushing bride found herself whisked through Paris
for a “surprise”. This turned out not to be dinner at the Ritz, but rather a
seedy brothel where she was forced to watch a couple have sex, as if performing
a public service. When they asked if Anne would like to join in, she replied
politely: “That’s very kind of you, but no thank you.” Cue more studio
laughter.
The blushing bride found herself whisked
through Paris for a 'surprise' – not dinner at the Ritz but sex at a brothel
She must
have got the hang of it pretty quickly because the first of the five Tennant
children was conceived on the honeymoon. What has made this book such a hit,
however, is not the rolling out of anecdotes about saucy toffs, but rather the
access it provides to the workings of the royal family in the second half of
the 20th century. In 1971 Anne was appointed lady-in-waiting to her childhood
friend Princess Margaret. The two little girls who had delighted in jumping out
from behind the curtains at the footmen in wartime Holkham Hall now spent their
adult days together, opening hospitals, looking interested in prisoners’
artwork, and trying not to yawn when seated next to a particularly boring
bishop. They would also share off-duty times on Mustique, the midgy Caribbean
island which Tennant had bought for a song in 1958 and turned into a playground
for millionaires. Cue some larky tales about Bianca Jagger and David Bowie with
sand between their toes.
Anne even
has a stake in season three of The Crown, where she is played by Nancy Carroll
as the counsellor and confidante of Helena Bonham Carter’s Margaret. In an
oddly dreamlike merging of memoir and dramatic narratives, Anne recently found
herself sitting side by side with Bonham Carter on Graham Norton’s sofa
promoting their parallel projects. Naturally the two women knew each other
already, Bonham Carter being cousin to Tennant, AKA Lord Glenconner.
This makes
the upper class sound like a cosy tight-knit clan, but one of the chief
revelations of Lady in Waiting is just how cruel and wasteful the aristocratic
system has historically been to women. Because of the cast-iron rule of male
primogeniture, Lady Anne and Princess Margaret were obliged to spend their
entire lives as left-overs “waiting” for someone to decide what to do with
them. When Anne Coke was born in 1932 as the first child of a man who would
become the fifth Earl of Leicester she was a “big disappointment”, who “broke
the line” by being a girl, the first of three sisters. As a result of her
wrongness the magnificent Holkham Hall and the earldom passed on her father’s
death to her male second cousin. Margaret too was hexed by her gender: if the
clever, headstrong girl had been born a boy she would have leapfrogged our
present Queen to succeed their father in 1952. Instead of useful, purposeful
public lives, the mischievous best friends found themselves entirely surplus to
requirements.
This sense
of being in the way was compounded when both women were disqualified from
marrying the men they loved. Before her marriage to Tennant, Glenconner was
blissfully engaged to “Johnnie” Althorp, who would later go on to father Diana,
Princess of Wales. But as a result of Johnnie’s father Earl Spencer muttering
about Anne having some distant mentally “defective” cousins (who also happened
to be first cousins to Princess Margaret and Queen Elizabeth), the dashing
cavalry officer slunk away without telling his fiancee that the match was off because
of her “mad blood”. Princess Margaret, meanwhile, was famously not permitted to
marry Group Captain Peter Townsend on the grounds that his earlier divorce was
incompatible with her sister’s position as head of the Church of England.
Instead, both women accepted men on the rebound whom their families considered
distinctly below the salt. Margaret married “Tony Snapshot”, as Glenconner’s
father wittily called Antony Armstrong-Jones. Meanwhile, Glenconner insisted
that his own daughter’s fiance, Tennant, whose family fortune was far too
recently based on bleach, line up with the beaters rather than the guns when
attending a shoot at Holkham Hall.
Perhaps
both young men were cross about having such non-U names (“Colin” and “Tony”
sound as if they belong at a Rotary Club social rather than Buckingham Palace).
Whatever their reasons, they used their “artistic” temperaments as a cover
story for some truly appalling behaviour. Armstrong-Jones took to leaving notes
for Margaret along the lines of: “You look like a Jewish manicurist and I hate
you”, while Tennant thinks nothing of embarrassing his wife at parties by
tearing off his paper underpants and eating them. Both men have mistresses,
both men present their wives with a “love child”. Tennant’s final act of
cruelty came in 2010 when he left a scrappy handwritten will bequeathing his
fortune – still huge despite the financial depredations that had come with
Mustique – to a local employee. What makes it all so much worse is that
Glenconner says that she still isn’t sure whether he did it simply as a stunt
to ensure that his reputation as an eccentric aristocrat would survive
post-mortem.
Although
Glenconner never mentions any kind of mental health diagnosis for her husband,
Tennant is clearly troubled; he spends hours in a foetal position begging her
to talk him down from his own anguished self. Her real focus, at least in this
book, is on her best friend Margaret, who she believes has been horribly
traduced in recent years as a narcissistic monster of rudeness and self-regard.
While never resorting to a cover-up, Glenconner provides a nuanced character
portrait of a woman whose life sounds truly wretched. Above all, she emphasises
that Margaret was marvellously supportive during the years in which Glenconner
was forced to endure the death of her first two sons and the permanent disablement
of her third following a motorcycle accident. In particular she wants us to
know that, long before Princess Diana became famous for fighting the stigma of
Aids, Margaret was visiting dying patients at the London Lighthouse hospice;
they included Glenconner’s second son, Henry. HRH didn’t do hugs, but she was
funny and her jokes made the young men laugh.
In return
it’s clear that Glenconner was marvellous to her unhappy friend. Her account of
Margaret’s final year, bundled up in bed and wanting nothing more but to hold
hands or watch Antiques Roadshow with her, is beautifully, which is to say
tactfully, done. Indeed, discretion and honour emerge as the hallmarks of
Glenconner’s career as a royal servant, culminating in this book which manages
to be both candid and kind. Above all, she demonstrates a remarkable readiness
to own up to her own mistakes. In particular she worries that the classic
absentee mothering style of the aristocracy, involving nannies and boarding
schools, may have been at the root of her eldest son developing the drug
addiction that eventually killed him. If only, one can’t help thinking, members
of the present royal family would follow their admirable servant’s example of
honest self-reckoning and personal responsibility.
• Lady in
Waiting is published by Hodder & Stoughton (RRP £20)
Interview
'I’m no snowflake': Anne Glenconner on Margaret,
marriage and Meghan Markle
Hadley
Freeman
The former lady-in-waiting’s memoir is a surprise
bestseller. She discusses family tragedy and why Princess Margaret was more fun
than people think
Hadley
Freeman @HadleyFreeman
Fri 20 Mar
2020 08.58 GMTLast modified on Fri 20 Mar 2020 15.48 GMT
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/mar/20/anne-glenconner-margaret-meghan-markle
Since it
came out five months ago, a debut work by an 87-year-old has become a
publishing phenomenon. Lady in Waiting: My Extraordinary Life in the Shadow of
the Crown by Anne Glenconner has sold more than 200,000 copies in the UK and
retains a tenacious hold on the bestseller lists. Written by the former
lady-in-waiting to Princess Margaret, its broad appeal might seem surprising,
not least because Margaret was hardly the most popular royal. But Lady
Glenconner’s book has two things going for it: the first is that it is not what
it seems; it is definitely not “a lavender sort of scented memoir”, as
Glenconner put it when she appeared on The Graham Norton Show last November. And
its other great strength is Glenconner herself.
“Are you
really tired after your journey? Did you find a taxi when you got off the
train?” she asks when I arrive at her home on the Norfolk coast. She has the
accent of the Queen – “really” becomes “rill-eh”, “off” is “orff” – and is
dressed like her too, in a blouse, cardigan, pleated knee length skirt, tights
and loafers. It is easy to picture her striding around the world, making small
talk with Imelda Marcos, which is what she used to do with Princess Margaret. I
lean in to kiss her, but then ask if she’s refraining because of the
coronavirus. Glenconner looks at me as if I’ve left my marbles on the train:
“I’ve been through the second world war and lived with someone with Aids at the
beginning [of the Aids crisis]. I’m not scared of a little virus, you know,”
she says. She turns on her heel and marches down her long hallway, and I have
to scoot to keep up with her.
Glenconner
was born Anne Coke (pronounced Cook), the daughter of an earl. “So I married
down somewhat,” she says with a satisfied smile, as her husband, Colin Tennant,
was merely the Baron Glenconner. In her book, Glenconner describes her current
home as “a cottage” but these things are relative: compared to the nearby
Holkham Hall where she grew up, and Glen, the enormous estate in Scotland
belonging to her late husband’s family, I guess it is a cottage. To me, it
looks like a sizable house, with a warren of rooms filled with family portraits
and vintage toys that are now kept for her grandchildren and
great-grandchildren. She takes me to the pretty sitting room, where we sit on
either side of the fire. “When Princess Margaret would visit the two of us
would sit just like this,” she says. “One time she came with her kettle and
said: ‘I’m going to be independent, Anne, all you need to do is give me some
milk.’ I was a bit doubtful and I was right because suddenly one morning it was
‘Anne! Anne!’ ‘Yes, ma’am, what is it?’ ‘I think the kettle’s broken!’ Of
course, she hadn’t turned it on. But she did want to help …” Prince Charles,
another “proper friend”, stops by often: “And people are really fond of him
now, you know. All that talking to plants and his green things, it’s all come
true. People don’t laugh at it.”
I tell her
that even the most republican of my friends love the book.
“You know,
I’ve never written anything in my life at all, and I thought: ‘Well, people
like me might buy it.’ But it’s gone way beyond that. I certainly didn’t think
the Guardian would be interested in my book. I know you’re a very leftwing
newspaper and somebody like me is not quite your cup of tea, so that’s
encouraging.” On a table nearby, a Daily Telegraph is tucked discreetly under a
cushion.
Glenconner
composed the book in this room, dictating her life story into a recorder.
“Somebody said: ‘Do you get writer’s block?’ I said: ‘No, writer’s diarrhoea!’
I just talked and talked,” she says. Glenconner’s distinctive voice has a
no-nonsense briskness to it, undercut with a wry but warm sense of humour. She
manages to laugh at things others might find less amusing: the patriarchal
aristocratic system that meant she couldn’t inherit her family home (“I tried
awfully hard to be a boy, even weighing 11lb at birth, but I was a girl and there
was nothing to be done about it”); her husband taking her to a “perfectly
disgusting” live sex show during their honeymoon; even her son Henry’s funeral
when he died from Aids – “I couldn’t help a tiny smile because, as is Buddhist
custom, his coffin was covered with pineapples and other tropical fruit, so it
looked like a giant fruit salad as it came into the crematorium.”
“It’s no
fun for anyone if you’re sitting around being a misery. I’m no snowflake,
probably a battle-axe. I was brought up by my mother to get on with things,”
she says. Her family crest is an ostrich swallowing a horseshoe, signifying the
family’s ability to digest anything.
Glenconner’s
family has a long relationship with the royal family: her paternal grandmother
was Edward VIII’s mistress and her father was equerry to George VI. Glenconner
was Princess Margaret’s devoted lady-in-waiting for more than 30 years, and
this is what spurred her into writing her book, as she was horrified by a
recent biography about the princess, which she describes as “that horrible
book, we won’t mention the name of the somebody who wrote it. I don’t know why
people want to rot her like that.” When I ask if she means Craig Brown’s book,
Ma’am Darling, she gives a pained, terse nod.
Determined
to rectify the common perception of the princess as spoilt and spiteful,
Glenconner writes about Margaret’s various kindnesses to her. They were, she
says, real friends, even if one called the other “Ma’am” and the other didn’t.
“I would have felt quite uncomfortable calling her anything else. But she was
so funny, that’s what people don’t get,” she says. After the princess died, the
Queen thanked Glenconner for providing her sister with many of the happiest
moments in her life.
I’d been
warned beforehand not to ask about Meghan Markle so I ask instead if, having
spent so much time with Margaret, she has extra empathy for the other spares,
Princes Andrew and Harry. But Glenconner knows what I’m up to: “You’re edging
closer to asking me about Meghan Markle,” she tuts. “I’m going to put another
log on the fire before I answer that!”
Markle’s
mistake, she says, was to not understand that all the royals, even the spares,
work hard: “I think she thought she could drive around in a golden coach. But
it’s actually quite boring. Princess Margaret did so much charity work, and
without any photographers, unlike the Princess of Wales.” (Glenconner is a
staunch royalist, but her sympathies are with the more traditional branches of
the family; even Princes William and Harry, she says, “go on about their mother
the whole time. I think it’s a bit much.”)
Coverage of
Glenconner’s book has focused on the royals, but it’s the descriptions of her
own life that gripped me. First, her marriage to Colin, who had frequent mental
breakdowns and was a bully; when Glenconner asked him why he screamed at people
so often, he replied: “I like making them squirm.” He insisted on telling her
about his holidays with his many girlfriends (“I said, ‘Can we talk about
something else?’”), but Glenconner got her own back, and makes one fleeting
reference in her book to having a “dear friend”. This is the one subject she
won’t be drawn on: “I’ll tell you absolutely nothing at all, except that he
made my life possible. We had lunch once a week and the occasional weekend for
nearly 40 years, and that’s all I’ll say.”
Despite
everything, Glenconner painstakingly emphasises her husband’s good qualities in
the book, such as his sense of fun and imagination – partly, she says, for the
sake of their children, but also because it was true. He turned Mustique from
unpromising scrubland into a celebrity pleasure island, where Mick Jagger would
lead singalongs in a beach bar. Colin’s parties were legendary for their
loucheness, such as the Golden Ball, which was photographed by Robert
Mapplethorpe, when Bianca Jagger was carried in by a troupe of boys painted
entirely in gold and wearing only “a coconut strategically placed below”. The
celebrities revelled in the privacy from the media: on one holiday, Glenconner
delicately pointed out to Princess Margaret that her bathing suit was
transparent. “‘Oh Anne,’ she said, somewhat exasperated. ‘I don’t care. If
[people] want to look, they can look.’ And that was that.” Colin died in 2010
but, Glenconner says, he would be “absolutely delighted” that Mustique is still
causing scandals, with questions over who paid for Boris Johnson’s recent
holiday there.
The couple
had five children: Charlie, Henry, Christopher and twins May and Amy.
Glenconner loved being a mother, but, despite not having been entirely happy
with aspects of her childhood – absent parents, nannies, boarding school – she
repeated it with her own children, leaving them behind as she helped her
husband in Mustique. “It’s just what you did, what all our friends did, the
shooting parties all winter we went off to – we didn’t think. I didn’t even
want them to go to boarding school …” she trails off.
The three
youngest children had the same nanny throughout their childhood, but the two
eldest, Charlie and Henry, had many different ones, their father sacking their
favourites on a whim. By the age of eight Charlie had severe OCD. As a
teenager, he got into drugs. Henry married and had a son, but in the late 80s
he came out as gay and within 18 months he had Aids, at a time when the
diagnosis turned you into a pariah. “I would take Henry to A&E, and it was
full when we arrived and within half an hour everybody had left and I was alone
with him. He was so ill that we would sit on the floor, with his head in my
lap. That was quite hard to write about.”
Meanwhile
her youngest son, Christopher, suffered a catastrophic head injury while on a
gap year in Belize. He was in a coma and a doctor told Glenconner that she
should forget about him. Instead, she nursed him and when he woke up four
months later she took him home and cared for him for the next five years. He
was left with life-changing injuries, but he has married twice and has two
children.
After Henry
died and Christopher recovered, Charlie also seemed to be recovering from his
addictions. But it was too late: he died from hepatitis, and Glenconner buried
her second child. “Often people don’t talk to me about the children, maybe
because they’re interested in the other things. But I like talking about them,
and perhaps the book has given me a way to do so,” she says.
Her book’s
success has thrilled her: “Aren’t I lucky?” She is planning a trip to New York,
where Tina Brown will throw a party for the US launch. She is also working on
her first novel, Murder in Mustique: “I’m the new Miss Marple!” she says
delightedly.
Glenconner
talks me through the family photos that surround us: Charlie as a handsome
teenager, Henry’s son and his children, one of the twins getting married. A
photo of Glenconner holding Charlie and Henry as babies is so bittersweet I can
hardly look at it. “Oh I know,” she says when she sees me wince. As I’m about
to leave, she touches my elbow gently. “I’m glad you asked me about the
children, it was kind of you,” she says. “Because the book really is
about them, you know.”
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