I know family and friends will join the trust in mourning the recent death of the Dowager Duchess of Devonshire. She was of course the youngest and last surviving Mitford sister, born 31st March 1920, Deborah Vivien Freeman-Mitford. As was the custom in those days she was given a party, on 22nd March 1938, before being presented at Court in May.
In her memoirs Wait for Me published as recently as 2010 she wrote
Two weeks after my party, I was invited to a dinner given by Lady Blanche Cobbold for her daughter Pamela before Lavinia Pearson’s dance. I sat next to Andrew Cavendish. We were both just eighteen. Ignoring our neighbours, we never stopped talking throughout the dinner. That was it for me – the rest of the Season passed in a haze of would-he-wouldn’t-he be there; nothing and nobody else mattered. Meeting him was the beginning and end of everything I had dreamed of. A month later he left for Lyons ‘to learn French’ for a term (I never saw, or rather heard, any evidence of this in later life but it did not seem to matter). I missed him during his absence, but it was all the more exciting when he came back, and we managed to meet at parties time and again.
If the dinner in question was held at Glemham Hall then the romance was born in the very room used for the trust’s 2008 exhibition. Andrew was of course Lady Blanche’s nephew and ‘Debo’ as she was always known would have been high on any hostess’s invitation list. They married in 1941 and Andrew became the 11th Devonshire following the death of his older brother in 1944 and his father in 1950.
It was between then and Andrew’s death in 2004 that Chatsworth was transformed from a debt ridden liability into the highly profitable leisure enterprise that it is today; the most visited stately home in the country. That transformation is widely credited to his duchess’s business skills and her wondrous ability to draw the very best from those who worked for her.
Blanche’s father, the 9th Duke was ‘old school’ and Blanche told of memorable glittering family Christmases at Chatsworth. Our picture saved from a newspaper, records just such an occasion, probably about 1928/9.
