The Duchess: The Untold Story – the explosive biography, as seen in the Daily Mail. Penny Junor

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СКАЧАТЬ ‘for putting some life and backbone into a rather amorphous and disorganised adolescent’.

      He had met his father just once in all those years, briefly, when he was eighteen, at his grandmother’s funeral. He didn’t see him again for another twenty years, by which time Bruce had a wife and three children, and his father was on his fourth and final marriage. One of his half-sisters is Elspeth Howe, the former chair of the Broadcasting Standards Commission and wife of the former Conservative minister, Geoffrey Howe.

      Bruce was a gentleman – in every sense of the word – and he came home from the war a hero, but he was not an aristocrat and not a wealthy man. What money he had came from his late grandfather, and from his job in the wine trade, topped up by his military pension. He had been a very brave soldier. By the age of twenty-five, in 1942, he had won the Military Cross twice and been wounded and taken prisoner at the battle of El Alamein in North Africa in 1942.

      At the outbreak of war in 1939, he’d been part of the British Expeditionary Force sent to France; and he was in Belgium when the Germans invaded in May 1940. It was there he won his first MC for his courage in covering the withdrawal of a column of lorries and guns under fire from four German tanks. That same month, he and his men covered the withdrawal of troops to the beaches and port of Dunkirk, after the Allies had been cut off and surrounded by the German army. Over eight days, 338,226 soldiers were evacuated by a hastily assembled fleet of 800 boats of all shapes and sizes that had come to the rescue from the south coast of England. Bruce was assigned the job of embarkation staff officer at the seaside resort of La Panne, which was being continuously bombed, and through a combination of resourcefulness and good luck escaped from Dunkirk in a cement ship, landing after an uncomfortable night at Margate on the morning of 1 June.

      The second MC, or bar, was awarded in Libya, where he was wounded in the second battle of Alamein, when his vehicle was hit by enemy fire. A German bullet passed through Bruce’s cheek and into his radio operator, who was killed instantly. Their driver managed to turn the car but they were hit again by a ‘tremendous blow’ and he slumped over the wheel, dead. As the car began to burn Bruce climbed out of the top and lost consciousness briefly. He next remembered trying to clamber onto another vehicle, but was then hit in the knee and lost his grip. As he said, ‘A buzz of German voices greeted my return to consciousness.’ After a month in hospital in Athens, he was taken by train to Spangenberg Castle, near Kassel, a prisoner-of-war camp where he spent the final two years of the war with three hundred or so other British officers. The security personnel guarding them were mostly schoolteachers with good English; their chief, Hauptmann Seybold, was a man who prided himself on his knowledge of the idiomatic use of the language. ‘He was reputed to be the originator of the classic saying, after a satisfactory morning’s search for a radio, “You British think that I know fuck nothing, I tell you that I know fuck all.”’

      Bruce came back from the war a distinguished but broken man. His injuries had made him unfit for active service, he was retired from the Army the year Camilla was born in 1947, and after a false start marketing educational films, he went into the wine trade. The father he scarcely knew had written books on the subject. Bruce became a partner in the long-established Mayfair firm Block, Grey and Block of South Audley Street, which specialised in supplying wine to Oxbridge colleges – and he had an enviable cellar beneath the kitchen of the family home. Many years later, when the company ran into difficulties, he joined Ellis, Son and Vidler of Hastings and London, where he worked until he retired – while always combining the job with his duties and interests elsewhere. He was Master of the Southdown Fox Hounds for nearly twenty years, hunting several times a week from the end of August to April. He also reviewed military books for Country Life magazine, and later on became a servant of the Crown and a member of the royal household. He was a passionate historian, and a voracious reader of biography and memoirs. He had been kept sane during his years of incarceration by what he described as ‘a very adequate library’ at Spangenberg Castle that had provided him with all of these as well as ‘the great Victorian authors, notably Thackeray and Trollope’, to whom he remained loyal all his life.

      Years later, when Camilla was caught in the midst of a very different type of war, she too read books to keep a hold of her sanity. Books, horses and the support of this very special father helped see her through some very dark times.

      4

       History

      It was Rosalind’s family that had the money. In 1947, the year Camilla was born, Rosalind’s great-grandfather died and her father, the Hon. Roland Calvert Cubitt, became the 3rd Baron Ashcombe and inherited the family fortune. He’d grown up with no expectation of it but three older brothers were killed in the war, all in their twenties. The fortune had been amassed by his great-grandfather, Thomas Cubitt, a pioneering master builder born in Norfolk of humble origins in 1788. Cubitt revolutionised the building industry in the nineteenth century, designing and building great swathes of London including Camden, Islington, Bloomsbury, Stoke Newington, and in the heart of the West End, Belgravia and Pimlico. He also built Osborne House, Queen Victoria’s favourite retreat on the Isle of Wight, and won the contract to extend Buckingham Palace. He became close friends with the Royal Family and after his death of throat cancer at the age of sixty-eight, Victoria said, ‘In his sphere of life, with the immense business he had in hand, he is a real national loss. A better, kindhearted or more simple, unassuming man never breathed.’

      Towards the end of his life, Thomas Cubitt bought Denbies, an estate of 3,900 acres outside Dorking in Surrey, where he built himself a grand three-storey mansion with nearly a hundred rooms, similar in design to Osborne House. After his death, the estate passed through his sons – at one time it employed as many as 400 people – but the fortune was decimated by death duties, and the house was billeted with troops during the war and fell into disrepair. Rosalind’s father didn’t have the money to restore and run it, so he converted a couple of other buildings into something more manageable and the big house was demolished in the early 1950s. By this time much of the land had been very profitably sold for development, and the remainder is now owned by Denbies Wine Estate, one of the largest producers of wine in the UK. (By a happy coincidence, Camilla is now the president of the United Kingdom Vineyards Association.) Rosalind grew up there but by the time she married Bruce, her mother had divorced her father had moved to West Meon in Hampshire.

      Rosalind’s mother, Sonia Keppel, was also well-known in society, but for rather different reasons. She was the daughter of Alice Keppel, who’d been famous at the turn of the century as a dazzling society hostess and as the long-term mistress of King Edward VII.

      Alice Keppel was married to the Honourable George Keppel, son of the 7th Earl of Albemarle, when she met Edward, or Bertie, as he was known, in 1898. She was twenty-nine years old, the youngest daughter of a Scottish baron, Sir William Edmonstone. Bertie was fifty-six and still Prince of Wales; he didn’t become king until Victoria’s death three years later, but he fell soundly in love with Alice and she remained with him and loyal to him, lightening his darker moods, until his death in 1910.

      Alice was ambitious and her husband was a third son. Despite his charm, good looks and titled lineage, he didn’t have the wherewithal to meet her ambitions. So, being a strong and determined woman, she swiftly embarked on a series of affairs with rich men to keep them both in the style to which she aspired. She worked her way up the social scale until she came into the future king’s orbit. Within a matter of weeks she was his official mistress, ousting Daisy, Countess of Warwick. George Keppel, it would seem, was happy to share his wife and enjoy the proceeds of her numerous and varied lovers. Bertie was particularly generous in his largesse; he organised a job for George and membership of the gentleman’s club he coveted. In return, СКАЧАТЬ