Lady of the house

THE ancient and stately pile of Chatsworth sits in 1,000 acres of parkland, hills and woods in the Peak District of Derbyshire. It contains 297 rooms and 397 windows; and in one of these, facing west, Deborah Devonshire especially liked to sit, revelling in the view to the River Derwent and beyond. Beauty surrounded her, with nothing ugly to be seen anywhere.

The house was about the right size for an army of occupation, and sometimes awkward to live in. The 1.3 acres of lead on the roof, weighing 244 tons, tended to spring leaks and buckle ceilings. Moths ate the hangings, timber warped, and beetles feasted on the carpets. It was a terrible place to house-train puppies or lose one’s keys, and some of the bathrooms (she had installed 17) were a convenient size for dwarves. But it was breathtaking outside, built in best grey Derbyshire limestone, and inside a most delightful jumble of things glorious and homely: tin baths, tapestries, Old Masters, stags’ heads, rampant gilding, marble nudes by Canova, Roman busts (wreathed with tinsel at Christmas), four-posters hung with chintzes two centuries old, and runners to stop aged spaniels injuring themselves on slippery floors.

She proudly listed her profession as “housewife”, for so she was. Her marriage in 1941 to Andrew Cavendish, soon to be the 11th Duke of Devonshire, eventually brought her seven houses, including the lovely Hardwick Hall, also in Derbyshire. But Chatsworth was always the principal and best. When the house reopened to the public in 1949, and especially after she and Andrew moved there in 1959, she got it spruced up and decorated by an immense team of joiners, roofers, painters, seamstresses, plumbers and electricians. Then, over the years, as the family struggled to meet crippling death duties after the death of the 10th duke, she turned Chatsworth into a self-sustaining business and a brand, in the nicest possible way.

No one trained her. She never knew what held ceilings up, or how drains worked. As the youngest of the six Mitford girls, she gaily called herself the slowest and dimmest. While her sisters were flirting, or worse, with fascism or communism, she was happy enough with her pony Doughnut and her guinea pigs. Books were tiresome, and school, which she barely attended, intolerable. She learned about business mostly from keeping chickens—selling the eggs to bulk out her pocket money—and from Beatrix Potter’s “The Tale of Ginger & Pickles”, concerning the failure of a dog and a cat to run a village shop on unlimited credit. “The best book on retailing ever written,” said the duchess.

Hens remained her first love. Deep into old age she went out each evening to feed her flock, in Barbour and wellies if required, enjoying the argy-bargy of the older birds with the neat and elegant pullets. Her favourite reading was Poultry World. Though she could be the stateliest of aristocrats, sweeping into balls in gowns by Worth and the larger Devonshire tiara with 1,900 diamonds, country ways were best: dipping her finger into super-delicious fresh cream in the dairy, unpasteurised of course, pricing the work of foresters and dry-stone wallers, thrilling to the hunt (when the fox-loving government allowed her to), recognising old gooseberry varieties, looking for wild flowers. The loss of her wedding ring in a heap of wheat-straw hardly bothered her because, the same day, she found a rare pink corncockle.

Scythes and deportment

“Make the best of it” might have been her motto. She faced tragedies enough. Several close friends and relations died in the war. Three of her children died at birth, and Andrew battled alcoholism for years. She picked herself up and got on with it, as one should. In order to keep Chatsworth going and the Inland Revenue quiet, several fine paintings and houses went, as well as 54,000 acres of land, and Hardwick was given to the nation, but it had to be done. Her own good idea, springing straight from her love of commerce, was to set up shops in the Orangery and the Carriage House where visitors could buy produce from the estate and souvenirs of the house, and to open a restaurant in the Stables, when before there had been nothing to refresh the public but a cold-water tap in a wall. In 2013 644,000 people came.

Visitors who met her in the grounds in later years—dressed down, talking to herself, saving a frog from drowning or somesuch—were likely to think she was some dotty old woman. Certainly she was a relic in a way. The list of things she missed included scythes, formal mourning, telegrams, deportment (especially for girls) and the 1662 prayer-book. She thought e-mail “horrible”. Yet she understood better than anyone the cachet and earning-power of the Chatsworth name, to the point where she extracted a royalty from anyone copying the pattern of the velvet curtains.

When she sat at her favourite window, in the years before she downsized to the nearby Old Vicarage in Edensor, she would watch visitors wandering below. She loved to see them, for Chatsworth came alive, and the tills rang, when they were there. And the luck of owning this enormous house, filled with splendours, was made all the better by remarks such as that of one local, on sighting the silver and Bohemian glass laid out on the giant table in the Great Dining Room: “Tea’s laid, Mabel.”