An Unlikely Countess: Lily Budge and the 13th Earl of Galloway

Copyright

HarperPerennial An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

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This edition published by Harper Perennial 2005

First published by HarperCollinsPublishers 2004

Copyright © Louise Carpenter 2004

PS section copyright © Louise Tucker 2005

except ‘An Unlikely Countess’ by Louise Carpenter

© Louise Carpenter 2005

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Louise Carpenter asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

‘Small Town’ Words and Music by Lou Reed and John Cale © 1989, Screen Gems – EMI Music Inc/Metal Machine Music/John Cale Music Inc, USA Reproduced by permission of Screen Gems – EMI Music Ltd, London WC2H OQY

The publisher and the author gratefully acknowledge Randolph Galloway, the Estate of Lily Budge, The Stewart Society, Joseph Bonnar, William Mowat Thomson, Michael Thornton, and Roddy Martine for permission to reproduce photographs and press clippings from private collections.

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Source: ISBN 9780007108817

Ebook Edition © FEBRUARY 2013 ISBN 9780007391707

Version: 2016-08-05

Dedication

For Tom

and

Randolph Galloway

Epigraph

I am very fond of the good soldier Schweik … Iam convinced that you will sympathise with thismodest, unrecognised hero. He did not set fire to thetemple of the Goddess at Ephesus, like that fool of aHerostratus, merely in order to get his name intothe newspapers and the school reading books.

And that, in itself, is enough.

JAROSLAV HAŠEK, The Good Soldier Schweik

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Epigraph

PART ONE

1 The Most Caring Place in the World

2 The Beginnings

3 Virescit Vulnere Virtus: Valour Grows Strong from a Wound

4 Tea or Coffee, ma’am?

5 Happy Days are Coming

6 Becoming Mrs Budge

7 Lobotomised Patients Make Good Citizens

8 Carnival of the Animals

9 A Crazy House

10 Anglo-Catholic with Charismatic Overtones

PART TWO

11 Poor Love

12 My Home is My Castle

13 A Shoddy Day and Age

14 Will the Earl Get a Crumb of Comfort?

15 Here, Sir!

16 I Would Have Hated to Commit Murder

PART THREE

17 We Have the Name Darling, but Alas, We do not Have the Game

18 Poor Margot is Ghastly

19 Never Judge a Person until You’ve Walked a Mile in their Shoes

20 New Places to Wear Diamonds

Afterword

P.S. Ideas, Interviews & Features …

About the Author

Approaching Lily: Louise Carpenter talks to Louise Tucker

Life at a Glance

Top Ten Favourite Books

A Day in the Life of Louise Carpenter

About the Book

An Unlikely Subject by Louise Carpenter

Read On

If You Loved This, You Might Like …

Find Out More

Select Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Praise

Copyright

About the Publisher

PART ONE

When you’re growing up in a small townYou know you’ll grow down in a small townThere is only one good use for a small townYou hate it and you’ll know you have to leave.

LOU REED, ‘Small Town’

1 The Most Caring Place in the World

On 15 May 1979, on a draughty platform at Waverley Station, Edinburgh, Lord and Lady Galloway, fresh to their titles and in a muddle with their luggage, were preparing to board a train headed for London. ‘If I can have this opportunity of going to the House of Lords, I shall take it,’ Lily Galloway had told their French lodger, Marie-Laurence Maître, in their tenement flat as she packed.

Lily, dressed in a bottle-green velvet suit, which was a touch thin at the elbows and cuffs, but brushed up on the lapels, struggled as usual with their trunks while Randolph Galloway walked ahead, hands clasped stiffly behind his back. If anybody had cared to study their expressions, in him they would have observed a vagueness, as if he inhabited another world, one he did not much care for but from which he could not escape, and in her the opposite, the alertness of a proficient nurse in constant anticipation of a crisis. Randolph was easily unsettled by noise and commotion – as a child he would become quite hysterical if a train blew its steam – and he was prone to wandering off. Lily would have to maintain vigilance.

Their brief wedding announcement had been published in the court and social pages of the Daily Telegraph on 1 November 1975. Lord Garlies, then heir to the Earldom of Galloway, had married Mrs Lily Budge, youngest daughter of the late Mr and Mrs Andrew Miller, of Duns, Berwickshire. In February 1976, following their church blessing, a large photograph of them appeared over a page of the Edinburgh Tatler with a brief caption outlining how the reception had taken place at the Caledonian Hotel in Edinburgh. The picture alone revealed that Lily was some years older than her husband and would not by any stretch of the imagination be capable of providing an heir. And while blessed with a mop of thick black hair and two rows of straight, pearly white teeth, she could not be described as a beauty. To those in Scotland who followed the births, deaths, and marriages of the aristocracy, the announcement that the 12th Earl of Galloway’s son and heir had married came as a shock. The reception had not taken place at the family seat of Cumloden, Newton Stewart, and the 12th Earl of Galloway and his daughter, Lady Antonia Dalrymple, did not attend the party.

Randolph Galloway, recognised by the Stewart Society as head of the Stewart clan, noted in Burke’s Peerage, Baronetage and Knight-age as the 13th Earl of Galloway, Lord Garlies, Baron Stewart of Garlies and a Baronet (Sir Randolph Keith Reginald Stewart, 12th Bart. of Corsewell, and 10th Bart. of Burray) was now about to take his seat in the upper house. He stood at over six feet and possessed a broad, athletic build. He had thick black wavy hair, parted and combed back from his high forehead, a strong square jaw and light, piercing blue eyes, sometimes hidden behind heavy black-rimmed spectacles. He was slim and handsome in the new three-piece suit, picked and paid for by Lily.

On arriving in London unscathed by drama, Lily and Randolph went to 20 Great Peter Street, SW1, the clergyhouse of St Matthew’s, Westminster, offered by the Vicar Prebendary Gerard Irvine. (Shortly afterwards, they would move to temporary accommodation in SW5 and thereafter use a series of cheap tourist hotels such as The Hansel and Gretel, £12.65 a night including VAT and breakfast.) The following day, 16 May, Randolph took his seat and Lily settled herself on the red leather pews of the Peeresses’ gallery, front row, first in. She watched over him proudly as he sat mute on the Conservative benches in front of her. He did not deliver a maiden speech, which was for the best.

Outside the gates of Parliament, she posed for a photograph. ‘The Lords is the most caring place in the world!’ she later told a newspaper reporter. ‘If I had my way we would live in London permanently.’

When Lily was not guiding Randolph about the wood-panelled corridors or sitting in the chamber, with her eyes attentively trained on him in the manner of a dog to its master, she could be found in one of three places: in the House of Lords’ stationery cupboard, availing herself of as many complimentary cards and envelopes as would fit into her handbag; on the telephone to family in Scotland, a service which was also complimentary; or in the tearoom, knitting needles in hand, eating tea and toast with the Scottish peeresses who befriended her.

There was nothing in Lily’s outward appearance to distinguish her from the other peers’ wives except perhaps a little weariness. She was set apart principally because she had no interest in behaving as expected. Her occasional guests from Scotland saw that she liked to congratulate the other wives on their appearance – ‘My, Lady so and so, what a dear little hat you are wearing today’ – and every morning, on entering the House, she made a point of inquiring after everyone’s health – ‘Good morning Mr Skelton [then a junior doorkeeper], how are you? And how is your mother? Oh, will you send her my regards?’

Lily and Randolph considered themselves to have an important patron. The 17th Earl of Lauderdale, Patrick Maitland, a well-respected Scottish hereditary peer, former MP for Lanark, former reporter for The Times, and one of the last men in Britain to make use of a large ear trumpet, had come to know them through the ecumenical pilgrimages he organised to St Mary’s Kirk, his private chapel in the parish of Haddington, not far from Edinburgh. They were, he had long ago concluded, a very curious couple, at times exasperating, but of the sort that he found himself drawn to helping, often against his better judgement. When Lily had asked for his help in completing the necessary paperwork to propel Randolph to the House of Lords, however, he had had few misgivings. He had lent a hand, confident, as was she, that the act of elevating Randolph to the role for which he had been born might be the making of their marriage. Now that they had succeeded, within days of their arrival Lord Lauderdale found to his dismay that his good deed had returned to torment him. Lily sought him out whenever she could, falling into step beside him as he puffed his way down the corridors, or crying out to him across the tearoom. Soon, Lord Lauderdale found himself darting behind pillars to avoid her, not easy for a man of his girth. On the rare occasions that he escaped Lily’s notice, he would watch with bemused fascination as Lily and Randolph huddled together with furrowed brows, poring over the weekly whip, ‘more out of excitement than understanding’.

Word quickly spread about Lily and Randolph’s circumstances. While the Scottish peers and peeresses might return weekly to imposing seats scattered throughout the lowlands and highlands, they were not inclined towards the high life. But even by their standards of frugality, they saw that the new recruit was unusually strapped. Lady Saltoun, chief of the Fraser clan, a cross-bencher and another addition to the upper chamber that year, recognised Randolph’s limitations immediately. She remembered him as a teenager, when he was Lord Garlies, and it made her shudder. As an eighteen-year-old girl, she had been forced by her parents to dance with him at a masonic ball in Glasgow. It had been an awkward experience and one she was keen to forget. But despite faint memories of whispered talk of the boy’s disappearance from Scottish society, his sudden and unexpected reappearance in the House of Lords thirty years later met no interrogation or indiscretion.

During those early exhilarating days, Lily experienced a feeling of true belonging. It was a feeling of power and privilege by proxy. But it was to become apparent that Randolph could not fulfil his role. Some time before they left, Lily had an encounter that reminded her of how far she had come from her world, one to which she could not now return and to which she felt she had never spiritually belonged.

The reminder came in the stately if unlikely figure of Lord Home of the Hersel, who had succeeded Harold Macmillan as Prime Minister in 1963, but who had now returned to the upper chamber as a life peer. Lily did not hesitate when she saw him walking towards her in a corridor. She stopped him in his tracks. Speaking without pause in her thick Borders accent, as was her way, she reminded him of that time when they had met quite by chance more than forty years ago. The encounter had been at the Caledonian Hotel, Edinburgh, at the wedding reception of one Bunty Johnston, the daughter of R. J. Johnston, a lawyer and the County Clerk of Berwickshire. Lily would not normally have attended such a function but her older sister, Etta, was the Johnstons’ servant girl and Lily had been invited too, as she helped Etta with the Johnstons’ spring cleaning. ‘Oh Etta, I must come, I must!’ she had said. ‘It’s the only time I will ever have the chance of seeing the inside of the Caledonian Hotel.’

‘How nice to see you again,’ the former Prime Minister replied, either out of impeccable memory or, more likely, impeccable manners. ‘It has been a very, very long time.’

2 The Beginnings

Soon after Lily May Miller entered the world on 28 October 1916, she began to understand that the single benefit of being born into small-town life was that it could eventually be left behind. Her mother, nicknamed Sis and known for being fierce and cross, had spent her life bringing up her siblings and then her children, weaving blankets at Cumledge Mill, hunched, scowling, over two looms at once. Her father, a local groom, had run away from a tenement in Glasgow, desperate for country air, and when not at home and being subjected to his wife’s wrath, could usually be found in the stables, content among the horses.

The Borders town of Duns, which sits close to the Berwickshire coastline, was until 1975, the county town of Berwickshire, the administrative commercial and agricultural hub of neighbouring border towns such as Selkirk and Galashiels. As well as the cattle market every other week, set up for the buying and selling of farm equipment, once a year there were the Hirings in the Town Square, where employers traded farm hands and children skipped and played in the accompanying fair.

Duns had none of the excitements or department stores of Edinburgh and Glasgow, but it was well served. Everything of significance was conducted in or close to the town square, dominated by the town hall, where ladies in hats and gloves stopped to exchange gossip. Sometimes the news was of the latest young girl who had got herself pregnant out of wedlock, reliable information put about by two of the three Miss Smalls, large spinster sisters in brown fur coats who ran the baby linen shop and sold sanitary towels in brown paper parcels tied up with string. (It is a measure of how little there was to do that the Miss Smalls had the time and inclination to track the menstrual cycles of their customers.) The women in the town square, or those propped on brooms on their doorsteps, would nod and tut and predict the girl’s demise. These women preferred their husbands to travel to outlying areas to buy their birth control, the thick, ghastly condoms that were washed after use and dried with a sprinkling of talcum powder. Sex: pity the person who muttered the mere word, let alone the woman who admitted enjoying it.

As Lily grew up, there was none of the gossip that had followed the birth of her sister, Agnes, two years before. Plump and blonde, Agnes, affectionately called Etta, was as physically different from her father as a child could possibly be. Lily, by contrast, had been declared Andrew Miller’s from the start. She possessed his wiry frame, the same long nose, strong jaw, and cloudy, bulbous blue eyes. When her mother scraped her black hair back from her wide pale face, knotting it in two coiled snakes by her ears, the resemblance was indeed remarkable.

John Andrew Miller liked to say he had blue blood in his veins, or bluish at least. His mother had been a Scottish servant girl called Mary Jane Bryden and she had conceived him while in service. His father, she had told him vaguely, was a man connected with the household. Once her condition had begun to show, she had been dismissed. She kept her son for eight years, but when she met a new lover she promptly gave him away to the Miller family in Glasgow, from whom he took his name.

Andrew Miller was a clever boy, the brightest in the school, he claimed, but at fourteen his education came to an abrupt halt when he discovered he now had to earn his keep. He arrived in Duns some time before 1910, probably around 1905, an unusual step, for one brother was a coal miner, the other a baker, and it would have been more natural, expected even, for him, too, to have stayed in Glasgow at the centre of the pre-war Scottish economic boom. But he wanted to work in open fields, and there were not many of those in Glasgow. The Borders made sense. After agricultural labour, domestic service provided the chief source of employment. There were many grand houses and estates dotted along the River Tweed, such as Manderston, famous for its intricate silver staircase, which required many servants.

Andrew Miller quickly found a job. He was taken on as a trainee groom in a large house called Anton Hills, eight miles from Duns town, where he slept on a narrow bed in a cramped grooms’ dormitory with panelled walls and a basin in the corner. From Anton Hills, he moved on to the much bigger and grander estate of Duns Castle, owned by the Hay family, local gentry, patrons of the poor, and dispensers of pennies at Christmas time. By now, Andrew Miller possessed all the characteristics of an adolescent boy – a scrawny overgrown body, gangling limbs, and a ghostly teenage pallor highlighted by his black hair and light, serious eyes. To relax he boxed in matches against other grooms using his bare fists. He liked to drink, too, although rarely to excess. Add in the smell of the stables and a girl might have had reason to look beyond him for a husband. Sis, however, knew a good thing when she saw it.

Her real name was Annie Colvin, after her mother, but her brothers called her Sis and, because one was notorious in the town (for drinking and poaching), she became Sis to everybody else. Sis came from a family of drunks. Her father had dementia, her mother drank, and then there were those brothers of hers, who possessed barely a social skill between them. To begin with the Colvins were a family of nine – death would claim the sickliest, one by one – crammed into a shack-like house with an earthen floor and two windows. When Sis left school at nine to look after her mother’s new baby, it was by unspoken agreement that she took over the housework too. Thereafter she cooked, cleaned, and looked after all her siblings. This upbringing was to have consequences for her own daughters. She had no notion of what it meant to be a child; her thoughts ran solely on making ends meet. She bore a hatred of alcohol; she deeply distrusted education (which she considered something to be tolerated and on no account to be pursued further than necessary); and she had a contradictory attitude towards children. She viewed them both as good – a woman’s role in life – and bad – an economic drain, especially when born into poverty, which in itself she considered an act of supreme irresponsibility.

When Andrew Miller met Sis she was a well-established presence at the mill. Day after day, in the early morning darkness, she joined the gang of women who made the long walk along the road that led out from Duns. Sis was pleasant looking in the way that the plain often are: petite with wavy, mousy hair, a reasonable figure and small, round unsmiling brown eyes. (Her younger sister was the real beauty, but she was to die giving birth to her illegitimate child.) Heaven knows exactly how her path crossed with Andrew, since Sis rarely indulged in dancing and never in drinking, but in 1910, when she was twenty, she gave birth to the girl who became known as Etta. Papa, as Sis began to call Andrew, always explained his initial hesitance in marrying her as a result of his ‘bachelor’ job at the castle. This cannot have angered Sis too much, despite having to spend another three years under her mother’s roof, for on 25 September 1913, she married him at 1 Duke Street, Glasgow, by common declaration, with Papa’s brothers, William the coal miner and James the baker, as witnesses.

Papa recognised in his new wife the courage and spirit he lacked himself. She had a fighting, steely nature and offered him the prospect of a secure family environment (he had been old enough to remember his mother abandoning him). Sis saw that Papa was free of all the vices of her own family. In his knee-high boots, riding hat, and voluminous breeches, as he proudly drove his horses through town, with their polished saddles on glossy black flanks, he was considered a splendid sight and quite a gentleman. But while each filled the other’s needs, they were ill-suited at heart. Aside from a skill for mimicry, Papa was quiet and self-contained, dour even, certainly not prone to the great surges of emotions that erupted from his wife. He had always regretted his thwarted education and as an adult, became a determined autodidact, spending hours poring over Scottish literature. At one stage he even attempted to compile a history of the Scots language, which Sis would throw on the bonfire after his death. Sis hated books and frippery, and found it hard to control her feelings, particularly if she suspected he had been drinking at the bar of the Swan Hotel.

They had been married one year when the First World War broke out. Papa did not have the resolve to become a conscientious objector, but the idea of war horrified him nevertheless. He could not hide in the stables for long. In January 1915, for example, Country Life ran an editorial posing five questions:

1. Have you a Butler, Groom, Chauffeur, Gardener, or Gamekeeper serving you who, at this moment should be serving your King and Country?