The Field Interview: Lady Glenconner
Princess Margaret’s former lady-in-waiting talks to Daniel Pembrey about growing up at Holkham, home delicacies and the smartest sporting traditions
Even the walnut tree in the garden here has a venerability graced with a novel twist. “It is so old the holes are filled with polystyrene to stop water getting in,” explains Lady Glenconner, million-copy bestselling author, formerly lady-in-waiting to Princess Margaret, wife of Mustique creator Colin Tennant and, before all that, Lady Anne Coke, daughter of the late 5th Earl of Leicester.
Lady Glenconner lives just a few short miles from her childhood home of Holkham. These days home is a handsome 17th-century farmhouse formed of red brick and squared white clunch stone. It is well screened from the road, nestled in a pan-tiled village hugging the flat Norfolk landscape in the face of fierce winds racing in off the North Sea and military jets screaming overhead.
Entertaining essays
The sitting room is calm and light with tall Georgian-style windows and a well-made fire. Lady Glenconner, 92, has a young woman’s alertness of eye. Her dark clothes are smart; timeless. She has another book out: Lady Glenconner’s Picnic Papers and other Feasts with Friends. It collects together entertaining essays on the art of the picnic from an array of voices, including her late mother; the legendary socialite Lady Diana Cooper; media veteran Tina Brown; and etiquette ‘influencer’ William Hanson.
“I expect your readers would like to know about velvet,” she says. As Lady Glenconner begins to explain velvet, the years peel back in the manner of Brideshead Revisited. We encounter the Holkham trees her childhood self and younger sister used to shin up, armed with soup ladles for scooping up jackdaws’ eggs – “delicious to eat, like plovers’,” she remarks. During autumn, stags roaming the park shed layers of skin from their antlers that were collected and fried in butter. “This delicacy acquired the name velvet and was highly prized by my father, who savoured it on toast.” Does she like it? Her expression suggests otherwise.
Invention of covert shooting
It was during the muffled depths of winter that Holkham truly came into its own, from the late Earl’s standpoint. “My mother told me about the shooting lunches of the past, and, one Christmas in deep snow, her going out to find a trestle table in a wood,” recounts Lady Glenconner. “On it were a loaf of bread, a rather hollow Stilton and the famous box of small, raw Spanish onions – a Holkham tradition.” Later years brought improvements in the sustenance provided but these were not improvements from the late Earl’s standpoint. “You have to remember that for him and his like-minded friends, it was all about the shooting; eating was a distraction – worse, an interruption,” says Lady Glenconner. “Covert shooting was invented at Holkham.” So too the ‘billy coke’ hats worn by the gamekeepers, better known by the name of their original London hatter, Bowler. For years Holkham held records for wild partridge. On one day in 1905, on the Warham beat, 1,671 grey partridges were shot. “Yet it was never about the size of the bag,” she is at pains to add. “And like the late Queen, we always picked up. Nothing ever went to waste. There was an art to it all.”
An invitation to shoot here was coveted in the grandest houses of the land, and the Royal Family’s Sandringham estate is but 12 miles away. “There was a long-standing tradition of the guns being placed by rank,” Lady Glenconner explains. “Viscounts were on the outside, then – moving inwards – earls, marquesses, dukes and, at the very centre, members of the Royal Family: often the late Duke of Edinburgh and his equerries.
Fishing for eels
“After the main shoot, he [the late Earl] used to take his friends to a pond where they’d shoot duck and woodcock. My father enjoyed shooting woodcock more than anything else, due to the size and difficulty.” He also fished in the park’s ponds and lakes, on one occasion with the then HRH The Prince of Wales, around eight at the time. “My father taught him to fish for eels, which they cooked up in the kitchen back at the house. The eels’ nerves remain intact when cut, and pieces started jumping out of the frying pan. ‘I thought I was going to be sick!’ HM The [now] King recently confessed to me.” Other home-found delicacies had greater appeal: huge baskets of fresh samphire (“delicious”); early peaches grown beside heated garden walls; and every sort of shellfish, as well as dabs – flat fish found and caught in submerged sands by the agile feet of a Miss Disney, “who lived above the boathouse among the sails”.
When the late Earl died in 1976, the gamekeepers carried his coffin from the house to St Withburga’s church, which stands in the middle of the park, above the lake surrounded by the deer. “This was my father’s absolute favourite place in the world.” The late Earl had no sons, so the estate passed to another branch of the family. “Shooting still happens there but differently, of necessity,” she concludes. Lady Glenconner is on her feet with surprising alacrity. She lives year-round in Norfolk but is never stationary for long, returning to her beloved Mustique when she can. She is disciplined when it comes to daily activities, which include balancing exercises: “I like to ascend my stairs with a tray in one hand, not holding on with the other.” She is equally careful to walk properly (“never shuffling”), believing that being young, not old, takes practice: advice many, several decades her junior, could surely benefit from.