Deborah, Dowager Duchess of Devonshire, who has died aged 94, was for more than half a century the chatelaine of Chatsworth House, the great stately home and estate in Derbyshire. In that time she did much to promote it as a favourite public destination. But she started out as the youngest of the Mitford sisters the country chick of that sophisticated brood, the extraordinary offspring of Lord Redesdale and his wife, Sydney. Although sister Nancy's claim that Debo could imitate a hen expelling an egg might have been a joke, Debo did drive the cart delivering the Mitford henhouse eggs to the station. While Nancy, Diana, Unity and Decca pursued literature, fascism, Hitler and socialism, Debo's best friend in childhood was the family's old groom, Hooper, "the human end of the horses; the stables were my heaven".
She was born at Asthall Manor, Oxfordshire, but equine bliss ended at 16 when the Mitfords sold their next country house: at 17, Debo's closest sibling, Jessica "Decca" eloped without a word, a letdown slightly ameliorated by the £1,000 libel settlement the Daily Express paid Debo for wrongly naming her as the runaway, which she squandered on a fur coat. She came out as a debutante in 1938 at a ball given by her doting father at the Mitfords' London house, and enjoyed the last real season before the second world war. Unity, the Hitler groupie, wrote from Germany: "Swyne [a Debo nickname] seems to be having a wonderful time who will the romance be with?"
Continue reading...