Lady Catherine, the Earl, and the Real Downton Abbey Read online

  Catherine was the third of four children and had two older brothers, Jacob and Reginald; five years later, she would also have a younger sister called Philippa. At the time of Catherine’s birth, her family were, if not quite in the ranks of the American super-rich, then certainly extremely wealthy.

  Her father, Jacob (Jac) Wendell Jnr, was born in 1869 into one of New York City’s foremost families. The Wendells were of Dutch descent and among the original settlers of Manhattan Island. Catherine’s paternal grandfather had increased his family fortune through trade, and her father had followed in his footsteps, making his own success by going into business with a college friend to form a railway supplies company.

  Wendell Jnr seemed to be a chip off the old block: reliable and savvy as well as jovial company, a man beloved by his many friends. He was a prominent member of the Harvard class of 1891, and caroused with Mark Twain and Ralph Waldo Emerson during his European tour after graduation. At the inaugural dinner of the Harvard Club of Rome in April 1892, he entertained these friends with comic songs and impressions that had them all in gales of laughter. He was excessively charming, witty, kindly and eligible, an altogether excellent match for Marian Fendall, who married him in her hometown of Washington DC on 16 April 1895.

  Where the Wendells were an old family that had made money through business, the Fendalls could boast equally longstanding and even more illustrious lineage. Jac and Marian’s wedding breakfast was held at the home of the bride’s aunt, Miss Mary Lee Fendall. Catherine was descended on her mother’s side from the Lee families of Virginia, which made her practically aristocracy in the United States. Her great-great-grandfather was Philip Richard Fendall, a cousin of Revolutionary War hero and eulogiser of George Washington, Henry Lee III. The Lee-Fendall clan was extensive and extensively involved in politics at the highest levels. The best known of all was Catherine’s distant cousin, General Robert Lee, the commander of the Confederate Army and one of the most lauded military leaders in US history.

  The marriage of Catherine’s parents brought together two great families, and appears to have been, besides, a very happy one. As well as the house in Maine where she was born, Catherine grew up between her paternal grandparents’ town house in New York City and Frostfields, her mother’s country house in the tiny and picturesque town of Newcastle on the outskirts of Portsmouth, New Hampshire. The photos of Marian, Jac and their four children in the gardens at Frostfields show an informal group, seemingly caught in a moment between expeditions to play in the rock pools, or run down to the beach with the dogs. Frostfields was a modern seaside villa, imposingly large but not grand, unlike the New York headquarters of the Wendell family with its dark Victorian furniture and heavy drapes at the windows.

  Catherine’s childhood was typical of a monied East Coast family, shuttling between the great hub of New York City and the country retreat at Portsmouth. There were long mornings with her governess followed by dancing and music lessons in town, tennis parties and ponies in the countryside. She saw far more of her parents than many of her British contemporaries, especially at the weekends, though Jac and Marian—or Gar as the children called her—also had their own busy social lives to lead. They were often out at balls, trips to the theatre, dinners with friends, or enjoying any of the other sources of gaiety available to the wealthy in the most prosperous city on earth.

  The family was of the class that cherished its history and cultivated the sense of confident purpose that came from having been successful over the course of generations. Catherine’s parents were well matched and affectionate with each other and their children. She was close to all three of her siblings; most particularly in these early years her two older brothers. It appears that until she was ten, Catherine was a happy child living a charmed life.

  Then, in 1910, her father lost his entire fortune in one supremely unlucky (or badly judged, depending on one’s point of view) stroke. Jac Wendell Jnr’s business was in railway supplies. For the best part of twenty years he and his partner sold equipment to the companies that were expanding the urban railway network in cities all over the States. They exported to countries around the world. With such a diverse and successful business of two decades’ standing, it is somewhat mystifying that Wendell Jnr should have elected to invest everything in a single railway stock. When its value crashed months later, he lost his entire business and, with it, the Wendells’ centuries-old winning streak.

  The flip side to the United States’ economic dream factory, to the busy creation of all that staggering wealth, was this: risky manoeuvres that could bring whole fortunes tumbling down, and with them the livelihoods and prospects of hundreds of people, all the way from proprietor to lowliest employee. Fortunately for Catherine’s family, if not for the employees, her father had lost only his money, not Marian’s. The fact that Catherine’s mother was independently wealthy saved the Wendells from ruin, though their circumstances were inevitably much reduced.

  In the wake of this financial disaster, Jac Wendell did something surprising. He took the opportunity to pursue a long-cherished dream and reinvented himself as a professional actor. It was a significantly left-field action for the scion of a New York dynasty with a young family to maintain, but it was also the flowering of a lifelong passion to entertain. Jac had been a key member of the Hasty Pudding Club, Harvard’s dramatic society, and was described by some who saw him there as the best amateur actor of his generation. For the Harvard Class of 1891 Fifth Report, produced in 1911, Jac wrote that, ‘My “play” has now become my work and I am working at that with enthusiasm.’ In his first season at the New Theater in New York, he played Agrippa in Antony and Cleopatra and Feste in Twelfth Night. He also played a dog and a half-witted boy in other productions which, as he wrote, ‘shows that there are some histrionic advantages that go with a college education.’

  Perhaps Jac believed he would become one of the great professional actors of his generation. Unless he had ambitions to be an actor-manager or, better still, a big producer, he cannot have imagined he would make much money. It is tempting to wonder whether the peculiar recklessness that led to his financial ruin did not stem from a subconscious drive to eradicate his old life and thus free himself to pursue the one he had always wanted. Or, at least, it would be if the loss of his fortune hadn’t subsequently caused him so much distress. What is certain is that, with Marian’s money backing him up, in the wake of the disaster he was able to opt for something rather more Bohemian than the life he had lived previously. His boldness seemed initially to pay off: his second season at the theatre saw him cast as the leading man in What the Doctor Ordered.

  Then a misfortune infinitely greater than the mere loss of a twenty-year endeavour befell the Wendells. Jac became seriously ill. For all his gaiety and determination to make the most of things, the worry about the impact of his decisions on his family had caused him to have a nervous breakdown. He was utterly exhausted. During the theatrical tour he contracted pneumonia.

  Many encouraging notes from his friends were dispatched. Theodore Roosevelt wrote, ‘Jack Wendell here’s to you, oh incarnation of the pudding! We miss you greatly and we are deeply concerned to know that you are so sick. May you soon be well is the earnest hope of your friends and well wishers.’ In the archives at Highclere there is a tiny note Jac wrote to his wife in a spidery hand, which begins, ‘Goodbye my darling …’

  Despite all the prayers and hopes, by the time the Harvard Class of 1891 Fifth Report came out, Jacob Wendell Jnr was dead. Where most of his classmates’ entries are more or less ironic accounts of their quiet lives, no longer than three paragraphs, Jacob’s entry is a five-page-long obituary, a tribute to a man so well loved by his college contemporaries that there is still a seat that bears his name at the Harvard Club.

  In the course of just over a year, Catherine’s idyllic childhood had been obliterated. The confident expectations, the luxury, the secure social status, the happiness of a charmed circle: all were gone. Her father was gone.


  Marian Wendell lost little time to grief. Though she and Jac seem to have been a sincerely close couple and his sudden death at the age of forty-two must have been shattering, she had practical questions to resolve. New York high society in the first decade of the twentieth century was not an easy place to be a young widow with four children and depleted finances. It was a world unchanged since Edith Wharton had described the gilded cages of rigid conventions that bound women’s lives. In New York a widow had no independent status. With the loss of her husband, she was effectively demoted. Marian had some money of her own and her house at Frostfields but, without marrying again, which she evidently had no desire to do, she and her children would be cut off from the lifeline of the city and its society. She decided it was time for a fresh start and wrote to her cousin, Gertrude Tredick Griffiths, who ten years before had married an Englishman and gone to live in London.

  Gertrude and Marian had been fond of one another when they were growing up, and Gertrude had been a bridesmaid at Marian’s wedding, but they hadn’t seen each other since Gertrude’s move. The affection must have been deep and sincere though, because, in an act of significant generosity, Gertrude and Percy Griffiths invited Marian and all four of her children to live with them. He was a partner at the accountancy firm of Deloitte and a fanatical collector of rare furniture. They had a London house in Bryanston Square and spent the weekends at Sandridgebury, their home just outside St Albans, a small cathedral city twenty miles north of London.

  Catherine left the States behind when she was twelve years old. She never lived there again.

  Marian and Gertrude seem to have worked together to establish clear routines for the children almost from the moment of their arrival. Jac, the eldest boy, was sent to school at Repton. Reggie, two years younger, went to Eton. He was a direct contemporary of Porchey, Catherine’s future husband, and only the second American ever to be elected to Pop, the school’s society of senior boys, a body very roughly analogous to prefects. Catherine and Philippa were educated at day schools in London. At weekends Marian, Gertrude, Percy and the girls decamped the short distance to Sandridgebury, where they were joined in the school holidays by Jac and Reggie.

  The arrangement seems to have worked very well. The only note of discord occurred when Gertrude, who had no children of her own, wished to adopt Philippa. Marian was quite firm in her refusal. Despite this sticky moment, the Griffiths were unfailingly kind and generous. It must have been an enormous change for them, as a childless couple used to pleasing themselves, and with two houses full of precious furniture; not a combination that would necessarily work well with four boisterous children.

  In 1910 the Portsmouth Herald, the local paper of the New Hampshire town where Catherine had spent much of her first ten years, had run a rather breathless front-page profile of ‘Mrs Gertrude Tredick Griffiths and her success’. It claimed her as a brilliant society arbiter and ‘leader of the American colony in London.’ In truth, the Griffiths did not move in the most exalted social realm, though they were well connected among the wealthy professional classes that felt perfectly at ease mingling with the gentry, and had extensive contacts with other well-off Americans living in London. Marian Wendell might have reflected that, if life was perhaps a little less glamorous than it had been in New York before Jac’s death, she had at least achieved the reinvention of her family’s story. In London Marian was not just Jac’s widow, she was also Gertrude’s cousin. She was part of a solidly comfortable upper-middle-class world that, in practice, afforded greater social mobility than the New York high society she had left behind.

  It’s impossible to say for sure what impact her family’s change in circumstances and country, to say nothing of the loss of her father, had on Catherine. Her mother’s efficient management of the move, the financial cushion of her wealth and the ready-made social circle that awaited the Wendells in London must surely have helped. So, too, must the companionship of her siblings. If they had been fond of each other before, after their arrival in England the four Wendell children were devoted to one another. Jac took his role as the eldest very seriously all his life, looking out for his sisters in particular. Catherine adored both him and her brother Reggie and regarded Philippa as her natural companion in fun. They were all very close to their mother, Gar.

  As they grew up and settled more comfortably into London society, the family acquired a reputation for being excellent company. They all loved to dance, but Jac and Philippa were considered among the best dancers in London. Catherine and Philippa were growing into very attractive girls, fun and flirtatious, much in demand. Catherine had a soft prettiness, Philippa a dark-haired, dark-eyed intensity. A press photo of her in the Spanish dancer’s costume she wore to a ball at Claridge’s, not long after Catherine’s marriage, shows her looking extremely sassy, staring at the camera from beneath her flat black hat, arms on hips and shawl slung across her body.

  The family worshipped at St Mark’s Church on North Audley Street in Mayfair. Catherine and her sister would sweep in on a Sunday morning, one on each of Gar’s arms, smiling and greeting their numerous friends from among London’s smart set. The Wendell sisters were charming, and were invited everywhere.

  The Wendells’ adolescence seems to have been a lot of fun, despite the horrific events that were decimating the generation of young people among whom they were living. The war in Europe broke out two years after they arrived, and one can only imagine Marian’s relief that, as Americans, her boys were exempt from conscription. Reggie, born in 1898, was also just too young, but Jac was not. In 1915 he was sent a white feather, the gesture of contempt towards those so-called cowards who had not joined up. In fact, he, like so many, was desperate to go.

  It can be difficult to grasp the eagerness that young men felt, even once the scale of the carnage and its seeming futility had become apparent. Alfred Duff Cooper, who served as a Grenadier Guard and was later a Conservative MP and opponent of Neville Chamberlain’s appeasement policy, as well as a friend of Catherine and her husband and a great visitor to Highclere, wrote in his memoir Old Men Forget, that for ‘normal young men’ in wartime, ‘joining the army was plainly the decent thing to do, like giving up a seat to an old lady or taking off one’s hat in a holy place.’ He acknowledged that some really did struggle with their conscience, but implied strongly that they were the odd ones. There was a combination of basic decency and the boldness of youth that swept most young men off to face the war’s long hours of fatigue and boredom and horrors.

  In 1916, Jac joined Professor Richard Norton’s American Volunteer Motor Ambulance Corps. If part of Marian had hoped she would be spared this, she was also immensely proud. The Ambulance Corps was already legendary. It was founded in London in autumn 1914 by Norton, an eminent archaeologist and friend of Henry James and Edith Wharton, both of whom raised funds for the body. It began with two cars and four drivers. By the time it was taken over by the American Army when the United States entered the war in 1917, there were 600 American volunteer drivers and 300 ambulances. They worked alongside the British Red Cross and were initially under the command of the British Army. The French Army was, however, even worse served by ambulance units than the British, so they were promptly switched to work with the French.

  The Ambulance Corps, or les voitures américaines as the French called it, was noted for exceptional bravery, rescuing men from right under the noses of the enemy and amidst heavy barrages. They were collectively awarded the Croix de Guerre, the French military honour created in late 1914 to recognise the unprecedented valour being displayed in the field. Richard Norton died of meningitis in 1917, but was nonetheless France’s most highly decorated non-Frenchman of the war.

  Jac served in the seventh section of the Ambulance Corps, which received four collective citations in French honours. He was also cited individually. Despite being wounded at Verdun, he, unlike the unfortunate Norton and so many of his friends and contemporaries in the Army, who were dying in their doz
ens every day, survived the war. Once the United States joined the conflict in 1917, he became an aide-decamp to General Pershing. He was clearly an asset to the US Army. For one thing, Jac, like Catherine and all the Wendell siblings, was fluent in French. He had also spent over a year on the ground in France and proved himself to be both supremely able and brave. That white feather must have felt like a ridiculous joke from another lifetime.

  In 1918, with her beloved older brother safely back, Catherine threw herself into the rapturous celebrations of the end of the war. The social whirl had been maintained, as far as possible, throughout. It was felt that when the young men were on leave they needed to have as much fun as possible: champagne at dinner, the conversation of charming young ladies such as the Wendell sisters, and then for some (though never for the Wendells, who were well guarded from such scandalous activities) dancing in nightclubs till dawn.

  Now the festivities ratcheted up a gear. There was a heady sense of liberation, of relief and possibility. Duff Cooper remembered that both during and for some time after the conflict, there was a sense that it was almost a duty to be not just cheerful, but as happy as possible. ‘Among my own friends it became a point of honour never to show a sad face at the feast. And if we wept—as weep we did—we wept in secret.’

  Stoicism, indeed gaiety, was the virtue and the necessity of the age, but it can’t have been easy. Duff Cooper had very few friends left; they had been wiped out, one by one. Of the eight young men who made a trip to Venice in 1913, he was the only survivor. Each week there was another telegram, another friend dead.

  Catherine’s future husband was partially shielded from the impact of this carnage by being posted to India and thence to Mesopotamia rather than the killing fields of northern France. Lord Porchester—Porchey—was eighteen years old when on Boxing Day 1916 he sailed for Bombay to join his regiment and complete his military training. The 7th Queen’s Own Hussars were a cavalry regiment and attracted the dashing sons of the aristocracy and the gentry. Porchey had joined up in a mood of boisterous patriotism and had the typical young man’s conviction that nothing bad could possibly happen to him. Training in Mhow appeared to bear this out. There were sword-play exercises, mounted combat with lances, polo games to improve horsemanship and four kit changes a day. Full dress uniform was obligatory at dinner, which was served off silver that would not have been out of place at Highclere, Porchey’s beloved childhood home.