Almina, Countess of Carnarvon: 150th Anniversary Of Her Birth In 1876
The Life and Secrets of Almina Carnarvon
A candid biography of Almina, 5th Countess of Carnarvon of Tutankhamun Fame (1876-1969)
By William Cross, FSA Scot
Today, 14 April 2026, is the 150th anniversary of the birth of Almina, Victoria, Marie, Alexandra Wombwell, later 5th Countess of Carnarvon, chatelaine for almost 30 years of Highclere Castle, famous as the backdrop to film and TV’s Downton Abbey.
The book “ The Life and Secrets of Almina Carnarvon” is
a full length, remarkably candid, biography of this lady, the widow of George Edward Stanhope
Molyneux Herbert, 5th Earl of Carnarvon, co-discoverer with Howard Carter of
the great Tomb of Tutakhamun, in 1922.
Written chronologically in time scale straddling
Almina's nine tumultuous decades of
life, from the 1870s, until the 1960s, the book is based on a close study of
newspapers, letters, diaries, testimonials, and references to the Countess, and
her circle in sources in private and national archives. There are also first
hand recollections of Almina from a number of people, including her godson Tony
Leadbetter, whose mother Anne was Almina's housekeeper for almost 30 years.
Once dubbed everybody's fairy godmother Almina
ploughed through a King's ransom, inherited from her guardian, Baron Alfred de
Rothschild. In the Great War she reigned supreme as a pioneering nurse who
treated wounded Officers in hospitals that bore her name. Her succession of
wayward Nursing Homes, in the era before the National Health Service treated
the rich, famous and privileged earning her celebrity status, and parody by A J
Cronin in “The Citadel”. She hated other women they were all bitches. She
controlled men like a puppet master; many of those she manipulated went to the
grave before her.
The book offers a unique insight into Almina's life and times and discloses
many of her secrets. The narrative reveals a riches-to-rags story over nine
decades of the barely 5 feet high, Pocket Venus plunged into an artificial
marriage with a boorish, craggy faced Earl, ten years her senior, a virtual
invalid who failed her as a companion and lover. Almina reinvented herself
several times, married twice, she lived with a business partner for 20 years,
entirely undisclosed to her family, who walked in the highest echelons of
Society, swindled her own son and ended her days in an ordinary terraced house
in Bristol, perishing aged 93, in a horrendous "accident" in 1969.
This is a tale that rocked the old and present Establishment.
The book represents the ONLY full length biography of Almina, 5th Countess of Carnarvon.
“The Life Secrets of Almina Carnarvon”, Third Edition,
is available on ebay at a bargain price to mark Almina’s 150th birthday.
https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/204794598968
For further details/ queries please contact William Cross, by e-mail, williecross@aol.com
William Cross, FSA Scot
NB Almina's portrait, above, is by Tony Binder, painted at Luxor in 1923. Owned by William Cross.
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