BOOK REVIEW BY WILLIAM CROSS, FSA SCOT OF "LADY ALMINA AND THE REAL DOWNTON ABBEY"

 

                    

Lady Almina and the Real Downton Abbey    

   By Fiona Carnarvon    Hodder & Stoughton (2011)

A REVIEW OF THE ABOVE BOOK BY WILLIAM CROSS, FSA SCOT 

We should know our betters :  know that the toffs will not ever be transparent.  They will only tell you what they want you to know and to minimise the scandal they will painfully minimise the accuracy. 

The book does have an attractive front cover but it’s the content that counts. 

It’s all another instance of Herbert history repeating itself.  There is already a less than honourable pile up of Carnarvon-family scribes who put their heavy-handed gloss on the accuracy regarding past members of the clan.  Elsie, the second  4th Countess of Carnarvon, rigorously controlled and censored the posthumous biography of Henry, the 4th Earl of Carnarvon, a notable Victorian politician and Cabinet Minister. Lady Winifred Burghclere, the sister of George, 5th Earl of Carnarvon of Tutankhamun fame ( Almina’s husband ) did exactly the same,  stopping the leak of any embarrassing fall out about “Lordy!” ( the name the Egyptian natives gave Lord Carnarvon  in the Valley of  the Kings ). In 1923, Lady Winfred crafted an elegant and impeccably worded posthumous sketch of her adored brother, George, but as seen through her very rose tinted glasses, and it made no mention, of  faults, or George’s darker proclivities. Almina was demolished by Winifred’s blast of the trumpet in a single, dull, sentence.  Then there was the womanising 6th Earl’s ghosted memoirs that stopped well short of fact about his catalogue of carnal cavorting. And, unsurprisingly, the  ghost writers have done it yet again with this book,  portraying Almina as a saint. This lady was no saint! 

But there’s a lot at stake in only offering up a sanitised edition of Almina’s life with the rake-in being synonymous with the public popularity of Highclere Castle's expansive ( and expensive )  use as the backdrop to a television programme called “Downton Abbey”.

People actually believe in, and follow this TV series as mesmerised as grazing sheep watching car headlamps flicking in the winter darkness of night.  But the same extremes between fiction and reality portrayed in “Lady Almina…....” are at best an attempt to confuse the masses to make them actually believe the fiction, much as Orson Wells first deceived half of America into leaving their homes as they thought the men from Mars were about to land.

What good features there are in the book – and there are some genuinely interesting and worthy parts – albeit only carefully selected examples from Highclere’s Secret  Archives- are lost in the colossal wave of hypocrisy by the painfully irritating plotters. Almina’s true-life experiences are often scuttled, just as assassin or assassins scuttled an earlier biography of her in the 1990s– the reason being that on that occasion evidence was found that Almina had “strayed”,  the 6th Earl’s paternity was in very great doubt.   The  gene pool of Porchey Carnarvon’s father is mentioned in the narrative but in  the wrong places, to bring him out with any meaningful recognition. But you will find this confronted  in another biography of Almina, Countess of Carnarvon in addition to the rest of her secrets.  

Besides the  paternity issue, which remains an open wound,  Almina’s own paternity is a matter of some dispute.  Porchey, the womanising 6th Earl of Carnarvon, who absolutely hated his mother, was first to claim, publically, that the  millionaire banker, Baron ( he was never a “Sir”) Alfred de Rothschild was Almina’s biological father. This, despite a birth certificate that states her dad was  “ Frederick C Wombwell”, a gentleman, although also a cad. Wombwell believed he was Almina’s father, but he is ridiculed in Highclere’s text. They choose also to ignore Almina’s brother, who was a visitor at  Highclere and to whom the Countess raised a fine memorial when he died. 

Going back to Almina being a Rothschild bastard, this nonsense  has been maintained with constancy and the Wombwells discredited.  But there is  NO proof in favour of the Rothschild in this book, indeed they are as frigid as the fiction of Downton Abbey on the central point of their treatise.  

It seems a case of employing the technique of Mr Goebbels that if one utters a big enough untruth and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. In this case when the golden opportunity presented itself,  to reveal the full facts about Alfred and cite the evidence for these claims of Almina being a Rothschild,   the book can only declare limply “. the question of Almina’s paternity can’t be conclusively determined with any certainty….”   

The strengths of “ Lady Almina…..” include the descriptions of Highclere ramparts at war.  Almina found her forte as a nurse and spent over thirty years working steadfastly (and often waywardly) in private nursing care, mainly pampering to the Royals, the rich and the famous. But none of Almina’s story in the later period of her life is included in the book.

Almina transformed her Castle for the Great War and later moved her wartime nursing home activities to London’s Mayfair. But all this storyline ( which is well enough told ) is  small glory, in what is otherwise a cowardly approach, messing with a  woman’s life and only stating her pleasantries. Almina’s real life,  the character and make up of the woman, her struggle for love, and for her own carnal pleasures, as well as her motives in wanting to do something worthwhile don’t get mentioned. Perhaps they were afraid of scaring the horses at Highclere stud, the beasts were once owned by Almina, who was made bankrupt by 1951, and lived with a man twenty years her junior, in an apple orchard in Somerset, completely unknown to Highclere’s hounds.      

The book makes a good meal out of the rituals of Society entertaining and Almina’s brave challenge to be the grandest hostess of the hour. The stay at Highclere Castle by the Prince of Wales (later King Edward VII) in 1895 is a good chunk, but this was published in a previous book by the same stable, so it’s double dipping.   

Another weakness of the book is in its abrupt ending. Almina’s story is cut-off suddenly in 1923, just after the 5th Earl’s famous mosquito bite and then cruel demise.  That said, the last page refers to her second marriage, to an ex- army Colonel (whilst saying nothing of the blackguard plunging her into a scandalous Court case of DENNISTOUN v DENNISTOUN  in 1925, which cost her $100,000 worth of misery). In summing up Almina’s next four  lively decades in a single paragraph – and not a very good one – it leaves the brainwashed reader with only that other  biography to best reflect the Countess’s  full life and loves, her glories and her descent into bankruptcy, but ultimately to her greater story, which in being told without warts or blemishes leaves this important,  unstoppable, eccentric woman, who really didn’t give a damn, a much  lesser figure than she really was. She deserves a much better memorial than a nice book cover.

William Cross, FSA Scot

Author of " The Life and Secrets of Almina Carnarvon" Book Midden Publishing ( 2011) 

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For further details/ queries please contact William Cross, by e-mail, williecross@aol.com