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grandfather; both her grandfather and her father died here, and her father was born in
York Cottage, now the estate office, an ugly villa in the grounds. While the family and
their staff love it, to outsiders the Big House is quite frankly hideous. It looks, as Queen
Mary’s biographer, James Pope-Hennessy, wrote, like a Scottish golf hotel, built in
Edwardian-Jacobean style in aggressive red brick trimmed with stone, with a touch of
fantasy in the elaborate stone porte-cochere modelled on a Loire château and tall trellispatterned
mock Elizabethan chimneys and towers with a weather-vane. The house looks
huge and once had 365 rooms, but forty or so were demolished when a wing was pulled
down in 1974–5. It was a servants’ wing with a huge dormitory where the more junior
male staff slept in cubicles, a warren of small bedrooms and the usual hierarchical set of
dining-rooms for the various ranks of staff. It was pulled down as an economy as it was
leaking and falling down; during Queen Alexandra’s long occupation and during the
war years practically no maintenance had been carried out. Plan after plan was put up
to Elizabeth, who was, a former employee said, ‘very concerned that the staff should not
be affected by the changes’. Philip came up with the idea to amalgamate the three staff
dining-rooms to save space (just as, at Buckingham Palace, he ended the system of
different kitchens for the preparation of royal and staff meals), but there were
difficulties in that the same type of service was required but the pantry space was no
longer there. Sir Peter Ashmore, the then Master of the Household, attempted to decree
that there would be no more tray service to bedrooms. Staff held their breath for the
arrival of ‘Miss MacDonald’, Princess Margaret and her guests. Tray service was
resumed. The result was below-stairs confusion; the wretched pantry boys would be
dealing with the break fast trays piled up higgledy-piggledy all over the place because
there was no space to put them so that often good china got broken, while they also had
to wash up the main dining-room breakfast as the chefs shouted at them to prepare the
shooting lunches. As an economy, the wall where the old wing had been was not
properly faced with stone but just red bricks; it is visible only to the staff and
tradesmen, who refer to it as ‘the out-patients’ department’. There are still strong traces
of the old regime. When Philip asked if they could change the way the flowers were
arranged in the bedrooms, the old gardener told him that they were done that way
because that was how Queen Mary liked them, detailing exactly where she had wanted
them put, and her fondness for carnations, the fashionable flower of before the First
World War. When Pope-Hennessy visited the house in 1956, something else more
macabre had not changed:
Across the head of the main stairs is situated a truly sinister warren of small rooms, looking on to the main
front of the house… the first door on the left is where the Duke of Clarence died. This dim and cheerless hole
is surprisingly small… so that you could touch the mantelpiece with your hand if lying on the bed. How
fourteen people, including the [enormous] Duchess of Teck, crammed into this room on the morning of 14
January 1892 foxes me completely [he wrote]. Queen Alexandra kept this room as a shrine, visiting it almost
daily, strewing fresh flowers on the bed, looking at his uniforms and clothes ranged in a glass cabinet along
the wall opposite the fireplace. Even the soap and hair brushes were left as on the day he died… 9
To sum up [Pope-Hennessy went on], this is a hideous house with a horrible atmosphere in parts and in