The Earl of Harewood

In July, Leeds United, a formidable northern England football club, posted an RIP advice on its noticeboard to George Henry Hubert Lascelles, the seventh Earl of Harewood, first cousin to Queen Elizabeth II, who had just died, aged eighty-eight. He was their long-serving president and would regularly travel with his butler from Harewood House, the magnificent Adam palace to the north of Leeds, to watch his team play from a box in Elland Road.

In Australia, he is best known for his strong commitment to music and opera. He was artistic director of the Adelaide Festival (1988) and a board member of the Australian Opera (now Opera Australia). He frequently visited Australia, even as a recently as a couple of years ago.

His second wife, Patricia (Bambi) Tuckwell, was once a violinist with the Sydney Symphony Orchestra. She has an entry in Who’s Who in Australia. Her father, Charles Tuckwell, was an eminent Australian organist.

Harewood was also managing director and later chairman of Sadler’s Wells Opera, now the English National Opera (1972–75), managing director of English National Opera North (1978–81) and artistic director of the Edinburgh Festival (1961–65) and the Leeds Festival (1958–74). He was made a Knight of the British Empire (KBE) in 1986. He was also a prisoner of war in the notorious Colditz Castle.

But as well as all this, he was seen as very much a Yorkshire squire and a man for all seasons. His beard helped give him a distinct resemblance to his grandfather, George V.

He had an excellent pheasant shoot at Harewood, where he moved between each drive on a quad bike, because of his severe asthma. He was well liked by the beaters (those who hacked through the undergrowth with their dogs putting the pheasants up over the guns), who referred to him as “Lordy”. Both Lord and Lady Harewood took time to talk to the beaters, making theirs a popular shoot to beat for.

The Yorkshire Post described Lord Harewood as one of Yorkshire’s most “recognisable and respected sons”.

In a publication to mark his eightieth birthday, he wrote: 

I remind myself constantly that in life you must never stop touching wood and that a banana skin lurks around every corner, and there is plenty of time for fortune to turn round and buffet me. But as I write I can only bless the stars which have so frequently shone down with benevolent accuracy and hope they don’t decide to change direction. 

The seventh Earl of Harewood was born on February 7, 1923, at Chesterfield House in London, the son of the sixth Earl and HRH Princess Mary, the only daughter of George V. He was the king’s first grandchild and sixth in line to the throne at the time.

Harewood became his home when he was seven years old. He said: “Harewood means everything to do with the word ‘home’ both on a small and on a big scale. It’s always been somewhere to come back to, a refuge.”

He had a happy childhood with his brother, Gerald, who is eighteen months younger. A governess taught him at home before he was sent to Ludgrove Preparatory School, followed by Eton. He greatly enjoyed playing cricket and football. As a boy he was page to Queen Mary and performed a minor role in various state occasions, attending the Queen at the 1937 Order of the Garter Ceremony at St George’s Chapel, Windsor. He served as a page at the coronation of his uncle, George VI (highlighted in the film The King’s Speech) the same year.

Harewood had an extraordinary ear for music and an interest in facts about music. His uncle, the Prince of Wales (later the Duke of Windsor) remarked: “It’s very odd about George and music. You know his parents were quite normal—liked horses and dogs and the country.”

When he heard the overture to Die Walkure for the first time on a record, Harewood exclaimed to his cousin Princess Helena Victoria: “Cousin Thora, that music frightens me.”

Holidays were split between Yorkshire and London, with regular visits to royal relations. Easter was always spent at Windsor and New Year at Sandringham.

Harewood was taken to his first Leeds United match when he was nine and remained an enthusiastic supporter, becoming Life President of the club. He developed an early love of music, listening to records on a wind-up gramophone player over and over until he knew every note. He proclaimed he was always “too ham-fisted to become a performer”, but, like soccer and art, music and in particular opera became a lifelong love.

He had an early taste for writing and together with his younger brother Gerald started a lively magazine, the Harewood News, which covered a wide range of topics from racing tips to short stories. In 1939 they even caused official disquiet at the War Office by publishing a description of a gun battery they had seen.

Harewood was commissioned into his father’s regiment, the Grenadier Guards, in the Second World War and saw active service in Algeria and Italy, where he frequently went to the opera in Naples’s fine opera house, Teatro di San Carlo.

He very nearly met an untimely end on June 18, 1944, as a twenty-one-year-old subaltern checking a road in Italy for anti-tank mines, when he was ambushed by a German patrol. He was shot and the bullet missed his heart by a critical few millimetres. He was also shot in both legs. He mused: “To be wounded by a bullet entering half an inch from my heart and exiting through my hip bone without doing any lasting harm could have exhausted at least eight of a cat’s nine lives.” He was captured and sent first to the POW camp at Spengenberg before being transferred to Colditz Castle. While there he studied and assimilated Grove’s Dictionary of Music “as far as the letter ‘T’”.

He was also to see his death warrant signed by Hitler. He said: “But that was only hours before being set free by the German general charged with carrying out the order. You can’t get luckier than that.”

It was pointed out that also on June 18 his ancestor, the second Earl, had been wounded at Waterloo, and on the same date in 1915 his father, the sixth Earl, had been wounded during the First World War. Harewood remained distinctly superstitious and, for example, would never sit down to thirteen at table and never kept peacocks.

After the war he became for a short time ADC to the Earl of Athlone, Governor-General of Canada, before going up to King’s College, Cambridge, to read English.

He recalled that in 1947, when George VI was abroad, he had been taken from his studies and appointed Counsellor of State, empowered to transact formal business on the King’s behalf. “I used to whizz down from Cambridge, and the Duke of Gloucester and I constantly had to receive ambassadors and did lots of curious things together. Rather jolly,” he said.

He became the seventh Earl of Harewood at twenty-four, taking over the running of one of the great houses of Great Britain, which had been open to the public from the first, as well as extensive estates. He was in his second term at King’s and unprepared. He had to sell a great deal of land and possessions to pay off death duties. He employed able estate managers to ensure the estate’s survival. The estate would later host a wide range of activities from vintage car rallies to the most recent home for the filming of the television serial Emmerdale. 

In 1949 he married Marion Stein, the daughter of Erwin Stein, an Austrian Jew who had fled to England in 1938. Marion was a noted concert pianist and founder of the Leeds International Piano Competition. Harewood had to plead for what was regarded in royal circles as an unconventional marriage.

Notwithstanding this, the King and Queen came down especially from Balmoral to join other members of the royal family at the ceremony in St Mark’s, North Audley Street. The wedding anthem was composed and conducted by Benjamin Britten with solo parts for Joan Cross and Peter Pears. Queen Mary, who arrived with the young Duke of Kent and Princess Alexandra, attended the reception.

The Harewoods produced three sons, the eldest of them David, a film and television producer, now the eighth Earl. Marion was awarded a CBE.

Harewood was editor and co-author for more than thirty years of the opera-goers’ bible, Kobbe’s Complete Opera Book. Opera “caused me to think the world was a more exciting place than it otherwise was”, he said.

Of his personal life he admitted at eighty: 

Above everything, I reckon my good fortune held over my marriages with Marion [who subsequently married the Liberal politician Jeremy Thorpe], three stalwart sons with whom I get on well and eighteen more years of more harmony than a subsequent divorce suggests; and with Patricia, a son and thirty-five years of the sort of shared interests and mutual love as one mostly dreams of or finds only in the pages of fiction. 

While Harewood was obtaining his divorce the Harewood Arms, outside the impressive gates to the house, was known by the locals as the “Tuckwell Arms”. While he demonstrated that his second marriage brought him great happiness, it was reported that he was not welcome at court, attending neither the Duke of Windsor’s funeral nor Princess Anne’s wedding.

By 1974 he attended the funeral of the Duke of Gloucester, and the Queen met the new Countess of Harewood publicly during the Silver Jubilee celebrations in 1977. As recently as June this year, Harewood attended the service to mark the Duke of Edinburgh’s ninetieth birthday at St George’s Chapel, Windsor. 

He was Chancellor of York University. He was on the general advisory council of the BBC from 1969 to 1972 and a governor from 1985 to 1987. He was chairman of the Music Advisory Committee of the British Council from 1956 to 1966, and a member of the Arts Council from 1966 to 1972. As an active editor of Kobbe’s Complete Opera Book, he provided his own additions. He edited a number of other publications such as Kobbe’s Illustrated Opera Book and Pocket Kobbe.

He observed: “When I first did Kobbe in the 1950s, Stravinsky had just written a masterpiece [The Rake’s Progress]; Britten and Tippett were in full flow. Then in the 1960s and 1970s it all went down hill.” He felt the tide was turning in the 1980s.

He said of his magnificent inheritance: “I was brought up to think of Harewood as a trust, something that was entrusted to me from the past: a beautiful house, beautiful contents and a beautiful environment—a trust which I will pass on to my children.” Its upkeep was a burden and had to be supported. In 1987 Christies auctioned 500,000 pounds worth of “junk” from the house including a Chippendale bed (83,000 pounds), and in 1988 he sold part of the estate for 13 million pounds. With this money he completely restored Robert Adam’s original eighteenth-century library and Princess Mary’s sitting room (she became Princess Royal in 1932). In the 1990s he commissioned the restoration of the terrace gardens and the parterre to the original designs of Charles Barry (which can be seen in the television concoction Lost in Austen).

Harewood installed a huge nude figure of Adam by Jacob Epstein in the entrance hall. He had regular concerts and dance and poetry workshops. In the grounds is the biggest adventure playground in the north of England, opened in 1994. His endeavours have attracted 300,000 visitors a year, a great boost to the future of Harewood.

The opera critic Rupert Christiansen, writing in the London Daily Telegraph after the Earl’s death, described their meeting. He was invited to lunch at Harewood House and found his host to be a mine of information and experience: 

We talked high and low, about Callas and Britten, about the foundation of the Opera magazine, and his pride in Opera North, the company he had been instrumental in establishing down the road in Leeds, as well as about singers, conductors and directors of the day … He could be very funny and did not mince his words, but nothing he said was gratuitously nasty or trivial. Although his health was already in decline, one felt such conversation recharged his batteries, and I only hope he enjoyed my visit a tenth as much as I did.

Our royal family, God bless it, is not noted for either its intellectual stature or artistic sophistication. But Lord Harewood, the Queen’s cousin, was the exception: a man who combined intense aesthetic sensibility with practicality and erudition. As someone who changed the face of postwar culture in Britain entirely for the better, his memory should be honoured.