A Visit with the Dowager of Chatsworth

Deborah, Duchess of Devonshire (above), chatelaine saviour of Chatsworth and the last of the Mitford Sisters, would have been 100 today. The sixth daughter and seventh and last child, she was the Lord and Lady Redesdales’ final chance for a second son. Mabel their parlourmaid recalled, “I knew it was a girl by the look on his lordship’s face.” Nine decades later, this disappointing arrival wrote in her memoirs, “Blank. There is no entry in my mother’s engagement book for 31 March 1920, the day I was born. The next few days are also blank. The first entry in April, in large letters, is ‘KITCHEN CHIMNEY SWEPT’. Who could have imagined the life that lay ahead? In any case, this milestone, a century later, recalled this writer’s visit to the Palace of the Peak in October 2005 to satisfy a lifelong ambition — to meet one of the Mitfords.

One of the ducal cars (but not, alas ,the old duke’s Bentley with the Devonshire crest) brought me from the station, through…