Louise Carpenter - An Unlikely Countess - Lily Budge and the 13th Earl of Galloway

Lily Budge and the 13th Earl of Galloway

Harper Perennial An imprint of HarperCollins Publishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

This edition published by Harper Perennial 2005

First published by HarperCollins Publishers 2004

Copyright © Louise Carpenter 2004

PS section copyright © Louise Tucker 2005

except ‘An Unlikely Countess’ by Louise Carpenter

© Louise Carpenter 2005

PS™ is a trademark of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd

Louise Carpenter asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

‘Small Town’ Words and Music by Lou Reed and John Cale © 1989, Screen Gems – EMI Music Inc/Metal Machine Music/John Cale Music Inc, USA Reproduced by permission of Screen Gems – EMI Music Ltd, London WC2H OQY

The publisher and the author gratefully acknowledge Randolph Galloway, the Estate of Lily Budge, The Stewart Society, Joseph Bonnar, William Mowat Thomson, Michael Thornton, and Roddy Martine for permission to reproduce photographs and press clippings from private collections.

All reasonable efforts have been made by the author and publisher to trace copyright holders. In the event that we are contacted by any of the untraceable copyright holders after publication of this book, the publisher and author will endeavour to rectify the position accordingly.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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Source: ISBN 9780007108817

Ebook Edition © FEBRUARY 2013 ISBN 9780007391707

Version: 2016-08-05

For Tom

and

Randolph Galloway

I am very fond of the good soldier Schweik … Iam convinced that you will sympathise with thismodest, unrecognised hero. He did not set fire to thetemple of the Goddess at Ephesus, like that fool of aHerostratus, merely in order to get his name intothe newspapers and the school reading books .

And that, in itself, is enough .

JAROSLAV HAŠEK, The Good Soldier Schweik

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Epigraph

PART ONE

1 The Most Caring Place in the World

2 The Beginnings

3 Virescit Vulnere Virtus: Valour Grows Strong from a Wound

4 Tea or Coffee, ma’am?

5 Happy Days are Coming

6 Becoming Mrs Budge

7 Lobotomised Patients Make Good Citizens

8 Carnival of the Animals

9 A Crazy House

10 Anglo-Catholic with Charismatic Overtones

PART TWO

11 Poor Love

12 My Home is My Castle

13 A Shoddy Day and Age

14 Will the Earl Get a Crumb of Comfort?

15 Here, Sir!

16 I Would Have Hated to Commit Murder

PART THREE

17 We Have the Name Darling, but Alas, We do not Have the Game

18 Poor Margot is Ghastly

19 Never Judge a Person until You’ve Walked a Mile in their Shoes

20 New Places to Wear Diamonds

Afterword

P.S. Ideas, Interviews & Features …

About the Author

Approaching Lily: Louise Carpenter talks to Louise Tucker

Life at a Glance

Top Ten Favourite Books

A Day in the Life of Louise Carpenter

About the Book

An Unlikely Subject by Louise Carpenter

Read On

If You Loved This, You Might Like …

Find Out More

Select Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Praise

Copyright

About the Publisher

When you’re growing up in a small townYou know you’ll grow down in a small townThere is only one good use for a small townYou hate it and you’ll know you have to leave .

LOU REED, ‘Small Town’

On 15 May 1979, on a draughty platform at Waverley Station, Edinburgh, Lord and Lady Galloway, fresh to their titles and in a muddle with their luggage, were preparing to board a train headed for London. ‘If I can have this opportunity of going to the House of Lords, I shall take it,’ Lily Galloway had told their French lodger, Marie-Laurence Maître, in their tenement flat as she packed.

Lily, dressed in a bottle-green velvet suit, which was a touch thin at the elbows and cuffs, but brushed up on the lapels, struggled as usual with their trunks while Randolph Galloway walked ahead, hands clasped stiffly behind his back. If anybody had cared to study their expressions, in him they would have observed a vagueness, as if he inhabited another world, one he did not much care for but from which he could not escape, and in her the opposite, the alertness of a proficient nurse in constant anticipation of a crisis. Randolph was easily unsettled by noise and commotion – as a child he would become quite hysterical if a train blew its steam – and he was prone to wandering off. Lily would have to maintain vigilance.

Their brief wedding announcement had been published in the court and social pages of the Daily Telegraph on 1 November 1975. Lord Garlies, then heir to the Earldom of Galloway, had married Mrs Lily Budge, youngest daughter of the late Mr and Mrs Andrew Miller, of Duns, Berwickshire. In February 1976, following their church blessing, a large photograph of them appeared over a page of the Edinburgh Tatler with a brief caption outlining how the reception had taken place at the Caledonian Hotel in Edinburgh. The picture alone revealed that Lily was some years older than her husband and would not by any stretch of the imagination be capable of providing an heir. And while blessed with a mop of thick black hair and two rows of straight, pearly white teeth, she could not be described as a beauty. To those in Scotland who followed the births, deaths, and marriages of the aristocracy, the announcement that the 12th Earl of Galloway’s son and heir had married came as a shock. The reception had not taken place at the family seat of Cumloden, Newton Stewart, and the 12th Earl of Galloway and his daughter, Lady Antonia Dalrymple, did not attend the party.

Randolph Galloway, recognised by the Stewart Society as head of the Stewart clan, noted in Burke’s Peerage, Baronetage and Knight-age as the 13th Earl of Galloway, Lord Garlies, Baron Stewart of Garlies and a Baronet (Sir Randolph Keith Reginald Stewart, 12th Bart. of Corsewell, and 10th Bart. of Burray) was now about to take his seat in the upper house. He stood at over six feet and possessed a broad, athletic build. He had thick black wavy hair, parted and combed back from his high forehead, a strong square jaw and light, piercing blue eyes, sometimes hidden behind heavy black-rimmed spectacles. He was slim and handsome in the new three-piece suit, picked and paid for by Lily.