American MODEL who married a TOYBOY and moved into a CASTLE next door to a QUEEN
In the early hours of December 9, 1933, a fire broke out in a country house in Hampshire, southern England, while a weekend house party was taking place. Guests at The Heronry were woken by the smell of smoke. The place was ablaze. There was no escape down the staircases. Two of the guests were a young couple, The Hon Mr and Mrs James Rodney: James and Frances. James acted quickly, making a rope of tied sheets for them to climb down from their bedroom to the flowerbed below. Frances sailed down it and landed badly, crying out with pain. James jumped after her, suffering from cuts and burns.
Frances was rushed to hospital and found to have a broken vertebra. It was a while before anyone had the heart to tell her that her husband had died soon after his arrival in hospital. It was thought he had not died from the landing or the smoke, but from a heart attack – his heart was weak after fighting in the First World War. The anaesthetic nitrous oxide gas had triggered a fatal reaction.
So Frances, 31, found herself widowed and in hospital, ‘trapped in a steel brace and wrapped in grief ’, as Caroline Young writes in this fascinating chronicle of the life of an amazingly enterprising woman: Frances, née Oldham, then Rodney, then Gordon, and finally and most famously Farquharson, the tartan-clad wife of the 16th Laird of Invercauld in Aberdeenshire, Scotland, in the castle next door to Balmoral. A sample of her flamboyant wardrobe is kept in the Aberdeen Art Gallery, and it includes a tartan swimsuit, which must have dazzled visiting members of Britain’s royal family.
The doctors in 1933 told Frances that, with her broken back, she would never walk again, and would never be able to have children.
Just a year later, she was not only up and living life to the full, trying to take no notice of her constant backache. She was also appointed fashion editor of the London magazine Harper’s Bazaar,a job she did brilliantly all through the rest of the 1930s and the war.
Her new year’s resolutions for 1935, which she listed in the magazine, were deliciously frivolous: ‘To keep my ermine always at pristine whiteness.’ ‘Never to wear flowers and feathers together.’ ‘To choose my corsets, belts, bust bodices and undies before spring fittings begin.’ ‘To drink vodka with caviar, and champagne or hock with oysters.’ But interspersed among them were some sterner resolutions, which expressed the person she aspired to be: ‘To help others to prosper.’ ‘To encourage enterprise.’ ‘To give only constructive criticisms.’ She would bring all those to bear in all her dealings from that moment on.
No one would have foreseen this future for the young Frances Oldham, born in Seattle in 1902. Her father, a prominent lawyer, was a descendant of George Washington’s sister. With that lineage, Frances lived the high life as a beautiful, lithe ‘flapper’, but she longed to travel to Europe.
At last, her father gave her permission to travel to Rome with a chaperone. There, she fell in love with the world of haute couture, working in salons, first as a model and then sales manager. Then she came to London to work in the London branch of the Paul Caret salon.
When she married the dashing James Rodney, she gushed in her column, ‘Marriage is such fun… one simply exists until marriage’.
So, a working woman, yes, but pretty conventional when it came to acquiring and keeping one’s man: to do the latter, she advised, ‘make him supper’, ‘light a fire for his return’ and ‘learn backgammon and bezique so you can play them with him’.
Husband No.2 was Captain Charles Gordon, with whom she did have a baby daughter, Marybelle. (So there, doctors!) Aged just one, Marybelle was evacuated to the USA at the outbreak of the Second World War. Frances kept working at Harper’s Bazaar but yearned to do more for Britain’s cause. She sailed to the USA in 1941 to push British cottons and soft wools in the American market. She was so persuasive that soon every department store on Fifth Avenue had a ‘Buy British’ window display. Frances collected Marybelle from New York in 1942 but Frances and Charles drifted apart. After the war she found herself, aged 43, helping Alwyne Farquharson, the 26-year-old Laird of Invercauld, to clear out the post-requisitioning mess of his huge castle. Taking no notice of the age difference, they fell madly in love – and really did live happily ever after.
Despite the struggle to maintain their leaking castles under an enormous tax burden, Frances, with her fearless, American approach to life, had no qualms about making Invercauld, and its sister castle Braemar on the same estate, pay for themselves.
She opened a theatre and a shop called The Galleries, which specialised in Scottish tweeds, fabrics and craftsmanship. She started an annual festival, and opened the castle to paying guests.
Frances became a much-loved local figure, highly visible at the annual Braemar Gathering, wearing her spectacular Farquharson tartan outfits. Caroline Young doesn’t speculate on the strains of such an age difference in the marriage – we get the impression the Farquharsons were having such fun running the estate together that they didn’t have time to worry about such minor matters. The Queen Mother was one of their customers and, when her house, Birkhall, was being renovated, she borrowed Invercauld for the duration, and gave the couple a (much-needed) hot-water boiler to say thank you.
To read this book is to be energised by the positivity and zest of this irrepressible woman, whose life could have been fatally diminished by that terrible accident and tragedy, but who instead used them as a spur to prove to herself and the world that life can and must go on.
‘She became a much-loved figure in her spectacular tartan outfits’