I pray for the day when my race is Strictly NOT an issue
Poised to be Britain’s first black marchioness – in the face of cruel treatment – the poshest contender for the glitterball trophy says...
EMMA THYNN, viscountess Weymouth, is perhaps not the most famous celebrity on this year’s Strictly Come dancing, but who among the hoofers is more fascinating? or can practise their ballroom steps in ballroom-sized rooms and prepare to amaze in a maze? The 33-year-old daughter of an English socialite and a Nigerian oil baron is married to Ceawlin, viscount Weymouth, heir to one of the most spectacular stately homes in Britain.
The couple live with their two sons, John, four, and Henry, two, amid the Elizabethan splendour of Longleat house in Wiltshire, surrounded by a collection of hedge mazes and the world-famous safari park.
At night, the family fall asleep to the roar of lions and the barking of the sea lions, while, during the day, Emmamum — as her sons have nicknamed her — tries to impress upon them how lucky they are.
‘Without being heavy, I do always say to them: “do you realise how exciting this is? Not everyone gets to see tiger cubs, you know. This is a magical place.” ’
For this glam-aristo, being on Strictly is a dream come true. ‘And so far, it has been every bit as sparkly as I imagined,’ she says. ‘My face muscles are strained from smiling so much.’
A model, former actress and sometime food blogger, Emma is certainly no stranger to the lure of reality television.
‘I’ve been offered many shows,’ she says. ‘I always turn them down, but this is different.’
As a family, the Weymouths love watching Strictly. At home, the four of them dance around the television together during the live shows, but how did her husband react to the prospect of her actually taking part? Apparently, C — as she calls him — was thrilled.
‘But I had to make him swear to keep it a secret,’ she says. ‘Now he is as excited as me.’
Is she a good dancer? ‘We are soon going to find out!’ she cries.
‘I am athletic and I exercise a lot, so I might look like I dance, but I don’t. I gave up ballet when I was four because I was so shy. How I regret that now!’
While wild animals roam part of the 10,000-acre parklands outside at Longleat, it is no secret that nothing can compare to the exotic creatures within its stately home.
Emma’s 87-year-old father-in-law, Alexander, the Marquess of Bath, lives on the top floor of the house with his erotic murals and holding pattern of visiting wifelets to keep him happy.
When he dies, his son will become the eighth marquess, while Emma will become Britain’s first black marchioness.
‘My race was never an issue in my life until C and I got engaged,’ she says. ‘After that, no one could stop talking about it. I pray for the day when it becomes less remarkable because race does not define you.’
Before her 2013 wedding, she talked of some outdated attitudes she had encountered from the sour cream of the English aristocracy.
‘There has been some snobbishness, particularly among the much older generation. There’s class and then there’s the racial thing. It’s a jungle and I’m going through it,’ she said back then.
HOWEVER, it must have come as a shock to the young bride that some of the very worst behaviour came from within her new family.
Most difficult of all has been the relationship with her mother-inlaw, Lady Bath — a former softporn actress called Anna Gael who lives in France.
According to Ceawlin, she repeatedly voiced an opinion to her son that marrying Emma would ruin ‘400 years of bloodline’. He barred her from his wedding and they have not spoken since.
Lady Bath, who has denied making the comment, still enjoys an open marriage with Lord Bath and visits Longleat regularly.
‘When she is on the scene, everyone clears out,’ an estate worker tells me.
Both Baths snubbed the wedding,
although Alexander missed the nuptials not because of Emma, but because Ceawlin had removed some of his more graphic sexscapes from the Longleat walls.
In recent years, there has been a reconciliation between father and son, and relations are cordial. ‘I can’t dwell on those aspects, except to say my father-in-law is sweet with my children.’
ANd her mother-in-law? ‘I have nothing to add. do I wish things were different? Every family has its ups and downs. ours is not unique. There is no textbook guide to family life. You just have to try to find a way through it.’
I ask whether Lady Bath has ever met or spoken to her grandchildren.
‘No,’ comes the eventual reply, giving the distinct impression that she never will.
Perhaps that is an upsetting prospect? Lady Weymouth looks pained and struggles to respond.
‘I am not sure I can answer that,’ she says. ‘I focus on the positive, and there is much to be grateful for. I have nothing to add to what has been said before.
‘We have created our own lovely family here, and that is what concerns me most. Bringing up my sons with healthy attitudes.
‘All my energy is consumed by the children. The future is my focus. My husband and I are building the next generation at Longleat our way.’
Lord Bath lives ‘up there on the other side’ of the great house, but both families run entirely separate households and rarely meet.
The Weymouths had tea with him recently, after they met at the village fete. ‘ We bump into each other, but not often. I couldn’t tell him about Strictly, it was still a secret then. But it was a nice visit.
‘When you are up there, the dogs are always running around. He loves his dogs and you can have a good chat with him if you mention them. He was making duck noises for the boys. It was fine.’
In the diaspora of dysfunction that engulfs much of the English aristocracy, there must surely be a special place for the current crop
of Thynnes, whose family have lived here for 15 generations. Make that Thynns, as Lord Bath knocked off the ‘e’ on a whim in 1976.
In the three-part BBC documentary All Change At Longleat, which aired in 2015, viewers saw a team of workers spend a painstaking day removing priceless oil paintings from the main stairwell to paint the walls, only for Lord Bath to order them to be put back up again because no one had asked his permission.
Nine years ago, he handed over the running of the estate to his energetic son. ‘I try not to do anything to irritate him,’ says Ceawlin in the documentary, the 45-yearold Saffy to his father’s Edina.
Perhaps the most amazing thing about the Weymouths is that they seem so normal, so down to earth and decent — their insistence on first names and not titles at Longleat is just the start of it.
‘What do all those different titles mean anyway? They don’t have the same resonance that they once had,’ says Emma.
Here she comes now, walking through the Elizabethan hauteur of the great entrance, where walls as high as cliffs are hung with portraits of Thynne ancestors in ruffs and doublets, their beady eyes following her every footstep.
Walking up the 500-year-old staircase in her silky Zara separates, her tread is light and her shoes glitter with diamante bows, but the shadows are deep and the weight of history is oppressive.
At the end of a gloomy corridor on the first floor, she punches a number into a keypad and with a click we are inside the Weymouths’ private apartment, as bright and jolly within as it is dark and sombre outside. There are pale walls and vases of lilies, with
Philippe Starck ghost chairs in the kitchen, while the sitting room glows with lamplight, green velvet sofas and the scent of Dyptique blackberry candles.
Emma’s golden Strictly dance shoes are here, too; she has been practising in them wearing a pair of socks, as instructed by the show’s professionals. She was alarmed when Strictly Come Dancing bosses asked her to name her dance style during preliminary interviews. ‘I wouldn’t be brave enough to say I had one,’ she says, although she professes admiration for Abbey Clancy, who won the competition in 2013.
She also has praise for last year’s winner Stacey Dooley (‘what an impressive paso doble’), who, of course, fell victim to the ‘curse of Strictly’, and is now in a relationship with her professional dance partner, Kevin Clifton.
Do the Weymouths worry that the curse might finally fall upon the house of Bath, and that Emma might run off with . . . Anton?
‘ No. That is so silly,’ she says crisply.
CERTAINLY, theirs is a relationship that still sizzles. In photographs and in life, lord Weymouth gazes at his wife with the enraptured intensity of a man who still can’t believe his luck.
Ask him to pose with his missus for a quick snap and he is right there, arm wrapped around her waist like a cobra, his expression suggesting that he has been waiting all day for just this very opportunity.
The former Emma McQuiston is not exactly Cinderella to his Viscount Charming. Well connected and wealthy in her own right, Emma had known Ceawlin as a child, as her older half-brother had married his half-aunt. yet when they met by chance as adults in 2011, sparks flew.
One star- crossed Thursday evening in 2011, they bumped into each other at Soho House. The next night they went to the Box nightclub in Soho on their first date and the following week he drove her to Paris, where they booked into the Hotel Costes and didn’t leave for days.
‘Such an exciting time,’ she says. ‘We laughed a lot. I could be myself with him. That is when you know it’s real.’
Ceawlin proposed a year later and they married in the longleat orangery six months afterwards, deliriously happy despite the family war that roared around them. Soho House, beautiful mixedrace woman joining a noble British family to the drumbeat of interfamilial fighting? Sound familiar? There are clear parallels between lady Weymouth and the Duchess of Sussex, but the two women have never met, and despite having negotiated the worst of her situation, Emma would struggle to offer Meghan guidance. ‘ Oh no, I would never presume to give anyone advice, I would not be so bold. And I haven’t even met her,’ she says.
‘I wouldn’t want to compare myself to Meghan, I don’t think it would be appropriate. But I think she is doing well; it is a lovely time in her life.’ like
Meghan, Emma tried her luck in Hollywood as an actress, but with less success. In 2009, she moved to West Hollywood and spent two years taking acting lessons and going to auditions.
‘It was tough. I auditioned for everything. It was daily, relentless. Independent films, chewing gum commercials, television shows. I got called back for Game Of Thrones, and they nearly cast me,’ she says, then laughs.
‘But if that had happened, I wouldn’t be here now.’
Her life may sound like a fairy tale, but she weeps openly when she talks about the trauma of having her children. ‘It still makes me feel so vulnerable,’ she says.
John was born following a planned Caesarean section after doctors feared the desperately ill Emma had a tumour on her brain — it turned out to be a swelling and a bleed on her pituitary gland, a rare but potentially fatal condition caused by pregnancy.
‘It got dramatic very quickly — it was so frightening. Had it been left untreated, I don’t know what would have happened,’ she says.
Two years later, she became the first member of the British aristocracy to have a baby born by surrogacy after doctors warned her she could die if she became pregnant again. The Weymouths travelled to California for three months and spent about £60,000 on the procedure.
‘Henry is 100 per cent our DNA. It is IVF with an extra step. I felt very guilty initially that I wasn’t able to carry him myself. And obviously we are very fortunate that we could go down this route.
‘ But coming to terms with another woman carrying your baby is hard. you have to try to make peace with it before you start the process. In the end, it was a joyous experience for us.’
The couple are still in touch with their surrogate and send photographs of Henry. ‘I don’t think we will do it again, but you never know,’ she says, wiping away her tears. ‘If you have had any traumatic experience you know your purpose more.’
RIGHT now, her purpose is Emma’ s Kitchen, a former longleat basement she has transformed into a bright space selling her own-recipe baked goods and the longleat china she has designed herself.
In the blackberry-scented living room, we eat Emma shortbread from an Emma cake stand, while Emma herself chats about the purity of ingredients, sourcing locally and eating well.
In the kitchen, she opens the fridge to show off the masses of organic fruit and vegetables within, only to be confronted by chocolates and — horreur! — an aerosol tin of spray cream.
‘What! John must have put it in the trolley,’ cries horrified Emmamum, roundly blaming the future ninth Marquess of Bath.
Together, the Weymouths have worked hard at turning longleat into a year-round attraction and visitor numbers are up this year. A high-profile run on Strictly can only further improve matters.
This summer Emma was photographed by the paparazzi on the beach at St Tropez. ‘ That has never happened to me before,’ she says, and she doesn’t sound too displeased. you’d better be careful, I say. you might end up being a prize attraction here yourself.
‘Oh my goodness. How does that work?’ says the first lady of Strictly, confiscating the spray cream.
Starting today, under the whirling glitterball, she will find out soon enough.
Strictly come Dancing launch Show 2019, BBc1, 7.10pm tonight.