What’s this country coming to when even toffs can’t pronounce their names properly!

THE first time I met Lady Georgiana GascoyneCecil, daughter of the present Marquess of Salisbury, she was sitting astride the sink in the pantry at a friend’s party in Notting Hill.

There was a long queue for the lavatory, and she just couldn’t wait. But far from showing any sign of embarrassment over her predicament, she was chatting and laughing away with friends and strangers in the queue, apparently wholly at ease.

Indeed, she behaved as if this was a perfectly natural thing for a young woman to do (this was back in the late 1990s) in full view of mixed company.

I have to admit that although I was somewhat taken aback, and averted my eyes with a deep blush, I was also impressed.

It struck me that this was the behaviour of an authentic aristocrat, too grand to trouble herself with the petty conventions and pruderies that constrain the conduct of lowlier folk like me.

But my bourgeois sensibilities were in for an even greater shock when she introduced herself.

Reader, she pronounced the second barrel of her surname ‘Sessal’ to rhyme with trestle!

Common

Now, my own family may be ineffably middle- class, but my parents were determined that their children should grow up to fit in comfortably with people from all walks of life, including the very grandest. So it was that they impressed upon me, from an early age, that the correct way in which to pronounce the surname of a member of the Salisbury family — the posh way — was ‘Sissil’, to rhyme with ‘thistle’.

Yet here was the titled daughter of that noble line — a line stretching back via Good Queen Bess’s chief adviser all the way to the Norman Conquest — pronouncing her surname the ‘common’ way.

For a middle-class lad like me, this was most disconcerting.

Indeed, I felt the same sense of disappointment when, sometime later, I heard the Duke of Bedford on TV pronouncing the name of his ancestral home ‘Woe-burn’.

Hadn’t my parents taught me that proper toffs pronounced Woburn Abbey ‘Woo-burn’?

So how come the actual owner of the pile — as toffy a toff as they come — pronounced it the same way as your average day-tripper to his safari park?

Had my childhood induction into the eccentricities of the aristocracy been for nothing?

And now the eighth Earl of Harewood, great-grandson of George V, has let me down once again. At the weekend, it emerged that he has thrown in the towel over his family’s traditional insistence on pronouncing the name of his title and stately home ‘ Har-wood’, rather than ‘Hare-wood’, as it’s spelled.

The decision was urged upon him, apparently, by the trust that governs his Grade I-listed house and grounds, near Leeds.

Jane Marriott, its director, says it was with some trepidation that the trust put the idea to the Earl, since his late father — George Lascelles, a former director of the Royal Opera House, who was born sixth in line to the Throne — had been an ‘ absolute stickler’ for the old pronunciation.

But it seems that the present holder of the title gave up without much of a fight. He agreed that Yorkshire taxi drivers were bewildered when passengers who were in the know asked to be taken to ‘Har-wood’, rather than ‘Hare-wood’.

Says Ms Marriott: ‘ We have done an enormous amount of work to reimagine what a country house is in the 21st century. And I did not want the first conversation I have with everybody to be about how you pronounce it.’

A brief aside: given all the ill-feeling flying around these days, I suspect that some staff at Harewood would rather discuss the pronunciation of the house’s name than the origin of the Lascelles family’s wealth, which was built largely on the slave trade. But that’s by the by.

Ludicrous

The upshot of the Earl’s decision is that, from now on, audio guides and staff at Harewood will abandon the old rule and start referring to the place as, well, Harewood.

Does this really matter, in the great scheme of things? Of course not. But old fogey that I am, I rather like the ludicrous upper- class practice of pronouncing names and places in unexpected ways, known only to the initiated.

I find it charming and quaint that the Cholmondeley family call themselves ‘Chumley’, that the Dukes of Rutland have always called Belvoir Castle ‘Beaver’ and that Princess Di’s family, the Spencers, call their Althorp estate in Northamptonshire ‘All-trup’.

Indeed, I fondly remember a flush of paternal pride when I took our eldest son, George — then aged about ten — to look around the Earl of Leicester’s magnificent Palladian pad, Holkham Hall in Norfolk.

As we began our tour, I told the boy that although the surname of the owner’s family was spelled Coke, they had always pronounced it ‘Cook’.

He clearly absorbed this information because, at the end of our tour, when I asked him if he’d like something to drink, he said he’d like a Coca-Cola — before adding, with a dazzling flash of wit: ‘I suppose we should call it Cooker-Cooler here, or they won’t know what we mean.’ That’s my boy! But then it’s not only toffs who go in for unlikely pronunciations. Back in the summer of 2019 (remember when we were allowed to go away on holiday?), I took Mrs U and the dog to Stiffkey in Norfolk, not far from Holkham Hall.

There, I was surprised to learn that the locals — or at least those who are sticklers for tradition — make a point of referring to their village as ‘Stookie’.

Or take my late grandfather, one of the last of the Victorians (he was born in 1894). He was the only person I’ve ever known who insisted that Sawbridgeworth, in Hertfordshire, should properly be pronounced ‘SaPSsworth’.

I remember one occasion when I happened to be driving him through Sawbridgeworth, and we crossed a small bridge over the River Stort.

Baffled

‘Grandpa!’ I said. ‘Do you realise we’ve just crossed a PS?’ I’m not sure he understood the joke — he was well past his brilliant prime by then — but I was more pleased with it than perhaps I should have been.

But then Grandpa was a law unto himself when it came to pronunciation. An Ancient Greek scholar in his youth, he insisted on pronouncing ‘cinema’ as ‘kye-knee-ma’, and margarine with a hard G ( the word derives from the Greek margos, a pearl, spelled with a gamma — the third letter of the Greek alphabet — apparently).

He was such a pedant that when asked if he’d like more spaghetti, he answered: ‘Well, perhaps just a few.’

Spaghetti, if you’re as baffled as I was, is a plural noun. Therefore ‘a few’ is more grammatically correct than ‘a little’.

Shame on you, anyway, Lord Harewood — or ‘Harwood’, as I prefer to think of you — for surrendering to the spirit of the times and abandoning one of the gloriously silly conventions that made England what my country once was.

As for Lady Georgiana Gascoyne-Cecil, whom I met only once after our first encounter by the sink, I fervently hope she’ll forgive me for publicising the circumstances of our introduction.

I’d like it on record that I found her exceptionally nice, funny and friendly. And that, after all is said and done, is probably more important than the way she pronounced her noble surname.