Duchess with perfect POLISH
Inveraray Castle is usually bustling with visitors at this time of year. But with the Covid crisis forcing the Gothic country pile to close and lay off its army of workers, the lady of the house has been happily mucking in – as housekeeper...
VISITORS arriving at the newly reopened Inveraray Castle this weekend might just notice a few telling changes to the stunning Gothic seat of the Argylls. There is the one-way system, designed to keep everyone moving through the picture galleries and formal rooms, the bottles of hand sanitiser nestling discreetly throughout the building, and behind the till in the gift shop, the duke himself, ringing up the receipts for key rings and tea towels.
‘Oh, my husband loves working in the gift shop,’ exclaims Eleanor, the Duchess of Argyll, who has also abandoned her role as lady of the manor since lockdown to take on a rather different title.
‘I’m now the housekeeper,’ she declares. ‘I hate cleaning more than anything but I’ve been the cleaner and housekeeper and my husband has been caretaker and gardener.
‘And of course we can do all these jobs. I might have killed a few plants, but we’ve done every job that needed to be done.’
Quite what the duke’s ancestors, a noble Scots family who have held the title since the 18th century, would make of all this work below stairs is unclear. After all, Torquhil is not only the Duke of Argyll but Chief of Clan Campbell, Master of the Royal Household of Scotland, and captain of Scotland’s elephant polo team.
But these are tough times, and in the face of a pandemic that has decimated the tourism industry, even the aristocracy is having to adapt. ‘We haven’t had an income since October,’ the duchess explains over Zoom from the family’s private apartments, tucked away in a wing of the vast castle, which normally opens to the public for six months of the year.
‘But the bills keep coming in. The insurance bill comes in and the roof keeps leaking and it all stacks up. And of course we aren’t making anything.’
A jeans and Converse trainers sort of duchess – ‘I’m definitely an Eleanor, when someone says “Your Grace” I’m always looking around for a bishop’ – at 47 she is one of the youngest duchesses in Britain. And as chatelaine of one of Scotland’s largest private houses, she is acutely aware of her responsibility to keep it going, not only to hand on to the next generation, but for the public to enjoy too.
THERE have been a number of innovations to keep the place ticking over, including events such as the Best of the West music and arts festival, active social media pages and a much-coveted spot on Downton Abbey as the location of a Christmas special.
But Covid-19 has killed business stone dead. Her frustration is palpable. ‘The house was ready, the shop was ready, everything had been cleaned and all the dust sheets were coming off, and then the door just never opened.’
The family’s children, Archie, 16, Rory, 14, and 11-year-old Charlotte, were sent home from school in March, and from that point on, it was obvious it was going to be a very different year from usual.
The castle and its 60,000-acre estate employ around 60 people in a normal year – 30 on full-time contracts, the rest casual staff employed seasonally. In a rural area where the castle acts as backbone to the local tourism industry, it is an important employer.
‘We basically sat down with the estate manager and worked out we couldn’t hire anyone who was tourist-facing,’ she says. ‘Anyone who wasn’t on a full-year contract, we couldn’t take them on. We couldn’t even put them on furlough because they hadn’t started.’
Meanwhile ‘tourist-facing’ staff – guides, shop and tea room workers – were all put on to the Government’s furlough scheme. ‘Thank goodness, because it means their jobs are safe,’ she says.
With the estate itself running on a skeleton staff of ‘a maintenance chap, a forestry chap and the factor’, the family knuckled down to a situation not even their ancestors faced: running a castle with more than 100 rooms themselves.
‘We’ve never had the house to ourselves, ever,’ says Eleanor.
‘I’ve done non-stop cleaning. I’ve cleared every cupboard in the house. I’ve cleaned out the attic, cleared out the basements, I’ve thrown away so much rubbish, but I’ve also found some amazing things hiding in that rubbish.’
Among them, she says, are some old Home Guard helmets from the Second World War and a selection of beautiful pictures. Then there was the whole room she discovered full of embroidered sheets and ancient lace bonnets.
‘It’s been great in a way,’ she says. ‘I’ve never had time to clear out the attic or just get in and sort stuff.’ There have been benefits for the family, too. ‘It’s really nice for the children to have the house to themselves,’ she says. ‘The tourists are great but everyone tiptoes around them slightly. And the children are so lucky. I mean, some people are locked down in a tiny flat on the 15th floor and we’ve had a huge great garden. We’ve been very lucky in that way.’ She laughs wryly. ‘And you can’t scream at your children when tourists are around, can you?’ Good point.
Eleanor’s maiden name is Cadbury – yes, that Cadbury, she is a cousin to the family who founded the chocolate empire – and in a winking nod to their heritage the couple keep a print of Andy Warhol’s famous Campbell’s soup tin painting next to a large china
Cadbury’s Creme Egg in their private apartments.
IN fact, family history is never far from her mind. ‘I was thinking about my parentsin-law because the house burnt down on them when they first moved in,’ she says, referring to the fire on Guy Fawkes Night 1975 which caused devastating damage to the castle, forcing her father-in-law, the 12th Duke, to spend years raising £1million for its eventual restoration.
‘Every generation has its
moment, don’t they? It’s different, but every generation has them. And this is ours.’
Then of course, there is that Duchess of Argyll, the one who scandalously appeared in an infamous photograph back in the 1960s and tarnished the family name, although Eleanor retains a soft spot for her because it was she, with one eye on the future, who first decided to open the castle up to the public.
The former duchess however, could never have quite envisaged the scenario facing Inveraray Castle in 2020. Eleanor says they are now aiming for around 10 per cent of their normal number of visitors over the rest of the summer.
‘We’d normally have around 1,000 people a day. But the overseas market has gone, the American market isn’t coming back for a bit, the coach party business has gone, the cruise business has gone, all the things we’d normally go for have vanished. The staycation business – people in the cars, which is the market we’re now going for – is about 10 per cent.’
And while that is OK, up to a point, it still has limitations. ‘The trouble with the staycationer is that they don’t spend as much as international visitors,’ she says. ‘Scotland needs the international business to come back.’
She worries about the long-term implications not just for Inveraray Castle, but for other large privately owned houses.
She sits on the board of Historic Houses, a group of independently owned piles which includes Knebworth, Althorp, Blenheim Palace and even Balmoral, and says that, across the country, the picture is bleak. ‘It’s dire,’ she says. ‘Absolutely dire.
‘We don’t really qualify for that many grants because we’re privately owned. In some ways that’s great because you can make your own decisions but you don’t qualify for all sorts of things that museums and galleries do.
‘So for these houses, wedding business has gone, event business has gone, everything. It’s got to pick up next year otherwise I think it’ll be horrific, she says.
‘I think many of the historic houses, they’ll go unless they can open up properly soon-ish.’
Are they in that position? ‘Well, hopefully not to lose the whole castle, but definitely jobs would go. Definitely. And we employ quite a lot of people around here.
‘This is the main tourist business for the area. And actually, even though it’s not directly related to the castle, there are tourist shops in the town, there are restaurants in the town, it’s all connected.’
That means they have done their best to attract visitors in coming months now that lockdown is easing. ‘We’ve opened a couple of private rooms which would normally be our spare bedrooms, as well as an old servant staircase,’ she says.
And there will be access to other places not normally seen by the public, including a corridor lined with family pictures such as the children’s christenings and the couple’s wedding (she wore a silk dress designed by Bruce Oldfield).
‘That’s the stuff the tourists really like,’ she says. ‘The real stuff. The modern stuff.’
There will be a booking system, although Eleanor says they hope people will be able to get in if they just turn up, too. ‘We encourage people to book,’ she says, ‘simply because it would be awful if people drove all the way from Glasgow and then couldn’t get in.’
Over the past couple of weeks there have been a few more tourists in the town, she says, but the locals are still wary, even though the community itself has seen very little of the virus. Just the other day she was in a shop in town wearing her mask and the woman behind the counter asked her where she was from.
‘I said I was from the castle and she said “are you?” So I pulled down my mask and she said “oh, yes, it’s you!”’ She laughs.
‘I’m the only person in the village who’s 6ft 1in so I’m not quite sure why she thought I was a complete stranger.’
LUCKILY, the couple have always had a roll your sleeves up and get stuck in attitude. They met when Eleanor, then aged 19 and a friend of the duke’s sister, Lady Louise, attended a party at the castle. The two fell in love but were still unmarried ten years later – ‘we were hopeless, utterly hopeless’ – when a family tragedy forced their hand after the duke’s father, the 12th Duke of Argyll, died suddenly aged 63 during surgery.
The jet-setting professional young couple (Torquhil was in the whisky industry, she worked in PR, and they split their time between London and Hong Kong) found themselves back in Inveraray, organising a wedding while taking on the running of the castle and estate while still in their twenties.
Almost two decades on the couple have adjusted to their roles, and are now looking forward to the grand reopening this weekend.
‘I really hope they come,’ she says. ‘I’m really looking forward to having visitors back.
‘Also I can work and do a job and get the children doing things too, because it’s all hands on deck. I can put coffee cups in the bin the same as the next person.’
Is she positive about the future? ‘I hope we’ve done the best we can,’ she says.
‘I’ve done a lot of cleaning, so hopefully the house is looking nice. But I guess we’ll learn. It’ll become clear if we’re getting it wrong.
‘No one’s ever done this before, have they?’