Dinner with the duchess — bores off the menu . . .
How do you survive a scandal? Those who watched A Very British Scandal on television over New Year may have wondered how Margaret, Duchess of Argyll faced the world for the remaining 30 years of her life.
Her husband had sued her for divorce on the grounds of adultery. Among the exhibits in court was her racy diary, in which, according to one account, ‘the duchess listed the accoutrements of a number of lovers as though she was running them at Newmarket’.
In his 50,000-word judgment, Lord wheatley described the duchess as ‘a highly-sexed woman’, ‘completely promiscuous’ and ‘wholly immoral’.
Today, when the margin between infamy and distinction is so blurred as to be invisible, such a CV would surely guarantee the duchess a place on I’m a Celebrity...Get Me out of Here! or, at very least, Celebrity Naked Attraction. But the early 1960s was a more puritanical time, when television was less inclined to embrace all sinners.
Regardless of society’s disapproval, the duchess decided to pursue the wartime strategy of Keep Calm and Carry on. In 1986, she wrote My Dinner Party Book, composed of what her publishers described as ‘straightforward and invaluable advice to the would-be hostess’. I still have it on my bookshelves.
Even so long ago, her advice must have seemed a little dated. ‘with people you must be ruthless. Rule one — no bores. The men must all be interesting and the women must be intelligent, witty and/or beautiful’, she writes in her first chapter, The Rules of Entertaining. ‘She may be your best friend but if she’s plain and dull, too bad — she does not come to the party.’
Half the book is padded out with recipes, though she cheerfully admits: ‘I never go near a kitchen. I hate raw meat, raw fish and raw eggs.’
Instead, she makes her cook, Mrs Duckworth, do the donkey work. ‘She had to do the shopping — order all the food, etc. I must admit I was never involved in that. I stay away from kitchens.’
‘Cheap and Cheerful’ was never the duchess’s motto. Her top tips for after-dinner entertainment include forcing the band to audition first. For one party, she hired the Joe Loss orchestra, favourites of the Royal Family, and insisted to Joe they rehearse in front of her on the morning of the party. ‘He was absolutely furious... and thought it totally unnecessary.’
when they started playing, the duchess didn’t like what she heard. ‘It was dreadful... guaranteed to kill any party stone dead. I said: “No, no, no! Faster, add a little pep and keep it like that... do not stop for two hours and if any of you want to go to the loo you will have to go off one by one.
‘Joe said: “People will ask for pop music and waltzes.” I said: “I do not care what people ask for, they are not going to get it.” ’
And what of the duchess’s advice on dinner party etiquette? Again, it is far from straightforward.
‘one of the worst gaffes I ever made at a dinner party occurred when I invited two ambassadors and the Lord Chancellor to dinner,’ is the way one anecdote begins. The Lord Chancellor was only Lord Kilmuir — ‘a comparatively lowly title’ — so she decided to put the two ambassadors on either side of her, and the Lord Chancellor further down the table.
‘I thought the dinner went very well and was rather congratulating myself on it until another guest wrote telling me I had made a terrible mistake. After royalty, and the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Lord Chancellor precedes everybody, even the Prime Minister... I was devastated!’ The moral of this story is, she says, ‘never invite the Lord Chancellor and two ambassadors to your dinner party at the same time’. Later, she advises against full evening dress for barbecues — ‘your shoes get absolutely filthy and so does the hem of your dress’.
oddly enough, nowhere in My Dinner Party Book does the Duchess of Argyll mention the contretemps with her maid Mrs Springett, who had looked after her for many years.
In the early 1980s, she dismissed Mrs Springett after finding her unconscious next to an empty whisky bottle in the duchess’s bedroom. She eventually reinstated her, but then had to send her a solicitor’s letter demanding she stop calling her ‘a silly old whore’ in front of her guests. But no one ever said the path to redemption would be a piece of cake.