Chloe Maccarthy
Eccentric landowner who married into the Bloomsbury Group and starred in Normal for Norfolk
CHLOE MACCARTHY, who has died aged 102, became an inadvertent television personality in her 100th year in the surprising hit series Normal for Norfolk (2016 and 2017). Wearing her Fair Isle beret and playing herself deadpan, she ambled about the Wiveton Hall estate, chatting to her son Desmond about pursuits that mother and son evidently regarded as everyday matters, while to viewers they seemed outlandishly eccentric.
Two series have aired of the BBC Two documentary in which Desmond, ever the gentleman farmer, finds ingenious solutions to keeping his 17th-century pile intact and the farm a going concern. They ranged from renovating a dilapidated cottage in time for its first paying guests to attracting “pick your own” fruit customers.
Viewers also cheered them on as Desmond opened a café in an unpromising breeze-block shed formerly used by his father to store the combine harvester. Against the odds the café, with its seasonal menu and sea views, has become a leading attraction of the North Norfolk coast.
As Desmond explained in a Daily Telegraph interview, the show’s title took its name from what was sometimes written on doctors’ notes to describe a patient who was not ill, just terminally odd. “It insinuated inbreeding,” he said, adding that the situation had now changed with the rise in European farm labourers and “turnip toffs”, smart young couples moving in. “It’s actually hard to breed with someone from Norfolk these days.”
Pamela Chloe Buxton was probably born on August 14 1915 (she was never certain of the exact day). Her father, Captain Richard Buxton, was from long-established Norfolk farming stock; her mother Primrose’s more exotic Norfolk family were the prosperous Rallis, 19th-century immigrants from the Mediterranean island of Chios – marked by Chloe’s Greek Christian name.
It was not until 1944 that Dick Buxton bought the Dutch-gabled Wiveton Hall and its farmland, later bringing his wife and daughter and their herd of pedigree Friesian cows.
Chloe’s happy childhood included visits to her Buxton grandmother in Cromer and to her Ralli grandmother at Stanhoe Hall; it was she who taught Chloe the skills and recipes that made her an outstanding cook.
Having acquired passable French, she went to Germany in 1933 to learn that country’s language, lodging with impoverished aristocrats who were bitterly unhappy about the triumph of the Nazis. After she witnessed a visit to Munich by Hitler, her parents brought her back home.
She came out as a debutante and had the prudence to preserve one of her outfits by Schiaparelli, which fetched a high price when she sold it to a museum years later. Her good looks earned her inclusion in a collection of glamour portraits by Olive Snell, The Book of Beauty, whose purpose was to promote Abdulla cigarettes.
Chloe joined the Red Cross during the Second World War, serving on the welfare side. At the end of the conflict she travelled with other Red Cross girls to the bombflattened city of Hamburg to make contact with newly liberated Prisoners of War, to report on their health, and to take news of them for their close relations.
Introduced to her future husband, Michael Maccarthy, by Mungo and Racy Buxton, who were cousins of both, Chloe married into the second generation of the Bloomsbury Group. Michael was an experienced farmer who had worked on estates in South America, South Africa and Rhodesia; but his decidedly nonagricultural father was Sir Desmond Maccarthy, the most prominent literary critic of the time. His mother Mary (Molly), née Warre-cornish, was related to the Thackerays and to the Stephen sisters, Virginia Woolf and Vanessa Bell. Molly Maccarthy was celebrated for her quick wit – she coined the term “Bloomsberries”. Michael’s younger sister, Rachel, married the writer Lord David Cecil.
When first married, the Maccarthys lived on the Holkham Park estate, where Michael was working. In 1952 they moved to Wiveton Hall, living in the west wing while Chloe’s parents inhabited the east wing. They also had the use of the Maccarthys’ London house, a rambling establishment in Wellington Square where, until Michael’s death in 1972, the couple gave splendid multi-generational parties.
It was Michael, and then Chloe, throwing nothing away, who were responsible for preserving the Maccarthy family archive, with its letters from the Woolfs, the Bells and from (Sir Desmond’s amitiés amoureuses) Lady Cynthia Asquith and Enid Bagnold.
The letters, bulging out of a cupboard or kept in a suitcase in a draughty upper corridor at Wiveton, had been typed up by Frances Partridge, but were never properly used until Chloe’s nephew, Hugh Cecil, and his wife Mirabel wrote their 1990 biography Clever Hearts: Desmond & Molly Maccarthy. Guests using the freezing cold bathroom would see, for example, a snippet of a letter in Virginia or Leonard Woolf ’s distinctive handwriting and stop for a browse.
Chloe Maccarthy continued to travel widely, in 1982 going on one of the first culinary tours of China with her daughter, the artist Mary Maccarthy. Her challenge, though, was to maintain the Wiveton Hall estate through the years of declining agricultural income. Despite earlier owners employing eight gardeners before the war, Chloe Maccarthy managed to maintain the gardens by herself with the help, for 50 years, of one Reggie Holman (“he of the flat cap and few words”, as one of the family summed him up). This was achieved with the avoidance of unnecessary tidiness. “Shabby chic” was Chloe’s watch phrase, both in house and garden.
When Desmond took over the house, Chloe Maccarthy moved a few steps away to Dairy Cottage. Together they hatched their schemes on camera in Normal for Norfolk.
Chloe Maccarthy is survived by her son and her daughter.
Chloe Maccarthy, born August 14 1915, died June 19 2018