Lady Elizabeth Shakerley
Party-planner to royalty and the jet set whose clients ranged from Prince William to Mick Jagger
LADY ELIZABETH SHAKERLEY, who has died aged 79, was better known as Lady Elizabeth Anson, the founder of Party Planners, a company specialising in organising extravagant bashes for, as she herself put it, “the very rich, the very idle, the very busy and the ones who simply haven’t got a clue what to do”.
Her list of British clients ranged from nearly every member of the Royal family to Sir Clive Sinclair, Mick Jagger and Derek Nimmo. She presided over Prince and Princess Michael of Kent’s wedding reception in Vienna and organised parties at Claridge’s following the weddings of Prince Charles and Lady Diana Spencer and Prince Andrew and Sarah Ferguson.
In 2000 she staged a huge party for Prince William’s 18th, the Princess Royal’s 50th and Princess Margaret’s 70th birthdays, and a week later helped Princess Michael of Kent throw a joint birthday party for her children, Frederick and Gabriella. In 2006 she organised the Queen’s 80th birthday party at the Ritz and Lady Thatcher’s 80th birthday party at the Mandarin Oriental Hotel.
Further afield, her international clientele included President Bill Clinton, Hans Heinrich Thyssen-bornemisza, John Paul Getty II, and Tom Cruise and his wife. Her parties, as Lady Elizabeth explained in her promotional material, were “always distinctive”. Themes included jungles, the Twenties, the circus, the French Revolution, and even an “Up Pompeii- style Roman rout”.
In newspaper articles Lady Elizabeth Anson was always described as “the Queen’s cousin”, which was true – they both had Bowes-lyon mothers – but the description gave a misleading picture of her life. Her connection with the Royal family did not relieve her of the need to earn a living.
At her parties Elizabeth Anson was always to be found on the sidelines, deciding the precise moment at which to send in platoons of waiters with kedgeree, or troupes of jugglers, stiltwalkers and B-list rock bands.
The potential for mishap was enormous – which was why people hired Elizabeth Anson to take care of things. A small, coiffed figure, she had an eye for detail and an almost obsessive desire for perfection.
But even she could not guard against every contingency. On one occasion a party she organised in a marquee in the back garden of a smart block of flats was ruined when residents of the basement flat, angry at being denied light, spent the day of the party boiling kippers so that the tent stank of fish.
On another occasion she drove to Newmarket, where she was arranging a large party in the Jockey Club rooms, to find her catering van overturned in a ditch: “I opened the back and it was one whole mess of broken glass together with the ice cream that was going to be the pudding together with the kedgeree that was going to be the breakfast. It was a complete shambles.” But the party ran only three-quarters of an hour late.
Yet the curious thing about Elizabeth Anson was that when she started her business she hated parties so much that she often turned back before reaching the front door, and confessed to being “cripplingly shy”. While she claimed to enjoy standing on the sidelines, she never wanted to join the party. “I won’t even stay for a weekend with people who say: ‘And we’ve got 12 for dinner on Saturday night …’ I don’t need that.”
The daughter of Lt-col Viscount Anson (elder son of the 4th Earl of Lichfield) and Anne Bowes-lyon, a cousin of the Queen,
Lady Elizabeth Georgiana Anson was born in Windsor Castle on June 7 1941. Her godfather was George VI. She and her brother Patrick (the photographer Patrick Lichfield) had a difficult childhood. Their parents divorced when Elizabeth was seven and their mother subsequently married
Prince Georg Valdemar of Denmark, a diplomat, and moved to Paris.
Their father, too, was often abroad, so the children were shunted between aunts in Scotland, Devon and Staffordshire, where Patrick inherited the family seat of Shugborough aged 18. Elizabeth was then 16 and was soon pressed into service cooking for house parties, though she had no formal training.
At Downham School in Hertfordshire she was “badly educated but had a lovely time”. As she left school, her coming-out party loomed. Since her mother was in Paris she had to organise it herself and found that she had a natural flair. She was 19 when she set up Party Planners.
The firm’s repertoire was once described as “everything from parties for 5,000 to tea for two, parties for everyone from the duke to the dustman”. The dustman was a bit of an exaggeration, and Lady Elizabeth sometimes had cause to regret her forays down the social scale.
For several years in the 1990s she pursued Ivana Trump in the courts, chasing £6,500 of a £36,500 dinner bill at Raymond Blanc’s Manoir aux Quat’ Saisons. The occasion in dispute, in what was dubbed “The battle of the bouffants”, was a 50th birthday party in 1993 for Mrs Trump’s then fiancé, Riccardo Mazzucelli.
British courts ruled in 1998 that Mrs Trump was liable for all costs and, at one point, Lady Elizabeth even obtained a lien on her adversary’s £1 million London flat to recoup part of the debt. In the end, however, the courts decided in favour of Mrs Trump.
Despite the glamour of her job Lady Elizabeth had to cope with a series of blows that might have destroyed anyone with less determination. She was a Lloyd’s Name; she suffered from debilitating chronic fatigue syndrome; in 1991 her house fell down, and in 2001 she was attacked by two masked raiders while watching television and left badly bruised and shaken after the men relieved her of her engagement ring and forced her to an upstairs bedroom to hand over the contents of her jewellery box.
An avid fan of the National Lottery, Lady Elizabeth Anson could be surprisingly naive when it came to money-making schemes. In 2003 she admitted being involved in a dubious pyramid selling venture, which she had persuaded several of her well-heeled friends to join. She failed to see what all the fuss was about: “I’ve come through twice,” she explained. “I don’t see there is a problem as long as people don’t end up losing their money.”
Lady Elizabeth Anson’s Party Planners Book: The Complete Guide to Entertaining Stylishly and Successfully (1986) contained such useful advice as “look out for the largest stuffed animals you can find, hire them and insure them” and “put all the bores together”.
She was appointed CVO earlier this year. In 1972 she married Sir Geoffrey Shakerley, 6th Bt, in a ceremony at Westminster Abbey attended by the Queen, the Queen Mother, and the then Princess Beatrix of the Netherlands. Princess Anne was her bridesmaid. The marriage was dissolved in 2009.
Her daughter survives her.