Earl criticises daughter after she claims his late mother disliked Diana
THE Earl of Cromer has criticised his daughter after she claimed her grandmother, the Dowager Countess, “didn’t really like” Princess Diana.
Lady Venetia Baring said in a recent Tatler interview that her grandmother thought the late Princess of Wales should “get a grip”.
But Evelyn Baring, the 4th Earl of Cromer, has now publicly disputed his daughter’s claims in a letter written to The Times, saying that it would be “totally alien” for his late mother, Esmé Harmsworth, the Dowager Countess of Cromer and a lady-in waiting of the late Queen, to speak about the Royal family in that way.
He said: “It would be totally alien to my mother to make a comment on a member of the royal family to anybody, least of all to one of her grandchildren and especially to Lady Venetia Baring, my daughter, who was born after the death of Diana, Princess of Wales.”
His mother served a temporary ladyin-waiting to Elizabeth II from 1967 to 1971, before becoming an extra lady-inwaiting to the monarch for the following two decades.
Her husband was the 3rd Earl of Cromer, who was a governor of the Bank of England in the 1960s and later served as the British ambassador to the US.
The 77-year- old Earl Baring, now based in Bangkok, said his daughter “alleged” the claims in her interview and instead, he described his mother as the “soul of discretion”, saying: “My mother served the late Queen for 17 years and was rewarded for her loyalty, work and affection by a CVO.
“Throughout her long service my mother was the soul of discretion, no doubt learnt from her years as wife of a governor of the Bank of England and wife of a British ambassador to Washington.”
Lady Venetia, 25, had told Tatler in a cover i nterview that her relative thought that Diana should “get a grip,” even when she was so upset during a row with Charles that she threw herself down a flight of stairs at Sandringham.
“My granny didn’t really like Diana,” she said, adding: “But I take her opinion with a grain of salt. She was one of those kinds of women that was, like, ‘ Bro, what’s wrong with you? Get a grip!’
“So I think when Diana was going t hrough her bulimia, stress and everything going on with Charles and Camilla, my granny said she used to throw herself down the stairs. When I hear that, I think she must have been going through hell. But [I think my granny was l i ke] ‘ this crazy girl wouldn’t stop throwing herself down the stairs’.”
Her grandmother was serving as an “extra lady of the bedchamber” to Eliz
‘Throughout her long service my mother was the soul of discretion’
abeth II in 1982, when Diana visited the Sandringham estate with her husband, then the Prince of Wales.
The late Princess later told Andrew Morton, her biographer, that she had threatened to throw herself down a flight of stairs because Charles claimed she was “crying wolf ” during a row.
In the published recorded monologue, she told Morton: “I was four months pregnant with William, trying to get my husband’s attention, for him to listen to me.
“But he just said: ‘You’re crying wolf.’ And he said: ‘I’m not going to listen. You’re always doing this to me. I’m going riding now.’
“So I threw myself down the stairs. The Queen comes out, absolutely horrified, shaking – she was so frightened. I knew I wasn’t going to lose the baby, though I was quite bruised around the stomach.”
Lady Venetia also told Tatler that her grandmother, who had been a nurse during the Second World War and who died in 2011, was a “terrifying” woman who “set the rules” in her family.
She added that her relative and Elizabeth II used to “breed dogs together” and revealed that she keeps a framed photograph of Esmé holding a puppy and smiling alongside the late monarch.
“My granny had dachshunds and the Queen had corgis, so she would breed her dachshunds with the Queen’s corgis and create dorgis. She had a really clever one that could play the piano,” she said.