Why Anne Glenconner is a Lady in Waiting no longer...
Her racy but touching memoir made her a national treasure. And now, at nearly 90, the royal insider is thrilled to be finally stepping out of the shadows
IT TOOK just one short appearance on Graham Norton’s TV show to transform her from a titled nobody into a national treasure. And what a treasure she’s turned out to be, with her candid memoirs of high life with the royals and low life with her eccentric husband now nudging an astonishing million sales worldwide.
Anne Glenconner, who but for an accident of birth would be owner of the fifth largest landed estate in Britain and bearer of a peerage dating back centuries, decided at the age of 87 to sit down and write her life story.
There was much to tell – of her four decades as Princess Margaret’s long-suffering sidekick. Of her honeymoon spent in a Paris bordello, and her “Robinson Crusoe life” on the Caribbean island of Mustique. And of the many secrets of life inside the royal court.
A former childhood friend of the Queen, she remains a keen observer of royal affairs and has strong views about the behaviour of some of the younger generation, of which more later.
But what captured readers’ hearts most, it turns out, was the frank portrayal of her tragic loss of two sons to heroin (Charlie) and AIDS (Henry) and her disinheritance by husband Colin Tennant – “the charming flaky madman” – who left his entire £20million fortune to an illiterate manservant.
Lady InWaiting has broken all records as the fastest selling autobiography of recent years, and has been translated into a dozen different languages including Lithuanian, Russian and Japanese. It remained in Britain’s best-seller lists for nine straight months and went instantly to number one in New York.
“What I find so extraordinary is that, all my life, I’ve lived in the shadows,” Anne says today. “Being married to Colin – no question, one was absolutely invisible then. And also Princess Margaret – of course I expected to be eclipsed by her, because that was one’s job. But now? I’ve never had such a marvellous time! I’m going to be 90 in a year or so, and I never thought something like this would ever happen in my life.”
Fetchingly charming and still retaining girlish good looks, Lady Anne is, however, not all she appears. Beneath the conventional exterior lies a steely ambition, just as urgent today as when she was packed off to America at the age of 17 to hawk pottery manufactured on the family estate at Holkham, Norfolk.
“I am a salesman – that’s what I like doing and that’s what I’ve always done,” she says.
And so with the book ready for publication, she told her publishers, “I want to sell half a million, and I want to be on Graham Norton’s sofa.”
“‘You’re never going to achieve that’, they told me, but I did. In fact it’s nearer a million – I know how to sell!”
Indeed she does.
Her success with Norton was unexpected, but she had advice from a chat show old hand, her friend the actor Rupert Everett. “Don’t let him get in there with his innuendoes,” he told her. “You get in there first.”
So she kicked off with a very rude story about a dog, followed it up with an interview on Lorraine Kelly’s morning TV show, and sat back to watch the fireworks.
“We sold 8,000 copies between 9.30am and 3pm,” she says proudly.
Suddenly people couldn’t get enough of this aristocratic octogenarian, the unlikeliest media sensation in a very long while. Only the onslaught of the pandemic prevented her from taking off on a lengthy book tour with the high point, a star-spangled New York launch, hosted by Everett.
JET-LAG? She doesn’t know the meaning of the word: “I go back to Mustique each year – it’s only 4,000 miles. I’m supposed to be going to New Zealand – that’s a bit more of a challenge as I’m supposed to be doing a speech when I get off at the other end.”
She bubbles over with enthusiasm, barely finishing a sentence before she’s on to the next, and she’s eager to discuss the forthcoming paperback publication of her novel Murder On Mustique. It’s a tantalising factand-fiction mix which offers the reader fur
ther insights into the Caribbean paradise she and Colin Tennant, later Lord Glenconner, created on their 1,400-acre island in the Grenadines back in the early 1960s.
“Warm, witty, and surprisingly entertaining,” one reviewer judged, and for those who gobbled up delicious details of Anne’s personal life in Lady In Waiting, it’s fascinating to learn that while her heroine in Murder On Mustique is called Lady Vee, Lady Anne’s second name is Veronica – and therefore the puzzle is to sort fact from fiction.
The conversation moves on to Anne’s next book (remember – 90 next year!) which comes out before Christmas.
A Haunting At Holkham, she tells me, is again a mix of fact and fiction: “But more of a carry-over from the first book – it enlarges a lot on my early life, as well as telling the story of the ghost of Holkham, Lady Mary Coke.”
Pretty soon she returns to the memoirs – because of the extraordinary effect they had on readers, triggering an unexpected avalanche of emotional response.
“I’ve had hundreds of letters from all over the world,” she says, “I just hadn’t expected that. I think the book engaged people in many different ways – I’ve had letters from people who’ve lost children, from women with difficult husbands, and a lot of letters from the gay community, because my son Henry died of AIDS.
“I reply to them all by hand if I can, some I reply to in more detail because they’re so touching – I’ve found myself crying over some of them for what they reveal. I’ve had letters from people who say I’ve literally changed their life. I feel very humbled by it all.” And this is the paradox of Anne Glenconner. She grew up in the vast Palladian mansion which would have been hers today had she been born a boy – but because of the rules of primogeniture, the estate and the title of Earl of Leicester held by her father went to a distant cousin who lived in South Africa.
Now she lives nearby “so I can see the house from my window”. Inevitably, she confesses, there have been many regrets.
“Yes, I would love to have inherited Holkham because when I was growing up my father treated me as a boy. I used to help out in the estate office, there’s nobody I didn’t know on the estate. Now, maybe, with these books I don’t regret it quite so much.”
Literary success comes as a consolation prize, then?
“Yes, because my life wasn’t at all easy, what with Colin and my darling boys. My father wanted me to marry a friend of his, Lord Stair, who was 26 years older. But a crumbling castle in Scotland, dank rhododendrons! I wouldn’t have been very good with that sort of person. So I married Colin.”
DESPITE his apparent betrayal, she refuses to condemn him for giving all his money away. “He had problems, and the problems were very difficult to cope with. I loved him. He was wonderful in lots of ways, but there was a flip side. Maybe,” she adds sadly, “there always is.”
As Lady Anne Coke she grew up on the Holkham estate bordering Sandringham’s vast acres and knew both the Queen and Princess Margaret as children, and so the talk inevitably turns to the latest royal developments.
She’s reluctant to say anything at all about Prince Harry and Meghan, but eventually gives way to her feelings. “I was a member
of the royal household for 34 years,” she says. “My children’s nanny Barbara Barnes went on to look after Prince William and Prince Harry – I used to see them a bit when they were young, and Harry was such a dear little boy.”
But the way he’s behaved since his departure to live in the United States, naming his daughter Lilibet?
“How could they have called their child by the Queen’s private name? It was a name given to her by the king – very, very private to her. Nobody ever called her that apart from Prince Philip, and possibly one or two of her cousins long ago.
“It was her signature on his funeral wreath. It’s private, it’s not a name. All my friends, people I know, all think it’s very sad – how could they do that?”
But quickly the conversation returns to her books. Apparently there’ll be another, rather different, volume for Anne Glenconner’s many fans next year, “And then I’ll hang up my pen,” she declares. You almost believe her – but not quite.
‘How could they have called their child by the Queen’s private name? It’s so sad’
Murder on Mustique by Anne Glenconner is out in paperback on June 24, published by Hodder & Stoughton and priced £8.99