Countess’s shocking discovery
THERE are few wives who remain on good terms with their ex-husbands after their former spouse re-marries. In the case of the Countess of Swinton, who has stayed close to both her first husband, Jeremy Sykes, and his second wife, Annabel, it has proved a bittersweet experience.
For when Annabel died suddenly last week while Jeremy was in hospital, it was his first wife, Pamela — now Lady Swinton — who discovered her body.
Pamela — who famously left Jeremy in the Nineties after becoming involved with Lord Swinton ( he was then plain Nicholas Cunliffe-lister and was himself married to former Tory grandee Viscount Whitelaw’s daughter, Susan) — was asked to help after a family friend failed to get a response from Annabel’s house in Driffield, East Yorks.
Jeremy, the brother of bachelor baronet Sir Tatton Sykes, was in hospital in Hull. Says younger brother, writer Christopher Sykes: ‘A friend i n the village had arranged to drive Annabel to visit Jeremy. But when he knocked on the door of her house, he couldn’t get a response. He was concerned about going inside on his own, so he went over to Pamela’s for help.
‘The two then went back and found Annabel. She looked like she was asleep, but she had died.’
A friend tells me: ‘It is unclear whether she had a heart attack or stroke, but the funeral has been arranged for Thursday at Rudston Church, which is near Annabel’s family home, Thorpe Hall — she is the daughter of the late clan chief, Sir Alexander Macdonald of Sleat.’
There has already been a memorial service in the chapel at the Sykes’s Sledmere estate. Adds the friend: ‘It has all been very sad and very unexpected.’
Ampleforth- educated Jeremy, 65, married Pamela in 1982 and they divorced in 1996 after she fell for Swinton. He is heir to his brother, who is known to his circle as Sir Satin Tights.
At one stage before their respective divorces, Swinton lived with his first wife Susan at weekends, but spent weekdays with Pamela in a bungalow at Sledmere. At the time, Pamela insisted on maintaining a friendship with her estranged husband and she became friends with Annabel, too, when they later married.