Du Maurier clan distraught at sale of intimate letters and belongings

REBECCA author Daphne du Maurier continues to cast a spell over successive generations, as was plain at an auction held ten days ago when a collection of her personal belongings — including her typewriter — raised £150,000.

But I can disclose that the sale has caused great distress among members of the Du Maurier family, including her elder daughter, Viscountess Montgomery.

‘I wasn’t aware of the auction,’ she tells me. ‘None of us knew about it until we read it in the press. It was very upsetting for the family.’

Tessa Montgomery is perplexed that so many personal family photographs and intimate poems written by her mother in her youth, as well as letters from members of the Royal Family dating from the Seventies and Eighties, were in the possession of the BakerMunton family, who sent them to auction.

The late Maureen BakerMunton was appointed personal assistant to Du Maurier’s husband, Lieutenant General Sir Frederick ‘ Boy’ Browning, who died in 1965 but who, for the last eight years of his life, was godfather to BakerMunton’s son, Kristen.

‘I had no idea that these people owned so much of my mother’s stuff,’ she adds. ‘They only approached my brother about the auction at the last minute.

‘My mother and father and I were very fond of his mother, but I don’t know [Kristen] at all,’ adds Viscountess Montgomery. She had hoped that Exeter University might acquire some of the collection.

‘ We would have certainly kept it in the family or it would have gone to Exeter University, where they have a large selection of my mother’s things.’

Purchasers from as far afield as Qatar and the U.S. bid on 354 lots, including a handwritten dramatisation of Du Maurier’s masterpiece Rebecca, which sold for £6,200, and her unpublished poem from the Twenties, Song Of The Happy Prostitute, found in the back of a photograph frame.

Exeter University and Kristen Baker-Munton were unavailable for comment.