The ‘slightly promiscuous’ aristocrat who became the First Lady of Rock ’n’ Roll
The Stones, Led Zeppelin, Queen and Oasis: Knebworth welcomed them all. As its chatelaine Lady Cobbold dies at 83, RICHARD KAY on a riotous life
AN INVITATION to Knebworth House was never a humdrum affair. Fellow guests might include the Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, Queen or Oasis, whose sell-out concerts in the Seventies, Eighties and Nineties saw the place immortalised as the stately home of rock ’n’ roll.
Even so, there were some strict rules for overnight stays. ‘It didn’t matter who you might be sharing the bed with, you had to be out of your room by 10am because that’s when the velvet rope was back in place and the paying public were let in,’ recalls one regular visitor.
‘If you were running late, you could stuff everything under the bed and sneak back later.’
This was a rare concession from Knebworth’s chatelaine Lady Cobbold, to those unwilling to break off their romantic entanglements until the last possible moment.
For she had to manage the precarious business of keeping the house afloat with a sharp eye on the bottom line, even though it seemed at odds with her fey, hippyish beauty and other-worldly air.
For decades, Chryssie Lytton Cobbold, who has died aged 83, and her late husband David, the 2nd Lord Cobbold, kept the family seat and its 250 acres of parkland afloat with a mixture of flamboyance, optimism and rock ’n’ roll.
‘ There was always something leaking, rotting, falling down or needing repair,’ says an old friend.
The headlines suggested that it was the music and its reputation for the best-run festivals in the world that ensured Knebworth could pay its bills, but Lady Cobbold’s needlework skills were just as vital.
THANKS to her debutante years when she was a £3a-week pattern cutter at Worth, the London couturiers, she re- upholstered ancient chairs, stitched new curtains and cushions and refurbished old fabrics. And when she wasn’t sewing, she was wielding a paintbrush or hacking away at overgrown flower beds.
With its creeper-clad turrets and fearsome gargoyles the house was a crumbling ruin when she and David took on the task of restoration in 1969. His parents had been unable to give it away: ‘ They offered it to the county council, then a series of public bodies, but they all said they couldn’t justify the expense,’ Lady Cobbold recalled years later.
‘One day when we were living in our London flat with our four children, we visited Syon House ( home of the Dukes of Northumberland in Brentford). We were very impressed with what they had done so we thought, shall we have a go, too?’
Despite the fears of his father Kim, a former governor of the Bank of England and Lord Chamberlain to the late Queen Elizabeth, that the estate was an impossible burden, the couple set to with gusto, laying roads and building loos and restaurants.
There were challenges — Chryssie was once woken in bed by mice nibbling her toes. Although they had far less money than grander rivals such as Longleat and Woburn Abbey, when they opened the doors two years later, visitors flooded in. The house, a bizarre mix of Tudor and Victorian Gothic, was not the only draw.
As well as an impressive collection of Jacobean furniture and tapestries, there were all manner of curios — from Winston Churchill’s love letters to David’s grandmother Pamela, Countess of Lytton, a noted society beauty, to a crystal ball left behind by an occultist whose ghost is said to stalk Knebworth’s passages.
But finances were precarious. Salvation came with the music. In 1974 they staged their first concert with Van Morrison and the Allman Brothers topping the bill. There were rave reviews and the era of country house rock had begun.
Later festivals featured Pink Floyd, Genesis, Paul McCartney, Eric Clapton, Robbie Williams and, in August 1986, Freddie Mercury’s last concert with Queen. The two concerts Oasis played in the summer of 1996 were described as the ‘gig of the decade’, while the crowd of 125,000 each night was said to have resulted in the two biggest rock concerts Britain had ever seen.
Inevitably, when rock- star royalty was staying, stories soon proliferated of louche and unexpected behaviour. Mick Jagger was said to have left a pair of blue underpants at the bottom of the 16th- century bed once slept in by Queen Elizabeth I, while Noel Gallagher rang on the doorbell to ask to take a bath.
CHRySSIE’S worst moment came the first time she invited a band to the house for drinks. Expecting just the members of Pink Floyd — plus wives and girlfriends — she put out a few ashtrays.
Forty people poured into the house — ‘liggers’ she called them — looking for a free drink. At that very moment the police and drugs squad arrived to mull over the day’s events and they looked thirsty, too. ‘I gave them whiskies in the kitchen while the band and their friends were in the study, for all I knew rolling up joints.’
Time stood still as she dashed around trying to keep the two groups separate. ‘ I almost collapsed with relief when the police left, blissfully unaware of all the naughtiness going on next door,’ she said.
But Chryssie was not one to wait on aristocratic formality. With her long blonde hair, gentle manner, fascination with astrology and her visits to Glastonbury, Lady Cobbold was, in many ways, a 1960s archetype. So was her husband. They married young — Chryssie was 20, David 23 — and, casting aside the prevailing prejudices of the day, adopted two Ugandan schoolfriends of their eldest son Henry.
And in true 1960s style their marriage survived what she once referred to delicately as ‘slight promiscuity’. A more blunt assessment would describe theirs as an open marriage. The dashingly handsome David was reported to have fathered two children with different women. For her part, Lady Cobbold acknowledged there were ‘occasions when one was slightly promiscuous. I think it was just because everyone else did it, one did it, too. But you grow out of it.
‘I think far too much is made of sexual behaviour. An awful lot of fuss is made about adultery. Most people are probably guilty at some time or another, but a happy marriage should be able to digest the occasional transgression.’
Certainly, she and Cobbold remained happily married until his death in 2022 living by this maxim. Neither his indiscretions nor her fondness for the bohemian thrice-married Earl of St Germans did so much as dent it.
When her husband died after years fighting Parkinson’s disease she decorated his coffin with artwork from his favourite Pink Floyd album and placed a memorial bench beside his grave at Knebworth inscribed: ‘See you on the Dark Side of the Moon.’
A day after her death from pancreatic cancer, Lady Cobbold was buried next to him.