Lady Archer: How stranger won my heart before Jeffrey
Unlike her flamboyant husband who was exposed as a serial adulterer, the ice-cool chemist Dame Mary Archer has always been famously reticent about her private life.
But a nostalgic trip to see a production of The Railway Children at the specially constructed king’s Cross Theatre in london has reawakened fond memories of her first-ever romance — which started after a brief encounter with an Austrian teenager on a train.
‘it was all such a long time ago and very innocent but the most romantic encounter i ever had,’ she tells me at the show’s first-night party.
‘i was 17 and en route to innsbruck, where i was due to teach english in a girls’ school, when i saw this very handsome young man. He was very nice. We struck up a friendship and he was my first sort-of boyfriend before i went to university. i t was a one-summer phenomenon.
‘He helped me with my German and his name was Christoph leudner. i don’t know where he is now. it was all very innocent and earnest. i have always loved train journeys,’ adds Mary, who is the new chairman of the Science Museum Group’s national Railway Museum in York.
lady Archer, 70, met her future husband Jeffrey when she went to read chemistry at St Anne’s College, Oxford, and married him aged 21. She has remained loyal ever since, despite his philandering and prison sentence for perjury.
Famously, the judge in Archer’s 1987 libel trial said it was inconceivable that someone with a wife as ‘fragrant’ as Mary would visit a prostitute. However, Mary’s fragrance didn’t stop Archer having affairs with Sally Farmiloe and Andrina Colquhoun.
Dame Mary, the daughter of a chartered accountant, later said she does not think ‘sexual fidelity is necessary or sufficient to keep a marriage going’.
lord and lady Archer celebrate their golden wedding anniversary next year and are already discussing plans to mark the occasion. ‘The thing is we’ve both been ill with cancer and although we are both quite well at the moment, we don’t want to get ahead of ourselves by planning too much,’ she says. in 2011, Dame Mary revealed she had undergone surgery for bladder cancer. if Herr leudner would like to get in touch, then maybe i can arrange a happy reunion.