How the Queen’s best friend took on Vladimir Putin ... at the age of 97''''
Lady Myra Butter was part of the most intimate royal circles, a cousin of Prince Philip and a close, lifelong friend of Her Majesty. And, feisty to the end, she was always willing to speak truth to power ....
ONE cold day in December 1936, two little girls went for a swimming lesson at the Bath Club in London. As they splashed around learning lifesaving techniques, few would have guessed that both came from the very highest echelons of royalty.
At 11 years old, Myra could trace her heritage back to Russia’s Peter the Great, while the smaller girl, ten-year-old Elizabeth, was unaware that her entire life was about to change for good.
Walking home through the city streets the pair heard cries of ‘God Save the King’. When Elizabeth asked a footman what was going on, he told her: ‘Your uncle has abdicated and your father is King.’
Throughout her long and extraordinary life, the Queen has had few constants. But Lady Myra Butter, the Scots-Russian aristocrat who died last month aged 97, was most certainly one of them.
Theirs was a lifelong friendship: the young
Princess Elizabeth first came to tea aged two-and-a-half. Almost nine decades later she attended Lady Butter’s 90th birthday party at a London club.
At the end of the evening, as guests drifted away, the two were left to chat, reminiscing about their happy childhoods together.
It perhaps helped that Lady Butter was just as royal as her friend. A granddaughter of Grand Duke Michael of Russia and a great, great granddaughter of Tsar Nicholas I, she also counted the author Alexander Pushkin as a relative, and Prince Philip as a cousin. Indeed, the two were close friends in childhood, and she knew Philip long before his future wife did.
But while she remained a member of the Queen’s inner circle her entire life, Lady Butter was also determined to carve her own path, ‘a life of action rather than words’ as she once put it, serving as an auxiliary nurse in the Second World War and later establishing a literary prize for Scottish schoolchildren.
And then there was her extraordinary act of defiance when, just a few months before her death, this regal Russian stood up to Vladimir Putin.
Born in Edinburgh in 1925, Lady Butter traced her Russian heritage back through her mother Lady Zia, the Countess Anastasia Mikhailovna de Torby, whose own mother, Countess Sophie, was Pushkin’s granddaughter and married to Grand Duke Michael, Nicholas I’s grandson.
Her father, meanwhile, Major General Harold Wernher, was involved in preparations for the Battle of Normandy and had overseen the construction of the Mulberry harbours. His father, Sir Julius, had made his money in diamonds in South Africa.
GIVEN that her parents moved in a small aristocratic set with royals among their relatives, at a young age Lady Myra was drafted in by the Yorks, as they were then, as a friend for Princess Elizabeth and her younger sister Margaret. Together the girls would go horse-riding, take swimming lessons, and join the Brownies and later the Girl Guides.
‘They got hold of some girls to be part of the thing to make it more fun,’ she recalled many years later.
‘It was a very fun time actually, and very useful.’
As a child the Queen was, she said, ‘so calm, always, but laughing a lot, with a very good sense of humour which has gone on for all her life’.
She recalled too the early envy Princess Margaret had of her older sister. ‘She always had to do the same,’ she said in 2021. ‘She was a Brownie because her sister was a Guide, and then she wanted to swim.’
Prince Philip was a regular visitor to the family home, Thorpe Lubenham, near Market Harborough, Leicestershire, as he drifted between Gordonstoun and his increasingly disparate family. Despite having no formal education, Lady Butter was an avid reader, taught by a number of tutors, and when the war broke out she was desperate to be involved, eventually serving as a nurse.
Not that there wasn’t time for fun during the dark days of the Second World War. ‘[For our] social life, we had a few concerts and the local 82nd Airborne Division was stationed near us, so we got to know them, and the local Air Force used to appear,’ she recalled once.
‘But really, the only place where there was something going on was at Windsor Castle, because the Girls’ Brigade was stationed there, and their parties were a highlight; if you were lucky enough to get asked to one, you had a really wonderful time.
‘Everyone came up and everyone danced their heads off. A lot went on, because I think you would have gone crazy if you hadn’t had fun.’
She met her husband, Scottish soldier Major David Butter of the 2nd
Battalion Scots Guards, who had been awarded a Military Cross during the fall of tobruk and had been wounded in Italy, just as the war ended. they married in 1946.
the wedding was quite the occasion, with a crowd of 700 gathering outside St Margaret’s Church in Westminster for a glimpse of the newlyweds and their wellheeled guests.
queen Mary, princess Elizabeth, princess Margaret and princess Marina were all in attendance, while princess Alexandra was a bridesmaid and prince Michael a page, carrying the bride’s train. prince philip and his mother, princess Andrew of Greece, were also in the congregation.
Lady Butter’s dress was shellpink tulle, embossed with silver in a floral design and long veil embroidered with silver, leading pathé News to report this was ‘a new kind of silver wedding’.
One year later, Lady Butter had a front row seat for her cousin philip’s wedding to princess Elizabeth, and indeed, the courtship that led up to it. She once remarked that philip had been viewed as unsuitable by the courtiers. ‘He was outspoken,’ she said. ‘they would call him brash.’
UNSurprISINGLy, however, Lady Butter was a fan of the union. ‘Lucky her, we thought, and lucky all of us. Because it was a really good fairy tale, and it remains a really good fairy tale.’
Decades later, she had many happy memories of the day itself.
‘the war had been so grey that the royal Wedding seemed to signify the world coming to life again,’ she recalled.
‘Everyone was determined to have a new dress for the day and I wore a blue ribbed silk dress by Dior. It was one of the first threequarter length dresses, and I wore it with a feathered hat. I had new shoes and a bag, too – any excuse!
‘the princess looked truly glittering. Her dress was beautiful and she was so obviously in love. philip looked very dashing in his naval uniform.’
Afterwards, she said, she and her family ‘rushed home and changed, then sped off down the Mall to Buckingham palace, where we stood there shouting to get them out on the balcony’.
She was always keen to defend prince philip against accusations that he was not the most sensitive of fathers, and recalled him once returning from dropping the young Charles off at Gordonstoun, famously referred to as ‘Colditz with kilts’.
‘When prince philip came back he looked slightly shaken,’ she remembered. ‘He didn’t say anything, but he went straight over and poured himself a stiff drink... And I thought, ‘‘Oh, that has shaken you.’’’
Again, it was a loyalty that lasted her whole life. When, in 2017, it was announced that philip would be stepping back from public life, Lady Butter popped on to radio 4’s today programme to add her two penn’orth.
‘I’m sure that he won’t disappear, he will be greatly missed by everybody,’ she told the presenters. ‘He’s been such a stable character in all our lives. He’s always there, and he’s always been there for the queen, and I think we’re very, very lucky to have him.’
After her marriage Lady Butter and her husband moved to the Butter family’s Scottish seat, Cluniemore, on the banks of the tummel, a tributary of the tay.
She was famous for her begonias and fuchsias – regarded as some of the best in perthshire – but also became hugely involved in the community. In 73 years she never missed a pitlochry Highland Games, was a county commissioner of the Girl Guides and a trustee of the Duke of Edinburgh Awards, for which she ran the local committee. She also founded a home for the disabled.
royal visitors were regular. When the Duke of Kent was courting Katharine Worsley he would often use Cluniemore as a secret haven, while princess Alexandra came regularly when she was dating Sir Angus Ogilvy.
MEANWHILE, the Butters were, of course, frequent guests ‘over the hill’ at Balmoral, where both she and her husband were lauded for their great ability as mimics.
But it was with the pushkin prize that Lady Butter really made her mark.
It came about after a visit to russia in the 1980s, during the Gorbachev era and the subsequent decline of the Soviet union, to see some of the palaces where her family had resided. returning home to Scotland she decided to set up the prize in 1987, the 150th anniversary of the death of her ancestor, Alexander pushkin.
Devised as a creative writing competition for schoolchildren, initially in the tayside area, it proved so successful that in 1992 a charitable trust was founded so that the prize could be expanded to all secondary schools in Scotland.
It also stretched back to russia, with children at English-language schools near St petersburg, pushkin’s home town, also entering.
An exchange element was included, with pupils travelling from russia to spend a week with their Scottish counterparts.
Lady Butter was delighted with its success, highlighting pushkin’s own love of Scotland, saying in 2018 that the poet ‘had the strongest feelings for Scotland. He worshipped Scott and Burns and always wanted to come here, but was never given permission’.
the same year, she was awarded russia’s highest cultural honour, the pushkin medal, on the personal decree of president putin.
In March 2022, however, she handed her medal back in protest at russia’s invasion of ukraine.
‘I regarded the medal as such an honour when it came to Scotland in better times,’ she said. ‘to witness the terrible suffering taking place now is unbearable. Every human being only wishes to live in a peaceful world and we can only pray that the war will end with the utmost speed.’
for a woman who had spent her entire life at the very top of the social scale, it was an act that seemed both brave and entirely in keeping with her character.
‘I think pushkin would have approved,’ she said. ‘He was, after all, a revolutionary.’