// From Bedford Street to Boreham Wood
Behind the scenes at The Lady
When I heard The Lady magazine was moving to Borehamwood, I felt rather as if I’d just been told Lady Grantham was taking over the boozer in Albert Square. For 130 years, the dowager duchess of British journals resided in an elegant, creamy-pink Covent Garden corner building, displaying copies of the latest editions in its large arched windows. It was a landmark for London cabbies and Shangri-la for all students of eccentric toffs and social mores.
Most ardent fans knew The Lady was founded in 1885 by the Mitford sisters’ maternal grandfather, Thomas Gibson Bowles. He briefly employed the sisters’ father, the future 2nd Baron Redesdale, who found the basement was full of rats and purloined a mongoose to catch them. Years later Nancy Mitford was a celebrated family contributor. Lewis Carroll once offered up a puzzle and Stella Gibbons became editorial assistant in the early Thirties; an amused colleague recalled she “neglected her duties disgracefully” to work on the manuscript that became Cold Comfort Farm. But the magazine became most celebrated as a real-life embodiment of Upstairs Downstairs, its small ads acting as a liaison point between well-heeled aristos and their would-be employees. If an earl needed a butler or nanny, the pages of The Lady were his first point of call.
If a gentlewoman fell on hard times, she could advertise her services as a paid companion in the periodical’s pages.
When I first picked up a copy of The Lady in the early Eighties, it had widened its scope to the middle classes, matching families in Tunbridge Wells with Swedish au pairs. There were also notices from married couples who would multi-task – housekeeper, chauffeur, valet, nurse, gardener, whatever – in return for a cottage and pay, as families that once employed dozens could now barely afford two. I’ve long been haunted by a small ad where a widower looked for a kindly woman to mother five distraught young children.
My parents stocked the magazine in our country pub, alongside Country Life and Hello!, knowing together they were a nosy parker’s paradise. I was fascinated by classifieds from businessmen seeking comely young women to travel with them as their “secretaries”. My older sister once responded to one of those ads out of late teen boredom and ended up in a town house in St John’s Wood fending off a portly 60-year-old with an umbrella. Her discomfort probably wasn’t as great as the Duchess of York’s after her dresser Jane Andrews – whom she recruited via The Lady – was convicted in 2001 of the murder of her boyfriend.
It was fair to say The Lady wasn’t totally in step with social change in the new millennium. In the internet age it still read like a glorified parish rag, not unrelated to the fact it had been owned and run and lived-in (there’s a 19-bedroom top floor flat above the offices) by its founder’s grandson, Tom Bowles, since the Sixties. When it started haemorrhaging money, Bowles’s formidable sister Julia Budworth took an ever more beady interest, raising capital to help install her son Ben (fourth of five brothers) as CEO. Ben Budworth, who had no journalistic experience, went on a courtship spree in 2008 to find a new editor. He chatted up every Mitford-loving hacketteabout-town and I was one of many invited to tea in Covent Garden.
It was the most idiosyncratic interview process I’d experienced, mostly consisting of Budworth relating tales that made The Lady’s offices seem ever more akin to an asylum for the criminally genteel. He told me that one of the features editors suffered from deep paranoia that made her petrified if there was any form of rumpus outside. On one occasion, when a group of policemen had assembled on the street corner, she told him that they were “coming for me” and hid under her desk. Meanwhile, he was still recovering from a recent incident when a shaking member of staff informed him an unspeakable act had occurred in the ladies’ lavatories. When Budworth opened the door he found someone had deposited “a large poo” straight on to the floor outside the cubicles. He said removing it felt like defusing a bomb, before ruminating that it was perhaps “an animal act of protest” in the face of a new regime.
A fellow interviewee, Jessica Fellowes, author of The Mitford Scandal, told me she had a tour of the building where Budworth explained he was still discovering new nooks and rooms in its rabbit-warren expanses. On one occasion he had opened what he took for a cupboard door and discovered a stranger at the small desk behind it. The man leapt to his feet and said, “Hello, I’m your marketing manager.” Uncle Tom was still given to wandering down in his pyjamas to see what his nephew was up to.
Weeks later I was told I’d made it to the last four candidates, alongside Rachel Johnson, Daisy Waugh and Molly Watson, and that we’d all be summoned, one after another, to meet Julia Budworth and her five sons in the boardroom. When I turned up at The Lady’s offices, I was surprised to be asked if I would mind signing an agreement form for the entire interview be filmed by a Channel 4 documentary team. My immediate suspicion was that Ben Budworth had already appointed his editor and only one candidate had what I’d describe as an immaculate Tv-ready face and blow-dry. It wasn’t very Lady-like behaviour on Budworth’s behalf, but a clear sign to me I wouldn’t have the necessary rhino-hide, or pooper-scooper, to deal with office shenanigans.
For those unfamiliar with the ensuing, much-documented saga,
It was fair to say The Lady wasn’t totally in step with social change in the 21st century
Rachel Johnson landed the editor’s seat and starred in the documentary, where she memorably described The Lady as “a piddling little magazine that nobody cares about. Or buys.” Julia Budworth declared she’d have fired her if she had been a majority shareholder: “She’s a loose cannon. All she thinks of is sex. You can’t get her away from a penis.” The Rachel and Julia Show ran for an entertaining couple of years, after which Johnson was gradually eased out of the editor’s chair – but not before she’d published a tell-all diary.
A continued decline in revenue proved that not all publicity is good publicity. Ben Budworth persuaded his uncle to sell him the London offices, which he promptly sold to Capital and Counties Properties for £12.4million. Julia Budworth gave a number of enraged interviews about the sale and mother and son now appear to be estranged. Plans to shunt the magazine out to Borehamwood duly went ahead and this week Budworth announced he was opening his own butler school in Norfolk, which will surely spawn another TV documentary.
As an incurable, lifelong fan of The Lady, I can’t help feeling it’s all a huge shame. The last of the Covent Garden editors, Sam Taylor, had revitalised the magazine with all-round effortless élan. She knew famous writers could be persuaded to contribute simply because they were entranced by the building’s literary associations and history of rampant eccentricity. Taylor elected not to move with the magazine, declaring: “The building and the magazine are inextricably linked… the Mitford sisters were in this building. Would Nancy Mitford have gone to Borehamwood? The answer is no.”
It’s hard to disagree and, whatever the magazine’s future, Covent Garden will feel less ladylike for years to come.