Diana, Lady Farnham
Loyal and long-serving Lady of the Bedchamber to the Queen who believed in having fun in life
DIANA, LADY FARNHAM, who has died aged 90, was for more than 30 years a Lady of the Bedchamber to the Queen, a role in which she combined immense charm with a sharp mind and great organisational skill.
Once a political appointment (Robert Peel famously rejected the premiership in 1839 when Queen Victoria refused to replace her Whig Ladies), the post had long since become entirely administrative and ceremonial, the principal duties being accompanying the Queen on official visits and providing her with support and companionship.
It was a role for which Diana Farnham, with her gifts for friendship and unerring loyalty, was well fitted. Appointed in 1987, she was appointed DCVO in 2010 and was still in the Queen’s service at the time of her death.
The work was not free from hazard. At one grand occasion, there was a mighty crash. A large vase of gladioli had fallen on her. The Queen looked at her with concern from across the room. Diana Farnham responded with a vigorous thumbs-up.
Her close and affectionate relationship with the Queen was demonstrated memorably at the Diamond Jubilee Service of Thanksgiving at St Paul’s Cathedral in June 2012. The Duke of Edinburgh was in hospital. The Queen asked Diana Farnham to accompany her in the royal Bentley. After the service they proceeded to the Mansion House for a reception, and then on to Westminster Hall for lunch.
At the time, she was described by The Daily Telegraph as one of the “unsung heroes of the Diamond Jubilee celebrations”.
She was born Diana Marion Gunnis on May 24 1931, the elder of two sisters, into a family with Glaswegian roots. She spent her early years at Sissinghurst in Kent, where Harold Nicolson and Vita Sackville-west were near-neighbours. Her father, Major Nigel Gunnis of the Royal Artillery, fought in North Africa and Italy during the Second World War before becoming part of the British Military Mission to Romania.
From her mother, Elizabeth, née Morrison, a strong-minded woman with a tendency to domineer, she inherited Irish connections through descent from the Hills, Marquesses of Downshire. Her parents divorced, and she spent much of her childhood with her mother at Codicote in Hertfordshire.
From Hatherop Castle School in the Cotswolds, she went on to the egalitarian-sounding House of Citizenship, which was in fact a finishing school for young ladies.
Her natural intelligence was sharpened, and her appreciation of the arts enhanced, by assisting her bachelor uncle, Rupert Gunnis, the art historian, with the research for his well-regarded Dictionary of British Sculptors 1660-1851, published in 1953.
A blissfully happy marriage in 1959 strengthened her Irish links. Barry Maxwell, the 12th Baron Farnham, had inherited his Irish title from his grandfather as a result of the early death of his father, Somerset Maxwell, Conservative MP for King’s Lynn, who was fatally wounded at El Alamein in 1942.
Diana later inherited a cottage from her mother at Burnham Overy Staithe on the Norfolk coast, which she called her “seaside escape”.
The young Farnhams had to face up to the challenge posed by the large run-down remnant of the once enormous Irish family estate, some 26,000 acres in 1870, in Co Cavan, now close to the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic.
Farnham House itself was in a perilous state. They enlisted Claud (later Lord) Phillimore, an expert in reducing the size of huge, uneconomic Irish mansions. All went well until he proposed to build an entirely new staircase instead of moving a splendid James Wyatt creation from part of the house that was to be demolished. Wyatt carried the day.
In the remodelled but still substantial house, Diana Farnham created an interior that combined modern comfort with restrained grandeur. It became a much-loved family home.
On the death of her husband in 2001, Diana Farnham decided reluctantly that she would have to sell Farnham House, which is now part of a luxury hotel and leisure complex. She took care, however, to place the large and important collection of Farnham family portraits on long loan in the Cavan County Museum to ensure that the family connection with this part of Ireland, stretching back 330 years, was not forgotten.
In 2011, when the Queen paid her historic state visit to Ireland, the most Irish of her Ladies was on duty by her side throughout this hugely successful occasion.
Diana Farnham undertook a great deal of public work outside the royal sphere. She helped to settle refugees who fled from Hungary when the Soviet Union invaded their country in 1956. She served as a magistrate in east London for many years. A passionate devotee of ballet, she took a deep interest in the work of the Dance Teachers’ Benevolent Fund, of which she was vice-president, and was a huge supporter of the English National Ballet. She was a trustee of the British Kidney Patient Association and patron of Friends of the Elderly, a charity that runs care homes in seven counties.
Fun, she always said, was an essential ingredient of life. She strummed her guitar with gusto, danced to Sinatra or Pinky & Perky, surrounded herself with the young, and was always interested and inquisitive about what they were up to.
In her later years she would rush her daughters and grandchildren to the shore by her Norfolk home to watch or partake in sailing, crabbing and shrimping, activities which she had enjoyed in her youth.
Her wedding photographs show how very beautiful Diana Farnham was as a young woman. She retained her striking good looks, accompanied by great poise and elegance of bearing, until the end of her life.
The twinkle in her eye never faded. “Pop out and get a bottle of whisky,” she said to her devoted young priest from the Chapel Royal when she was in hospital, pressing a £20 note into his hand. “I am an hour closer to eternity and it may not be available there.”
She is survived by her two daughters.