An Unlikely Countess: Lily Budge and the 13th Earl of Galloway

Two harrowing events in early adulthood had shaped Lord Galloway’s life. The first was the death of his younger brother, the Hon. Keith Stewart, killed during the First World War, and the second was his own experience serving in the Scots Guards during the first battle of Ypres. Wounded and close to death, he had been captured by the Germans and kept prisoner before finally being returned home.

Even before the Lieutenant Hon. Keith Stewart’s death on 9 May 1915, when he was head of the leading platoon of his regiment, the Black Watch, in the charge on Aubers Ridge, near Festhubert in Flanders, he was regarded by all – family, friends, schoolmasters – as extraordinarily brilliant, a rather special boy who, had it not been for his brother’s status as first son and heir, might well have eclipsed him in every way. At Harrow he was head of school, captain of the football First XI, had won the public schools’ fencing competition in 1911, the Macnamara Prize for English three years running, and had passed second into Sandhurst in 1913, then fifth out a year later. He was gazetted to the Black Watch in August 1914, and went to the front in the December. (Lord Galloway – then ‘Garlies’ – had been at Harrow School only a year when his brother arrived and his own time there would prove to be not nearly so distinguished.)

It was inevitable that the tragic, early death of such a young man would shock the family. Keith Stewart epitomised all they stood for: brains, honour, courage, strength, and patriotism. It was some while before his body was recovered, but his popularity was so great that both commissioned and non-commissioned officers went looking for it at considerable risk to their lives. His corpse was eventually found lying within a few yards of the German trenches. It was brought back and buried by the British chaplain in the cemetery of Vieille Chapelle. In the months that followed the news his father received many tributes. Tommy Graham, who fought with him, sent back to Britain wounded, wrote to him:

He was young as far as his years are concerned, but he was old in wisdom … He never asked one of us to do something which he would not do himself: he shared our hardships and our joys; he was, in fact, one of ourselves as far as comradeship and brotherly love was concerned … We never knew who he was till we saw his death in the Press; but this we did know, that he was Lieut. Stewart, a soldier and a gentleman every inch … it’s not every day one like Stewart joins the army. There was not a man in his platoon, or the regiment for that part, but would have willingly went through hell for him, and mind you we faced hell out there on more than one occasion.’

Graham had heard of the death from another officer, Lance-Corporal Alexander ‘Sandy’ Easson, who broke the news thus:

We have lost little Lieut. Stewart … the best man that ever toed the line … None of the rest of them ever mixed themselves with us the same as he done. He was a credit to the regiment and to the father and mother who reared him; and Tommy, the boys that are left of the platoon hope that you will write to his father and mother and let them know how his men loved him … He died at the head of his platoon like the toff he was, and Tommy, I never was very religious: but I think little Stewart is in heaven. We knew it was a forlorn hope before we were half way – but he never flinched.

The Galloway family motto is Virescit vulnere virtus – valour grows strong from a wound – and so it proved for Lord Galloway, who adhered to it throughout his life. As soon as he had recovered, both from injury and from the loss of his brother, he became honorary attaché to the British legation in Berne in 1918, and then, after the war, in 1919, ADC to the military governor of Cologne. A year later his father died and he succeeded to the title. That he would incorporate his brother’s name into that of his son and heir shows how the legacy of Keith lived on. The military tradition into which the two brothers had been born sets in context the assumptions and expectations Lord Galloway would come to make of his own son, just as, one imagines, they had been made of him. It also explains the enormous sense of disappointment, bewilderment, and shame he would come to feel when he found that his heir could not live up to them. For now, though, Lord Galloway had no reason to suspect that when he married his beautiful young bride, their genes would mix so badly.

Lord Galloway’s marriage to Philippa Wendell in 1924 was seen by society as a second splendid match for the Wendell family, descendants of the victorious American Civil War general, Robert E. Lee. The Wendell sisters were not just beauties – Catherine, the eldest, was blonde and graceful, and Philippa, ‘a vivacious brunette’ – they were American beauties, bringing with them the wealth that the British aristocracy so badly needed. In the fifth volume of The Stewarts: A Historical and General Magazine for the Stewart Society, the tribute to their union reads: ‘To none of all the alliances formed in recent years between fair Americaines and members of the British aristocracy does so much interest attach – historically and genealogically at least – as to that just celebrated by Miss Philippa Wendell and the Earl of Galloway.’ Two years earlier, in 1922, Catherine had married the Earl of Carnarvon. That Philippa had followed her into the aristocracy by marrying a Scottish earl, one whose ancestry placed him at the head of the Stewart clan, was considered another piece of good fortune. ‘She comes on both sides of the house from some of the very oldest New England families,’ the report in The Stewarts gushed, ‘and, it may be added, of pronounced Royalist sympathies.’

The new Lady Galloway was perfect in every way. She was a beauty with fine, noble features. She had pale skin and dark, thick hair (Randolph was to inherit her colouring), cut into a bob and worn pulled back from her face, showing off to good effect the sharp angles of her cheekbones and jawline. She enjoyed listening to and playing classical music, which particularly delighted the musical dowager countess, who in the past had held her own festivals at Cumloden, and she wrote plays and poetry (the latter published in Punch). Added to this her uncle by marriage, Mr Percival Griffiths, possessed a fine and extensive private collection of Stewart relics. There were wonderfully wrought royal layette baskets, miniatures of Charles I hand-worked in silk; a lock of the ‘Royal Martyr’s hair’; the hawking outfit – pouch, lure, and gloves – of James VI and I; the Bible of Charles II in its bag of Royal Stewart tartan velvet – ‘probably the oldest example of that tartan in existence’ – along with rings, medallions, and trinkets.

Shortly after their marriage Lord and Lady Galloway took a house in London which led the Daily Telegraph to speculate that ‘Lady Galloway would blossom out as a leading London hostess’. She did not. Lord Galloway found that he preferred being on his estate, for which he now felt a great responsibility. Although Lady Galloway had chosen to have her baby in London, soon after Randolph’s birth they travelled back to Scotland.

Cumloden is situated in the county of Kirkcudbrightshire in the south-west, close to the towns of Newton Stewart and Minnigaff. It was not a stately home, but a converted hunting lodge, orginally built in 1821 by Sir William Stewart. The family’s main seat had been the grand and imposing Galloway House, also in the south west, but that had been sold off in 1908 due to the family’s dwindling funds. Cumloden was a low white house with black timbers, not remotely grand or imposing. At the front, there was a porch with a verandah, framed by trees, rhododendrons, laurels, box hedges and azaleas. Inside, to the right of the entrance hall, a couple of steps led off to the billiards room and the main telephone room.

Along the south-west front of the house were Lady Galloway’s sitting room; Lord Galloway’s study; a bedroom called the Orange Room for important family guests; a little store room; and the drawing room, off of which was an ante-room leading to a conservatory always filled with flowers. Double doors led from the drawing room into the dining room, outside which was a hall leading to the bedroom of the head housemaid, and underneath was the wine cellar. A flight of stairs led off to the north wing where Lord and Lady Galloway had adjoining bedrooms (Lady Galloway’s room had a spectacular view). The dowager countess also slept in a pretty room in the north wing, despite it being considered the coldest room in the house. Across the passage was a bathroom and a set of box rooms where Lord and Lady Galloway stored their much-used travel bags. From here another flight of stairs led up to the bedrooms used by the gaggle of old Stewart aunts and American relatives whenever they visited. These rooms also ran along the south-west front of the house and were called South Room (with appropriately facing dressing room), Balcony Room, Blue Room, and Roof Room. The layout continued in this manner – a series of rambling wings connected by a rabbit warren of corridors and narrow staircases. The focal point of it all, close to the entrance hall, was the grand and central spiral staircase.

The beauty of the estate, however, lay not in the house, however comfortable the interior, but in the lands, which stretched beyond the eye could see and included a deer park that Randolph would grow to love. To the west was Kirkland, the nearest farm, and further beyond, up the Wood O’Cree Road, looking over the River Cree, sat All Saints’, Challoch, the family’s church and burial yard.

On inheriting all this Lord Galloway grew further into his new role and began applying himself to a myriad of public duties. He became justice of the peace for Kirkcudbrightshire and in 1932, four years after Randolph’s birth, he was appointed Lord Lieutenant of the Stewartry of Kirkcudbright. This role lasted until 1975 and involved lunches with Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip, from whom – in terms of old-school austerity and iron backbone – he was not dissimilar. The same year as Lord Galloway began representing the Queen, he also embraced masonic life. He was initiated into Lodge St Ninian, No. 499, and became Right Worshipful Master when he took office in Grand Lodge as Junior Grand Deacon. (In 1945, he would become Grand Master Mason.)

Unsurprisingly Lord Galloway’s responsibilities and his extensive travelling dictated the rhythm of the household. Randolph’s early years were typical of a post-war childhood in a big house, at one turn privileged, at another, by today’s standards, emotionally lacking. It would have been quite unthinkable by the standards of his class for Lord Galloway to make his many trips abroad without his wife. As a result Randolph spent much of his time with a succession of nannies, nurses, and governesses. The year was divided into time spent at Cumloden; a large house in Sandridgebury, near St Albans, where Lady Galloway had grown up following her father’s death – a fine residence with butlers and footmen, chauffeurs for the two Rolls-Royces, cooks, general maids, and scullery maids; and London. The London trip occurred in late January, usually when Lord and Lady Galloway were abroad, and the children would travel up with the nannies to stay at 39 Lowndes Street, where they would remain until just before Easter. The children adored these trips. In the cold London air the nannies would walk them round Kensington Gardens and Hyde Park, where they would stand, eyes wide with delight, before Peter Pan’s statue. Occasionally they would go to Bryanston Square, where Randolph had been born, and curl up with Nana, their mother’s old nurse.

Just before Easter the children would be brought back to Cumloden where they would remain until July. The nursery toy box overflowed. There were puppets, clockwork cows, and the ‘bunny express’, an engine in lapine form that sounded a bell as it chuffed around the track. There was a toy cinema, countless picture books, and annuals – a favourite being the series of adventures of the Peek-A-Boos. Lady Antonia had a large and intricate doll’s house, which in fine weather was moved into the play hut in the grounds of the house, and Randolph had three sets of trains with tracks, two containing green engines with chocolate and cream coloured coaches with multi-coloured roofs. The puppet theatre was a favourite. If Lord and Lady Galloway were in residence, the countess would make sure all adults attended performances, including the sombre dowager. Often Lady Galloway would go behind the puppet stand herself. There were picnics in the surrounding beauty spots, which brought the children much joy, but not always the adults, particularly the dowager. The sun annoyed her, any wind drove her frantic, and in the rain she would sit alone in the Rolls complaining of her misery and wishing she was by the drawing room fire.

Come July the children would transfer to Sandridgebury where they would stay until October. During these months Cumloden would be let out to rich holidaymakers and Lord and Lady Galloway would travel to Europe or beyond, announcing their departure in the broadsheets. The trip south was a complicated operation involving much luggage. At 8.30 a.m. on the dot Mr McGowan would arrive in the Rolls ready to drive the nannies and their charges to Dumfries station, the starting point of their long journey south. The nannies would then shepherd the children into the car while Mr McGowan struggled with the numerous trunks, hat boxes, Gladstone bags, books tied with string, attaché cases, and luncheon boxes, as well as the portable wireless and gramophone. At Sandridgebury they would be met by another Rolls, driven by Hubert French, and in the back seat sat a delighted Mrs Percival Griffiths. Mr Griffiths was equally pleased by their presence in his large house, and often liked to take them to Whipsnade Zoo in the Rolls, although he would get cross if they made a noise during his afternoon nap.

All things considered, with old great aunts pressing upon him as many Fuller’s peppermints as they could manage, Randolph thought himself happy at Sandridgebury. It was one long blissful summer of hide and seek, sardines, netball, rounders, tennis, croquet, and golf. And in October, on his birthday, there would always be a party during which his great aunt would stamp about the hall, much to the children’s delight, shouting ‘Do you know the Muffin Man, the Muffin Man, the Muffin Man? Do you know the Muffin Man who lives in Drury Lane?’

And so this was the cycle of Randolph’s early life, spent largely in the bosom of extended family and in the care of familiar, loyal servants who were always on hand to ensure the smooth running of the houses. Cumloden had a large staff, most of whom lived on the estate with their families, so that as Randolph’s anxieties began to take hold, and he became prone to wandering the grounds alone, these familiar, weather-beaten faces seemed part of his world even though they came from a quite different one. Mr Curry, for instance, who tended the grounds, tidied the woodland paths, cut the wood, and ensured the house remained heated, lived with his wife in a cottage in the deer park. Mr Malcolm Scott, the head gamekeeper, lived with his wife and daughter, Monica, at Cumloden Lodge, which sat at the south entrance (Monica was responsible for opening the gatehouse gate and waving in the Rolls). It was often the case that the house employed several members of the same family. The succession of cooks – Mrs Robertson, Mrs Cockie, Mrs Partridge, Mrs Bain, Mrs Clark, and Mrs McNabb – and the roll call of butlers – Mr Leashman, Mr Campbell, Mr Hopkins, Mr Sparks, and Mr Wright – tended to arrive alone, but the coachman’s daughter, for example, was head housemaid and parlourmaid. Randolph’s favourite servant beyond all others, the one he continues to talk of in adulthood, was Nan Dalrymple, the laundry maid and wife of the station hand at Newton Stewart railway station. Often he would seek her out in the laundry room and she would embrace him with vigour – an unfamiliar but very pleasant sensation.

Randolph and Lady Antonia were initially educated at home. They were woken at 7 a.m. by the school-room maid with a glass of hot water ‘that tasted awful’, as Randolph remembered later, and in the afternoon, after lessons, they rested for an hour before being taken for a walk around the grounds by their governess. There was rarely a shortage of company though. Children of family friends were always being invited over for parties and on Tuesdays in spring, after their return to Cumloden, the portable gramophone and a box full of records, including selections of Irish and Scottish country dances, would be carried down from the school-room and set up in the billiard room where Miss Border, the dancing instructress, would hold classes for them and their friends. But Randolph’s fear of his father slowly began to overshadow all. His ‘personality problems’ began early, long before he left Cumloden for Belhaven Hill, one of the most fashionable Scottish preparatory schools at that time. He cried when he left Cumloden for Sandridgebury and he cried when he left Sandridgebury for Cumloden. He was often making a scene, ‘either public or private or both’, he recalls. This irritated and angered Lord Galloway, who expected his son to behave with dignity, composure, and formality. It did not help that Randolph was a slight, sickly child. Whenever he contracted a cold or the flu, the school-room was turned into a sick bay.

Years later, when he was an adult, Randolph wrote of a puppet show that his mother had performed for him during his childhood. She named it ‘The Child in the Bath’, and in tone it chimes rather tragically with the feelings Lord and Lady Galloway would come to have regarding their own son. In the show the mother puppet placed her infant child in the bath and left the stage. While she was gone, ‘the Black Witch, an evil woman’ entered and snatched the baby. ‘No happy endings,’ wrote Randolph, ‘for both parents were so upset, they had no idea of the visitation of such a demonic and odious prowling spirit.’

For all the joyful innocence of the nursery, the picnics and the toys and the parties, Cumloden remained a formal household. Lord Galloway believed in the same values as his own father and his approach to child rearing was rigid and unbending. It was not an atmosphere suited to an increasingly odd and eccentric little boy. In 1935, for example, Randolph threw a tantrum at the news that a newly appointed governess would shortly be arriving in the schoolroom. Poor Miss Daisy Cook, who appeared armed with milk of magnesia and syrup of figs. ‘Tears of wretched despair … and dejected despondency adorned my face in the schoolroom, when writing Christmas letters of thanks,’ Randolph recorded. ‘Miss Daisy Cook was not amused by my attitude.’

Randolph was not a good student and when he did badly, he would sob or scream, which would have Miss Cook shouting back at him to bring himself under control. Other staff began to notice his oddities. On one occasion, following a telling off by the dowager countess, he displayed more peculiarity, fussing about and breaking wind (a habit that he never thought to control). ‘I was swiftly removed by Mother to the schoolroom,’ he wrote, ‘wherein I became aggressive and threatened Winnifred [school-room servant] on her approach.’ Mr Leashman, the butler, witnessed the incident and was ‘deeply shocked’. But Randolph did not apologise for his behaviour. He broke wind again, which had the effect of ‘bringing a dark frown to the butler’s face’.

Randolph’s eccentric behaviour was not confined to Cumloden. Reports would often drift back from outings with other children, and events would often occur at house parties that confirmed he was unlike the other boys. During one house party in June 1934, the housekeeper took the children to the coast of North Berwick (not far from where Lily lived). Randolph ran away and everybody got soaked in the rain while they looked for him. During one stay at Sandridgebury, the children were taken to a private tea party by their aunt. Randolph had promised to behave, but once there he found it impossible to rise to the challenge. He muddled up the names of all the guests – understandable in an eight-year-old child – but then went on to insult the host, Mr Parr, by telling him that his study smelt of rats and tobacco. ‘It may smell of tobacco, Garlies,’ said the surprised Mr Parr, ‘but it does not smell of rats!’ To which Randolph had rudely retorted, ‘Yes, it smells of tobacco and rats, and is the smelliest house I have ever been in!’ Throughout the rest of the tea, Randolph continued to break wind, which had his aunt slowly dying of shame. Back at Sandridgebury she told him that never in her life had she been so mortified. ‘Signorita’, who helped with the children when they stayed, told him wisely, ‘If you do this at school, teacher will come and put you in the lavatory!’

These minor acts of bad behaviour only make sense in retrospect. At the time the puzzled Lord and Lady Galloway consoled themselves that their son would change with age. What he needed was to grow and toughen up. What he needed was the discipline of prep school. There he was sure to metamorphosise from cry-baby into a proper boy possessed of a dignity befitting his title, and a spirit strong enough for the future challenges of Harrow School. In the summer of 1937, before Randolph was due to start at Belhaven Hill School in Dunbar, the headmaster, Mr Brian Simms, came to Cumloden for lunch. Randolph was petrified and thought him horrid. He did not like the way he ‘fixed [him] with a cold and hard eye across the dining table’.

That September Randolph left Sandridgebury with his mother and father. They were met at St Pancras station by the dowager countess and together they travelled to King’s Cross in order to catch the train back to Scotland. Randolph’s behaviour during the journey was not encouraging. When a locomotive blew its steam, he began screaming. Lady Galloway became angry and told him to stop being so babyish. Once on board the train his behaviour changed completely and he became jolly, babbling a list of nonsensical words that his mother sweetly wrote down on some notepaper for him. They spent the night of the twenty-eighth in the North British Hotel in Edinburgh (to become the Balmoral). Randolph was ‘as potty as ever, making the craziest of noises’, and smelling and blowing his sweet wrappers. The following day they travelled to Dunbar where Lord and Lady Galloway delivered Randolph to Belhaven for the beginning of Michaelmas Term. As they disappeared down the drive, he stood watching them from the front porch. For the first time in his life, he was alone, about to begin a new phase of his life under ‘the iron rule of Mr Brian Sims [sic]’.

4 Tea or coffee, ma’am?

‘I hated it.’ This was Lily’s verdict on her new life of subservience. The first time she stood before a mirror dressed in her afternoon uniform, a black alpaca dress with muslin apron, starched cuffs, and cap, she felt a surge of disgust. She wanted to rip the dress from her back and throw it on the fire. ‘I will not be a poor little servant girl! I will not!’ Less than four years had passed since Alice Brockie had made her passionate playground declaration. Alice was now doing well at Berwickshire High, well on her way to escape. The same could not be said for Lily.

The household Sis found for her was on the other side of Duns. It was a large square, double-fronted home with steps leading up to a porch, on either side of which stood two mock Roman pillars. The ostentation was ominous. Her new employers (Lily refused to speak of them by name, referring to them only as ‘they’) were middle-class professionals, and her mistress, Lily soon saw, liked to maintain a lavish shop front when perhaps stocks were not as high as they might have been. ‘There always seemed to be so much silver on the table, but to me very little food,’ Lily wrote. That first day she was led up the back stairs to a tiny maid’s room. The floor was bare and the bed coffin-like in its dimensions, topped with a lumpy flock mattress. Companionship presented itself in the form of a ferocious-looking old cook and a whiskery gardener. Her duties consisted of all that could not be cooked or weeded. She was to clean, tidy, clear the grates, and manage the laundry. All cleaning had to be completed by the time her mistress rose for breakfast, which meant beginning at 5 a.m., and certain rooms were forbidden her, except if she had work to do. She had to keep to the back staircase, and never use the main. She could not wear rouge or have boys loitering about, although this was not such a hardship – she was only fourteen.