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"In Tearing Haste: Letters Between Deborah Devonshire and Patrick Leigh Fermor"

In 1956, Deborah, Duchess of Devonshire, youngest of the six Mitford sisters, invited the writer and war hero Patrick Leigh Fermor to visit Lismore Castle, in Ireland. This halcyon stay sparked off a deep friendship and a lifelong exchange of highly entertaining letters.

There can rarely have been such contrasting styles: Debo, unashamed philistine and self-professed illiterate, darts from subject to subject, dashing off letters but hitting the nail on the head again and again without even looking, while Paddy, polyglot, widely-read prose virtuoso, replies in his characteristic fluent, polished manner.

Prose notwithstanding, they have much in common: enjoyment of life, youthful high spirits, generosity and lack of malice. There are glimpses of President Kennedy's inauguration, weekends at Sandringham, filming with Erroll Flynn and, above all, of life at Chatsworth, which Debo spent much of her life restoring, and of Kardamyli, the home that Paddy built in his beloved Greece.

And of course Deborah Devonshire died earlier this week.



RIP Debo.



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Deborah, or Debo as she was known to her friends, the Dowager Duchess of Devonshire, and the last surviving Mitford sister, has died aged 94. This announcement from the BBC news website. She was very much the last of Paddy’s friends from his younger days left alive. It is the end of an era.

Her son, the Duke of Devonshire, announced the death in a statement from Chatsworth House, her stately home.

The Mitford sisters fascinated – and sometimes scandalised – British society in the 1940s.

Unity was a friend of Hitler, Diana, the second wife of British fascist leader Sir Oswald Mosley, and Jessica a left-wing polemicist.

Deborah was more focused on her home life.

Nicknamed the “housewife duchess”, she made Chatsworth one of the most successful and profitable stately homes in England after marrying Andrew Cavendish in 1941.

But along with her siblings, during her lifetime she moved in the same circles as Sir Winston Churchill, John F Kennedy and Evelyn Waugh.

She also accompanied her sister Unity to tea with Hitler in 1937, was painted by Lucian Freud, and amassed a collection of Elvis Presley memorabilia.

The statement from her son said: “It is with great sadness that I have to inform you that Deborah, Dowager Duchess of Devonshire, has passed away peacefully this morning.”

It added that an announcement about funeral arrangements would be made shortly.

Born Deborah Vivien Freeman-Mitford on 31 March 1920, the duchess was the sixth daughter of the 2nd Baron Redesdale.

The Mitfords’ childhood at their family home in the Oxfordshire village of Swinbrook was immortalised in her sister Nancy’s novels, The Pursuit of Love and Love in a Cold Climate.

Her parents made a poor job of hiding their disappointment that Deborah had not been born a boy, leaving Thomas their only son.

The Mitfords’ father disapproved of educating girls, famously insisting that hockey would make their ankles fat, and Deborah spent her formative years skating and hunting.

Her sister Unity’s infatuation with Hitler saw the young Deborah invited to tea with the German dictator, although the visit made little impression on her.

“If you sat in a room with Churchill,” she later recalled, “you were aware of this tremendous charisma. Kennedy had it too. But Hitler didn’t – not to me anyway.”

At Chatsworth, the Duchess took on a major role in running the house and its garden, which have been used in a number of film and TV productions.

In July 2002, the duchess and her husband spoke out against the government’s proposed ban on fox hunting.

Made a dame in 1999, she became the Dowager Duchess of Devonshire in 2004 after her husband died and their son inherited his title.

She wrote a book about her life, Wait for Me!: Memoirs, which was published in 2010

Telegraph obituary...



Dowager Duchess of Devonshire - obituary

The Dowager Duchess of Devonshire was the devoted chatelaine of Chatsworth and the last of the Mitford sisters

The Dowager Duchess of Devonshire, who has died aged 94, was the youngest and last of the celebrated Mitford sisters, and the chatelaine of Chatsworth, the “Palace of the Peak” in Derbyshire, which from the 1950s onwards she made into both a glorious public spectacle and, really for the first time, a consummately stylish private home.
She was born Deborah Vivien Freeman-Mitford on March 31 1920, the sixth daughter of the eccentric 2nd Lord Redesdale, well-known to readers of Nancy Mitford’s novels as “Uncle Matthew”. “Debo” (as she was always known) was repeatedly assured throughout her childhood by her eldest sister Nancy that “everybody cried when you were born” on account of her being yet another girl.

Debo took refuge in quaintly odd pursuits. Another sister, Jessica (“Decca”) Mitford, described her spending “silent hours in the chicken house learning to do an exact imitation of the look of pained concentration that comes over a hen’s face when it is laying an egg, and each morning she methodically checked over and listed in a notebook the stillbirths reported in the vital statistics columns of The Times”.

As the youngest in a family of seven, Debo was constantly and mercilessly teased, despite the bellowing championship of her father. She was passionately fond of the country and country pursuits, and did not suffer from the brilliant, restless boredom so well-documented by her sisters. None of the girls was sent to school, as their father thought education for girls unnecessary; a succession of governesses was employed, one of whom, Miss Pratt, had her charges playing Racing Demon daily from 9am until lunchtime.

Rest here...

Telegraph obituary

Loved this book (my review is at https://www.goodreads.com/review/show... ). Letter writing is such fun. Something about the feel of crisp laid writing paper and permanent ink flowing from a fountain pen (biro just doesn't cut it).

Now where on earth do I find the time to digitise, decipher and arrange the plethora of various series of family letters that have been passed down my family to me?