Mrs Zigzag: The Extraordinary Life of a Secret Agent's Wife (18 page)

The boxer John Conteh used to stay with Eddie and Betty and did a lot of his training at Shenley. Eddie remembers the time:

We trained Johnny Conteh down there. We took him from amateur to until he won the world championship. He loved apple pies and he used to eat them before the fights. Betty used to take them down there for him. Before the fight began we used to shout out ‘Apple Pie Johnny, Apple Pie Johnny.’ We used to buy ringside seats. At that time he was such a popular guy.

Betty continues the story:

He was on television after he won the world championship and gave an awful interview. He sat there almost motionless, and when asked ‘why do you box’, all he had to say was ‘for the money’. He was so nervous that was all they got out of him and I thought, ‘Oh, Jesus!’ Patrick Wymark was sitting there with me watching the interview, so I said to him, ‘When he comes back will you please give him a few lessons on what to say and what to do.’ Conteh was quite flattered because Pat at that time was number one on the television. Anyway, for about a week we rehearsed with him, and the next time he went on television he got rave reviews from us. John Conteh’s girlfriend in the days was a successful writer, and used to come to Shenley regularly as well, always arriving in her blue Rolls-Royce.

‘Everyone who came to Shenley wanted to meet Eddie’, says Betty. ‘I set up the health farm and Eddie organised the exercise.’ Lilian Verner-Bonds relates a story about one of Eddie’s exercise workouts:

The local pub called The Fisheries attracted a well-to-do clientele of executives, actors and racing drivers. The men would come to The Fisheries in the afternoon, normally have just a bit too much to drink, and then go on to Shenley. Because they were going home to their wives, Eddie would make them have a sauna and put them through their paces, exercising so that they would then go home okay. I remember one of the racing drivers telling me that a bunch of them had had too much to drink, and that they were going to do the sauna after their exercise workout. He said, ‘We were all in the gym, lying on the floor totally drunk, but we knew he would make us do some exercises. Unfortunately, we forgot that that day he was showing around a group of very influential people, and they came into the gym. Eddie said to the visitors, “Well, yes, these are my boys”, and Eddie said to us, “Get along boys, straight up the climbing bars”, which went up to the ceiling. We climbed painfully to the top with Eddie giving encouragement, and when we were at the top he said, “Okay boys, turn around now and hang from the bars.”’ The racing driver told me that every now and again there was a crash as one by one they fell down onto the floor and just lay there in a heap. ‘Eventually I was the only one still hanging on, so as not to let Eddie down. Eddie didn’t say a word as we continued to crash to the floor. Eventually he turned to his distinguished visitors, and just said to them, “Boys will be boys.” At that point, they left!’

A prominent member of the House of Lords was the subject of another of Eddie’s workouts:

He was really a fat and useless individual. He was a completely spoilt brat. He inherited his title when he was 21 along with a vast sum of money. One day he was lifting weights and Eddie said to him, ‘Come on ten more.’ Suddenly he stopped and said, ‘I hate you, I hate you, I hate you.’ ‘Good,’ Eddie said. ‘At least you can hate now. You couldn’t hate anyone when you came here.’

Mrs Verner-Bonds knew Eddie and Betty through many of their years at Shenley and after, and also had a lot to say about the relationship between them. ‘Betty was very strong,’ she says. ‘And Eddie always talked about her.’ Despite his affairs with other women, he always came back. ‘She was his rock. That was the sad thing for the women he went off with,’ Lilian says. ‘Eddie could never break that bond with Betty.’

Betty agrees. ‘Eddie always said, “Never resist temptation”.’ He never did. Verner-Bonds tells another story related to her by Betty:

Once when he was back at Shenley, Eddie woke up around 3 a.m. in a panic. ‘Bloody hell!’ he shouted, stumbling around in the darkness, trying to find his clothes. ‘I’ve got to get home! I’ve got to get home!’ At which point Betty sat up and gently said: ‘Eddie, you
are
bloody well home.’

Others have stories about Eddie’s time at Shenley. ‘On the occasion of my first visit I arrived at the impressive front entrance of Shenley, only to hear the most fearsome of noises from the roof of the mansion. It was on this roof I met Eddie strapped into a Vickers machine gun – firing at a sheet draped between two oak trees half a mile away.’ Told about anyone else, the story would stretch credulity – but not when it is told about Eddie.

It was during this period that Betty first became interested in the psychic world. It would have an influence on her later life, particularly after Eddie’s passing. And, the success that Betty was making of Shenley, along with Eddie’s intermittent but important input, led her to another of the major episodes in her life: Kilkea Castle.

10

M
Y HOME IS
MY
(I
RISH
)
CASTLE

F
ully aware of the success that Betty was making of Shenley, in 1971 the Irish government contacted her with a view to her taking on an ancient castle. She recalls:

I got a call from the Irish tourist board to ask me if I would take an interest in an old castle. They wanted a health farm to be built in Kildare, Ireland and wanted me to advise them on it. They already had Kilkea Castle in mind. We had lots of discussions and then I went over and met the man who was running the castle at the time, Doctor Bill Cade, to make arrangements to join him in partnership. He was an interesting man, in the travel business. He knew everybody in the business, which was great for the castle. I thought it sounded exciting, and I already had a lot of contact with Ireland because of our previous shipping business. I’d been friendly for many, many years with Kathleen Ryan who was a famous Irish actress. She was married to the most handsome surgeon. I often think about them, because Eddie fell in love with her, and I fell in love with her husband. We were good friends for years. I used to stay at her family home, Burton Hall, on the outskirts of Dublin.

Dr Cade was a good friend to have, except that he was keen about me and that made it very difficult. I did like him as well, he was an extremely handsome man, very tall, but it was awkward. Cade used to promote as well, and he used to do my entire itinerary. In the end I bought the castle. He sold his shares to me and I already had the rest, so I ended up owning the whole thing, and he stayed on in a consultancy capacity. I was the chairperson and managing director. There was a lot of jealousy because an English Protestant woman running such an organisation in Catholic Ireland was really quite something. Because of this, almost from the first day, the IRA was a problem.

Kilkea Castle is the oldest inhabited castle in Ireland. It was built in 1180 by Hugh de Lacy, chief governor of Ireland, for the warrior Walter de Riddlesford, eleven years after the Anglo-Norman invasion of the country. From 1244 Kilkea Castle was in the possession of the Fitzgeralds, one of the greatest Irish families, destined to produce the late President of the United States, John Fitzgerald Kennedy. Betty was introduced to a person connected to President Kennedy with a view to Kennedy’s wife coming over for the opening of the castle, but with security issues it became impractical.

The name Kilkea is a corruption of the Gaelic
Cill Caoide
, meaning St Caoide, who was a disciple of St Patrick. The castle was a place of refuge for the many centuries of Ireland’s bloody history. In the original tower is found a haunted room, where the 11th Earl of Kildare, the ‘Wizard Earl’, practised the ‘Black Arts’ in the sixteenth century. Betty adds: ‘We even had our own haunted rooms.’

When it first went on the market years and years before, the workmen were sent in to demolish parts of the castle. They went to this one particular area and started to smash the walls. As they opened a sealed room, there was a woman sitting in a chair and she disintegrated in the air. The story goes that when the Earl of Kildaire lived there, this was his lady. The Earl went out hunting and he came back and found that his estate manager had been sleeping with his wife. He had her bricked up in a room and left her there to die as punishment, and her ghost is still there now. No one ever used that room, it was locked up. There’s also another haunted room at the top of the castle. Things were always appearing there. I was told never to go up there. Naturally I was itching to get there. One day I gave in and went up. It was a little room right at the top at the back of the castle and it just had a bed in it. It didn’t make any great impact on me when I went into it. Apparently people over the years had kept an eye on it because all sorts of things had been found there, like excrement on the bed, dead birds, with no evidence of where it had come from – the room was kept permanently locked.

When Betty arrived to take charge, the castle was already in use as a hotel – old, interesting, but not very modern. Her experience with Shenley had taught her that to attract top guests and functions, the place had to be of a very high standard. This was far from the case. Even the tables in the dining room were still bare wood. But, there was a complication: the castle was a listed building, a building of historic interest and protected by the government. To shift a single stone required consent. Betty recalls:

I built a function hall for 350 people and 2,800ft
²
of health farm adjacent to the castle, and it was very hard to do because this was a listed building. You had to have special permission and you had to use special materials, complying with a great number of rules. At the beginning of all of this the inspectors were terrified that if I put a foot wrong the place would fall down. In the end, I altered the place a lot. They nearly died when I took down walls to build archways and new facilities. When I built the Function Hall it had to be built of the same stone as the castle, in keeping with its status as a listed building. I actually got coloured leaded windows to match the castle’s to put in the Function Hall, and they had to be the finest there was in Ireland. I also built another house called The River House, which had twenty rooms, to use as overflow when we had overseas visitors. One of these visitors was the American boxer Muhammad Ali, who stayed with us while he was there for a bout in Ireland. The boxers Frank Bruno
¹
and John Conteh also used to train there before their big bouts.

The health farm itself had separate facilities for men and women, built as a modern extension on the castle. I went to Germany for the basic equipment, and I did a tour all over the place: I went to France, Germany, Italy, America and Switzerland to get the latest in everything for the rest of the modernisation. It was, for a time, the only health club in the country.

Realising that the dining room was in many ways the heart of the experience for guests, Betty set about transforming it from what she describes as ‘a common cafe’ into an elegant dining experience, in keeping with the clientele she intended to attract. She had a special rug woven, incorporating the castle’s crest; she covered the walls with French grey rice paper, a special paper like linen, dark grey with overtones of red. She added beautiful silverware and stylish tablecloths, and had handsome new chairs made. Overhead were glittering chandeliers. She marvellously understates: ‘It was quite a transformation.’ The chairman of the H.J. Heinz Company and his family were very supportive and were regular visitors. They said to Betty that it had to be the most gracious dining room in the whole of Ireland. There was also a ballroom that got Betty’s special touch. There had been a sprung floor installed at some time in the past, but it was badly scratched, and the perimeter was a mass of cigarette burns: it was typical of the state that the castle had lapsed into.

In addition to massive refurbishment, she also added a new bar inside the castle, the Cavalier Bar, which was a very smart cocktail bar. For the local people, she built the Kitchen Bar. This was an entirely new experience for them and it met with universal approval. The first Christmas she was there she decided to do the same thing that she did at Shenley, which was to give everyone a Christmas present. There was over sixty staff, so it was quite a task. She arranged a special afternoon so that she could distribute the presents: the staff, who were absolutely gobsmacked, said they had never been treated so well before.

We sold souvenirs of the castle as well. I found lots of historical pictures of it and had them reproduced. I had biscuits made by biscuit manufacturers and I had souvenir tins made with a picture of the castle on the top and all the famous castles in Ireland all around the side.

Some improvements had unexpected consequences:

The Australian Ambassador, there for a conference, said he would like to look over the castle, so I showed him around. We had a beautiful ladies toilet, which was done out in French style. I took him in, for a joke, and I said, ‘Now this is for the ladies, really’, and afterwards he said to me, ‘You know, Mrs Chapman, I always judge a hotel by its toilet facilities.’ Who would have thought it!

The improvements were not limited to ‘downstairs’. All of the fifty or so rooms were renovated, and en suite bathrooms were installed. At the time, this was a rarity in Ireland, and was a rarity even in some London hotels of the time. Even so, of all the refurbishments and upgrades, Betty remarked: ‘1180
AD
was a pretty hard act to follow!’