The Dukes (59 page)

Back in London, Menzies again wrote to Farquhar on 22nd June, 1798, "He seems lost in thought and speaks to himself. He is subject to incoherency and false judgements and is even at times violent. One day he was allowed to walk out, but he was so desirous of making his escape that he applied to persons whom he met to rescue him. About eight days ago he fairly got over the garden wall and over the wall of another small enclosure, tho' pursued by the servant who got hold of him in the fields. He is at times so absent that he seems ill pleased at having the train of his thoughts interrupted by a question . . . one day recently he was convinced that he was then confined and punished for a mutiny he had been guilty of in Lisbon, and two days afterwards he wished to work for his bread and blamed the Duke of Atholl for allowing his son to be reduced to these cir­cumstances. The work he wished for was to dig with a spade. When opposed in anything he eagerly wishes he will not hesitate to strike any person. . . . About ten days ago the person who attends him gave him a knife to eat his dinner, which I had seldom ventured to do. He started up from the table suddenly with the knife in his hand, and attacked the man who was obliged to defend himself with a chair."
²¹

By the same date, Menzies wrote to the Duke and referred to his son's "indisposition".

The boy never recovered his senses. He became 5th Duke of Atholl in 1830, but it is doubtful whether he ever knew it. He was by that time in a padded room in St John's Wood, where there were no windows for him to break, and the tiny household of two male and one female servant kept him out of harm's way,
²²
while family affairs were run by his younger brother, Lord Glenlyon. The Duke died unnoticed in 1846, and was succeeded by his nephew. The wife of the 6th Duke was a close friend of Queen Victoria, and was chiefly remarkable for having travelled in a most unconventional way, in a boat-carriage, a kind of boat with wheels. Her son "Bardie" (a diminutive of Tullibardine) was the most notable Murray for some generations. The 8th Duke of Atholl (1871-1942), as he later became, was a military man. He fought at the Battle of Khartoum, and in the Boer War, always mentioned in despatches. He was decorated twice, with the D.S.O. and the M.V.O., and rose to the rank of brigadier-general. During World War II, when he was seventy years old, he joined the Home Guard, and took turns as sentry officer on duty in Whitehall. Between the wars, Bardie was involved in less laudable exploits. He was full of entrepreneurial ideas which seldom worked. One of them landed him in a court of law. The Duke hit upon the idea of selling cancelled sweepstake tickets at ten shillings a time without disclosing which charities the proceeds would benefit. It was called "The Duke of Atholl's Fund", and privately he referred to it as "my bit of fun".
²³
The law did not find it funny; it arrested him for fraud and placed him on trial. The whole episode was simply a well-intentioned venture which misfired because the promoter lacked experience.
Truth
commented: "It is perhaps doubtful whether it is discreet of the Duke to talk about thickheadedness."
²⁴

Bardie's wife outshone him in fame. Katherine Ramsay, Duchess of Atholl (1874-1960), was a most remarkable woman, with so many achievements to her credit that it is difficult to know where to start. Called "The Begum of Blair" by the House of Commons, she exer­cised considerable influence in her day, owing to the fearless courage with which she expressed unpopular opinions, and to the prominence she achieved in public life, in spite of her sex and in spite of her title.

It may seem a paradox that the title of Duchess could prove a hindrance to one's career, but in Katherine Ramsay's case it certainly was. At a time when Duchesses were expected to glitter in comfortable vacuity, Katherine plunged into a professional career, an unheard-of vulgarity. She was nurse, musician, and eventually Member of Parliament. The only contemporary Duchess who scorned the con­ventions in this way, refusing to sit behind a tea-pot all her life, was the "Flying" Duchess of Bedford. The two ladies had much in common.

Katherine Ramsay was the daughter of the 10th Baronet of Banff, who had made the first ascent of Mont Blanc. After an education at Wimbledon High School for Girls, she won a scholarship to the Royal College of Music, which carried a fair amount of money with it. Katherine had no need of the money, so she gave it to an impecunious coloured student, whose career thereby flourished. His name was Coleridge Taylor.

In due time, of course, Katherine had to take her place, somewhat ruefully, in society. The tedium of weekends in the country, when she was introduced to one eldest son after another, and was required to manufacture stiff-backed small talk, almost too small to be visible, was anathema to her. She took a book of Beethoven quartets to occupy her mind while the other ladies exchanged platitudes. Or she would go for a ride on her bicycle. This was still the nineteenth century, and ladies did not ride bicycles.

Katherine Ramsay met the dashing "Bardie" in the closing months of the century, and married him in 1899. At Blair Castle, she was carried over the threshold, according to ancient family tradition, by the two oldest tenants on the estate.

Bardie cannot have known the extent to which Katherine's unconventionality would reach. Within a few years, she had devoted herself to a work of remarkable historical research, remarkable because it would normally engage the attentions of a man knee-deep in archive administration, a
Military History of the County of Perthshire from 1660 to 1902.
Her intellect could no longer be written off, and her rank could happily be ignored. From now on, the new Duchess of Atholl was taken very seriously. She was invited to sit upon various committees, her experience and erudition were valued, her hospital work at Blair during the Great War firmly appreciated. In 1918 she was created a Dame of the British Empire.

Even so, there were many in the country who were unaware of the singular qualities of the Duchess of Atholl. This was remedied in 1923 when she took the unprecedented step for a person of her rank, let alone a woman, and stood for Parliament. She was elected as Member of Parliament for West Perth by 150 votes, and made her maiden speech on her third day in the House. It was such an impressive performance that Lady Astor, Lloyd George, and Austen Chamber­lain all crossed the floor of the House to congratulate her. The Duchess was launched upon a political career which would occupy her for the next quarter of a century, make her one of the first women to hold ministerial office in any government, and in some ways to make the name of Atholl notorious throughout the land.

The Duchess held manifold posts. She began as Parliamentary Secretary to the Board of Education, and was a substitute delegate to the League of Nations. Committee work followed, lectures, books. She wrote on political matters about which she felt deeply; the Duchess was no dilettante. She nursed an abiding hatred of all totalitarian regimes, of whatever colour, and threw herself into the cause of the oppressed with complete disregard as to whether such a cause was currently fashionable. One of her books,
Out of the Deep,
drew attention to the plight of Germans in Russia, who were starving as a result of eviction from their homes.
The Conscription of a People
dealt with Soviet Labour Laws and the labour camps.
Women and Politics
was more general.

The turning-point came with the eruption of the Spanish Civil War. All should have realised by now that the Duchess was a woman of uncompromising principle, but some professed to be shocked when she openly embraced the cause of the Republicans, and wrote to Prime Minister Chamberlain suggesting that the Spanish Republicans should be helped with arms to defend themselves. She thought the British Government morally weakened by the non-intervention policy, which was a tacit acquiescence in the crushing of the Spanish people. She told Chamberlain that the government ought to oppose all further aggression. His answer was to expel her from the govern­ment. A year later, after Munich, she was one of the handful of politicians who did not greet Chamberlain's capitulation with cheers. The first Conservative woman minister left the Tory party for good.

From now on, she was known as the "Red Duchess", because her support for the Spanish Republicans had identified her with the Communist cause. No one could have been more vociferous in her hatred of Communist oppression, but political reputations are made on shifting sands. She retired from public life, having devoted more energies to public work than any other duchess in our history. She held Honorary Doctorates at the universities of Oxford, Glasgow, Manchester, Durham, Columbia, Leeds, and MacGill. She was described as a "tiny, upright, hawk-like figure", and by that malicious snob Channon as "sour, sunken, and sallow". All who knew her agree that she was incapable of a mean thought, was utterly unselfish, kind and good, and was a total stranger to hypocrisy: rare qualities in political life. Her brother-in-law, Bardie's younger brother, became the 9th Duke of Atholl (1879-1957), and he appears to have succumbed to some of her powerful influence. He spoke nine languages fluently and, like the Duchess, identified readily with oppressed people. He was so shocked by the Yalta settlement that he converted his Edinburgh house into a Polish hostel, and spent his every weekend with the exiles, caring for them, apologising to them for the perfidy of politicians. He was no mean authority on Perthshire history. The Duke never married, which meant that almost all his titles and estates went to a distant kinsman, Mr Iain Murray, whose connection with the Atholl line had to be traced back 200 years over six generations to the 3rd Duke.

In 1957 Mr Iain Murray was twenty-six years old, living comfort­ably with his mother in a large house in St John's Wood, London. The press saw the romantic side of his inheritance, and depicted him as assistant manager of a printing works in Uxbridge, earning £20 a week and commuting by underground train from a poky flat. They wanted him to suddenly come aglow with his fifteen titles, as spectacu­lar lights warm over a bare Christmas tree.

The press did not mention that his family
owned
the printing works, which was subsidiary to much larger business concerns belonging to his mother. Neither did they mention that his mother was a daughter of Lord Cowdray, and that they had owned and lived at Blair Castle, the ancestral Atholl home, since 1932. Iain Murray's branch of the family had, in short, taken over long before he became 10th Duke of Atholl.

He is now chairman of Westminster Press, his mother's family firm, as well as being in charge of the Murray estate in Perthshire, covering 120,000 acres and employing over 100 people. There are twenty tenant farmers. The Duke attends the Lords regularly, speaking there on his own subject of forestry, upon which he is now expert. He is a man of friendly disposition, witty and well informed. His languid appearance belies the truth - he is in fact eternally busy and energetic. He has an old-fashioned habit, not common even in ducal circles these days, of changing for dinner, even if he dines alone. In one private corner of Blair Castle "Snape" the butler and his wife look after him, while the rest of the romantic white castle plays host to the public.

If the Duke does not marry, the title will pass to another very distant kinsman, already over seventy-five, and then to some Murrays who have been in South Africa for three generations, and are unlikely to want to leave. It seems possible, therefore, that, though Murrays will continue to live at Blair as they have done for 400 years, the Atholl title will disappear overseas.

The Duke has a curious distinction. He is the only man in the country who is permitted a private army. Queen Victoria and Prince Albert spent three weeks at Blair in 1844. So much did they enjoy the holiday that Her Majesty, perhaps mischievously, conferred upon the Duke and his heirs the unique right to summon an army, called the Atholl Highlanders. Enlistment is voluntary and unpaid. At the moment the army is about eighty strong, with twelve pipers and six drummers; they have their own uniform and parade twice a year. At Blair Castle there is an old visitors' book which records not only the
name, but the weight of each visitor.

* * *

While the Dukes of Argyll and Atholl have been indulging their oratory and enthusiasm, the House of Roxburghe has in the meantime progressed quietly, without fuss, producing a succession of pleasant men with a penchant for books, and one duke in particular who collected one of the best libraries ever. If they have been noticeable at all, it is because their line of descent is erratic and ridiculous, and genealogical experts have had from time to time to put their heads together to work out who should be the next duke in accordance with the instructions of the original patent, which cannot, to everyone's chagrin, be altered. It is necessary to give some attention to this descent, which has perplexed learned minds.

One has to start with the 1st Earl of Roxburghe, who died in
1650.
Had his son and heir, Harry Ker, lived, the earldom and subsequent dukedom would doubtless have progressed in more or less orderly manner. But Harry Ker predeceased his father after a night of heavy drinking, leaving none but females to carry the name, which would mean the end of the Roxburghe title after only one generation. To avoid this, the Earl obtained a
novodamus
of his honours, which meant that he could resign them to the Crown, and then redirect them to heirs of his choosing. He therefore ignored the regular heir of line, and nominated precisely how the title was to pass from one relation to another, according to his own desire and whim, in perpetuity. The Roxburghe honours still pass (as they must) according to the directions laid down in 1646, though it is by no means simple to follow them.