Deborah Devonshire | The Spectator Columnists & Writers

In fine feather

The telephone rang and it was Mark Amory, literary editor of this magazine. You could have knocked me down with a feather when he asked me to review Beautiful Chickens. I said yes at once. I already had a copy of the book, given me by the staff at Heywood Hill as a Christmas present, so I knew the fun I was letting myself in for.The chickens are beautiful indeed. The Frizzle, for instance — a spoilt lady coming out of the hairdressers where they have forgotten to comb out her curls — is truly surreal. But not as surreal as what I overheard a woman telling a friend at the Reading Poultry Show many years ago, long before political correctness had been invented: ‘I put my little Japs in the bath’. She was staying in a hotel, so what the chambermaid must have thought I cannot imagine.

Deborah Devonshire

Death of a Post Office

They shut our Post Office yesterday. For the first time in living memory there is no early morning light in that end of the ancient cottage and the little shop that went with it. The stacks of newspapers and magazines with unlikely titles have disappeared overnight. No longer can a letter be weighed to go to the ends of the earth. No more the postmaster, with one elbow on the counter, turning the thick cardboard sheets with the bright-coloured stamps of all prices lurking between them, painstakingly adding them up to the right amount for a letter to Easter Island or Nizhny Novgorod. No more blue airmail stickers to speed the thing along like a migrating bird. The letter box remains, but what good is that without a stamp? It is a ghostly reminder that yet another service in another part of life is finished.

The full-blown country-house look

It is not given to many for their surname to be turned into an adjective immediately recognisable by a section of society. ‘Fowlerised’ meant a house transformed by John Fowler to his (and the owners’) taste.In spite of having known John for many years, I had little idea of the extent of his work and influence until I read this book. Dedicated to looking and learning, he dealt with all dates and styles of buildings through scholarship and his prodigious memory. He was born in 1906, a one-off in his family with artistic talents that took him to painting furniture for Peter Jones in 1934, earning £4 a week. He was refused a rise in wages so he and his colleagues downed brushes and set up on their own.They struggled on till 1938 when John joined Lady Colefax.

Diary - 22 September 2007

In the wake of my niece by marriage, Charlotte Mosley, queen of editors, I have done a few book signings lately in aid of The Mitfords: Letters Between Six Sisters. The reason for joining her is because I am a contributor to the book and am still alive, but alas my sisters are not. Charlotte is the only person who could have made this book. She has been part of the family since 1975, when she married Diana’s son Alexander, and has an enviable record as an editor with the best, shortest, sharpest, most accurate footnotes in the business. Who else would have waded through 12,000 letters to choose 600 covering 80 years? Who else could have been entrusted with intimate family relationships?Publishers sometimes think it is a Good Idea for an author to do a book signing to give the book a shove.

Jack the lad

‘Coming out’ had a different meaning in 1938 to what it has today. Nearly 70 years ago the London Season followed much the same pattern as it had before the first world war.For a small section of people there were three frantic months of entertainment. For 18-year-old girls and their young men friends there was a dance (and sometimes two) four nights a week, and often one in the country on a Friday night (not on Saturdays, because it was not seemly to dance into Sunday morning) from early May until the end of July. The bands, led by Ambrose, Carol Gibbons and, best of all, Harry Roy, played all night, every night for our pleasure.We took this strange state of affairs for granted; it was part of life to be enjoyed or endured according to temperament.

House-to- house battling

Of all the books on houses and gardens, inside and out, this one takes the cake. Nancy Lancaster was the possessor of those two attributes, difficult to describe but instantly recognisable, of style and charm. Together with her unstoppable energy and plenty of money, she made an indelible impression on one of England’s most envied assets just referred to as the country house. In her long life (she died aged 97 in 1994) she found herself in charge of houses of all sizes from palace to cottage. Her unerring instinct for beauty, originality and comfort resulted in perfection, whatever the scale. After she joined the firm of Colefax & Fowler, her influence spread beyond her own houses. Anyone who could afford it had the chance to mirror her taste.

Christmas at Chatworth

Not much was made of Christmas at Chatsworth in the 18th and 19th centuries. Diaries and letters hardly mention it. Prince Albert’s trees and decorations took a long time to reach Derbyshire and would have been wasted on the December air because there were no children here for nearly a hundred years. At the turn of the 20th century the grown-ups made up for this strange state of affairs at Christmas-time with homemade entertainment. The theatre in the house, which seats 250 people, was used every night and neighbours were roped in to take parts in the sketches between ambitious songs sung by Princess Daisy of Pless and other would-be opera stars among the guests. They moved in for the duration, so had lots of time for rehearsals.

Diary - 7 February 2004

One of the perks of being a director of a hotel is visiting and eating at the competition. The idea is to taste, look and learn. On this mission, and on the instructions of our chairman, the managing director of the Devonshire Arms Country House Hotel at Bolton Abbey in Yorkshire and I met for lunch in one of the most famous restaurants in London. The Devonshire Arms is the proud possessor of a Michelin star, so the managing director and his chef know a thing or two about the job. As I seldom go to London, it is an excitement to see what’s what in the fashionable world. I have known the chosen restaurant for many years, but I am so stuck in my ways that I was surprised by the changes I found since I last ate there.