IS EATON PLACE NO LONGER SACRED?

Simon Courtauld listens to the memories

of the daughter of Lord Curzon and former sister-in-law of Sir Oswald Mosley

`YES, I remember Balfour — he was a neighbour of ours, just round the corner in Carlton Gardens. My father remained friendly with him, in spite of everything.'

Lady Alexandra Metcalfe was talking about the Conservative prime minister (1902-05), who took Kitchener's side in a dispute with her father, Marquess Curzon, leading to his resignation as viceroy of India and who, in 1923, was largely respon- sible for blocking Curzon's appointment as prime minister in succession to Bonar Law. Of the 19 prime ministers during the 90 years of her life, Lady Alexandra can also remember meeting Asquith, Lloyd George, who made her father foreign sec- retary, and Churchill in his early years.

As I sat with Lady Alexandra in her first-floor flat in Eaton Place, I was almost open-mouthed as the names kept cropping up of people she has known. There was, of course, the Duke of Windsor (her hus- band, Major Edward 'Fruity' Metcalfe, was best man at the Windsor wedding in 1937); Prince George, Duke of Kent, with whom she was very friendly in her youth ('I taught him to drive'); Sir Oswald Mosley (her sister Cynthia was Mosley's first wife); Lord Mountbatten (`Dickie was best man at our wedding because the Prince of Wales was on tour at the time'); and the Dalai Lama, who has become a friend dur- ing the years that Lady Alexandra has worked for Save the Children.

No less fascinating are the houses in which she lived as a girl. Kedleston Hall, the magnificent Adam palace in Der- byshire, was the family seat, occupied for all but the last ten years of Curzon's life by his parson father. Alexandra's father in fact spent more time living at the Kedle- ston look-alike, Government House, Cal- cutta, which Lord Wellesley built at the beginning of the 19th century. (In a letter to the Times last week Lady Alexandra was defending the National Trust's manage- ment of Kedleston against charges of van- dalism made by her cousin, Lord Scarsdale, who lives there.) Then there was Hackwood Park, near Basingstoke, where Alexandra was brought up after her mother died and where, she recalls, the Belgian royal family came to stay during the first world war; Walmer Castle, while her father was Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports; Highcliffe Castle, near Bournemouth, and Montacute House, Somerset, which Curzon rented; number 1, Carlton House Terrace, their London residence, where Alexandra was born; and Cliveden, where she often stayed and which she called her second home. In addition, her father restored two huge mediaeval castles, Tattershall in Lin- colnshire and Bodiam in Sussex, and gave them to the nation; and he bought Lowther House, from Lord Lowther, for the Royal Geographical Society.

My name is George Nathaniel Curzon, I am a most superior person.

My cheeks are pink, my hair is sleek, I dine at Blenheim twice a week.

These lines, written by a fellow under- graduate during Curzon's Oxford days, came to mind while listening — over lunch of quails' eggs and cold chicken (also recalling one of Curzon's most famous lines, 'No gentleman has soup at lun- cheon') — to his youngest daughter's tales of her life and times. But if Lady Alexandra has inherited her father's superiority, it is endearingly unaffected. Her cheeks may no longer be pink, but her features are finely formed, and she was looking elegant in a lime-green dress with large white polka- dots. Her memory seemed clear, her mind alert and there was no trace of deafness. However, she dismissed my compliments.

`Holland is such a sensible country, allowing euthanasia. At ninety my marbles are gone and I'm losing my mind.' Quite untrue. Lady Alexandra had been horrified to learn, earlier in the day, of a friend who had been mugged in the street a few doors away. 'In Eaton Place?' she exclaimed. `When I was young and going to parties we used to walk in our tiaras through the squares — Berkeley, Grosvenor, Belgrave — which in those days were all privately owned.'

It must have been around this time that Lady Alexandra sold the christening pre- sent she had been given by her godmother, Queen Alexandra.

'It was a coronet clasp, with the Queen's initials, surrounded by rose diamonds,' she said. 'I was about eighteen and a bit hard up, and so I'm afraid I popped it.'

Born on 20 March, 1904, Alexandra was given the second name of Naldera, after the Indian hill village where she imagines she was conceived. The Curzons stayed there at weekends during the summer months, in an elaborately equipped tented camp, preferring it to Viceregal Lodge in Simla, a few miles down the valley.

For the sea passage to India at the end of 1904, a cow was taken on board to ensure that Alexandra would not be short of fresh milk on the voyage. She was two years too late to witness the famous Delhi Durbar, one of the great displays of British imperial might, to celebrate Edward VII's coronation. It was better known as Cur- zon's Durbar: the viceroy entered the arena seated on an elephant and for three hours took the salute as 35,000 British and Indian soldiers marched and trotted past.

Baba was the pet name which Alexandra soon acquired in India and which, to her irritation, has stayed with her. But she is happy to recall all her other associations with the subcontinent. Visitors to her flat climb the stairs past 19th-century prints of Calcutta and a cloth poster made for her by Tibetan children which marks her vice- presidency of the Save the Children Fund. Curzon is remembered by Indians today not so much for his potentially disastrous partition of Bengal, which was revoked after he left, as for his concern for their rights and heritage.

'I think my father was the viceroy of whom Indians have the fondest memories,' Lady Alexandra said. 'He founded the Ministry for the Restoration of Ancient Monuments, gave a lantern for the Taj Mahal and was responsible for the Victoria Memorial in Calcutta.' She gives an attrac- tive emphasis to the final vowels of 'Cal- cutta' and 'India', enunciating every word distinctly, sometimes with just the faintest trace of a transatlantic accent inherited from her American mother.

In the 1920s, Lady Alexandra recalls, she sometines sat next to Sir Edwin Lutyens at dinner in Delhi while he was building Viceroy's House. 'He would scrawl little drawings of his plans on the back of menus,' she said. 'But I'm afraid I never kept any.' On her many visits to India — the final one in 1988 — Lady Alexandra was treated with great deference by those Indians who could be persuaded that she was indeed the daughter of Lord Curzon. Rajiv Gandhi once made a point of pub- licly receiving her when he was accused of being hostile to Britain.

Lady Alexandra and Fruity Metcalfe spent the first year of their marriage living in Delhi and at Stirling Castle, Simla (where, years later, she was to be involved in housing Tibetan children and providing them with Marks & Spencer-made clothes and shoes). Fruity was an Irish cavalry offi- cer who had joined Skinner's Horse — 'he looked very dashing with a puggaree round his head,' Lady Alexandra remembers and then, in the early 1920s, the staff of the Prince of Wales (i/c horses and polo ponies), with whom he enjoyed several bachelor escapades in Canada and the Far East.

Lady Alexandra gives a sigh when I turn the conversation to the Windsors. It is a well-worn subject; but her diary — which has been circulated only among her family — provides some illuminating insights. She dreaded going to the wedding at the Château de Cande in the Loire valley. Of Mrs Simpson she wrote: 'I had forgotten how unattractive her voice was.' Though she found the Duke of Windsor still pos- sessed of enormous charm, 'he speaks through her mouth, he hears through her ears, and he sees through her eyes'. The Duke and his bride seemed 'so blind to the significance of it all . . .

Only seven English people attended; the Windsors' close friend Lord Brownlow decided not to go, fearing that his Lord Lieutenancy of Lincolnshire might be placed in jeopardy. Lady Alexandra, sitting next to Walter Monckton during the ser- vice, noticed that her husband was holding a prayer book given to the Duke on his tenth birthday and inscribed `To darling David, from his loving mother'. It was Monckton who effected a reunion between the Duke of Windsor and Met- calfe at the end of the war, after the Duke had abandoned his old friend in Paris, just before the fall of France, to go and join Wallis in Antibes. Metcalfe was also left without any money or transport, and had a difficult time getting back to England. `After twenty years I am through,' he wrote to his wife.

`I didn't want to see the Windsors again after that,' Lady Alexandra said. 'But after a time my husband said he wished to remain loyal. I naturally expected him to get a job at the court of Edward VIII something like Master of the Horse — but she would have vetoed it.' Lady Alexandra added, with impressively dignified under- statement, 'We were never great friends of Mrs Simpson.' In her review of Frances Donaldson's book on the Windsors, Anto- nia Fraser wrote, referring to Fruity Met- calfe, 'There's only one hero in this story' — a fine epitaph which Lady Alexandra understandably treasures.

Had her elder sister Cynthia (Cimmie) lived, Lady Alexandra believes, she might have been able to restrain Mosley from going politically over the top. Indeed she once threatened to put a notice in the Times dissociating herself from her hus- band's fascism. Alexandra went to one or two of Mosley's rallies, and briefly acquired the nickname of Baba Blackshirt. `No, of course I didn't wear the black- shirt; I wasn't politically aware at all,' she told me — perhaps a slightly disingenuous statement from the daughter of a foreign secretary. However, she did have the polit- ical nous, as well as the connections, to ask her friend Lord Halifax in 1941 to prevail upon Churchill to remove Mosley, when his health was deteriorating in prison, from Brixton to Holloway to be with his wife Diana. But this wasn't just the caring intervention of a well-placed friend and ex-sister-in-law.

`It wouldn't have done any good if he had died in jail and become a martyr,' Lady Alexandra told me coolly.

(Musing on what might have been, I recalled the one occasion that I had met Mosley, in the 1970s. He said that the Duke of Windsor had told him he intended to invite Hitler to England if he remained king. Mosley advised him to ask Goering instead, because he had a sense of humour.) After the war, and particularly since the death of her husband in 1959, Lady Alexandra's father's influence came once again to the fore. Before he became viceroy, Lord Curzon travelled extensively in Asia and wrote a major work on Persia. His daughter visited the Marsh Arabs of Iraq in the company of Wilfred Thesiger and trekked on a camel in the Hadramaut, following in Freya Stark's footsteps in the Yemen. She had also ridden a camel through parts of Morocco and Mauretania in 1938 with the Sacheverell Sitwells. 'I vividly remember when my camel tried to mount Sachie's,' Lady Alexandra said. 'It seemed especially funny because he was wearing a London suit.'

Lady Alexandra's association with Tibetan refugees and with the Dalai Lama recalls her father's fascination with that country, which for him represented the last chapter in the Great Game. It was 90 years ago, in the year of Alexandra's birth, that Francis Younghusband returned to Calcut- ta to tell Curzon of the failure of his mis- sion to Lhasa.

`There are more Chinese than Tibetans there these days,' Lady Alexandra said. `Tibetans are now so dispersed in other countries that the Dalai Lama — a won- derful man — has told me he will probably be the last to bear the title of Buddhist leader of his people. I'm afraid there won't be another Dalai Lama.' Nor shall we look upon the like of Lady Alexandra Metcalfe again.