Dagmar
FIVE
Her Royal Highness Princess Dagmar of Moravia, despite her name, was a mousy, timid, little character. She had an apologetic, poignant manner, as if she were aware of always being disappointing, which I am sorry to say was usually true where we were concerned, because we all wanted to like her more than we did. You will probably not believe me, or put it down to excessive snobbery on my part, but the tiny Princess and her enormous mother, the Grand Duchess, were immensely impressive to us all in those dim and distant days. Nobody could believe more firmly than I in the miracle of constitutional monarchy, but the years of constant exposure in every branch of the media has inevitably resulted in a certain devaluation of Royal blood, as the public came to realise that for the most part these men and women, often pleasant, sometimes intelligent, occasionally physically attractive, are no more remarkable than any other person one might stand behind at the grocer’s or the bank. Only Her Majesty, by never being interviewed, by never revealing an opinion, has retained a genuine mystery. Of course, we the public love to conjecture what her response to something might be. ‘She must hate this,’ we say. Or ‘How pleased she will be about that.’ But we do not know and it is our own ignorance that fascinates us.
If you can imagine it, forty years ago, we had that fascination for virtually anyone with genuine Royal blood in their veins. I don’t just mean snobs. Everyone. Because we knew nothing, we wondered about everything and the glamour Royals brought into a social gathering is quite unparalleled today. No film star at the peak of her success can confer anything like the excitement of finding Princess Margaret among the dancers in a ballroom in the Fifties or Sixties. Or at a cocktail party, to walk in and discover a ducal cousin of the Queen chatting in the corner was to know that this was the place to be tonight. In my own youth, in 1961 to be exact, my school once bussed all the boys, plus thirty musical instruments, for a bumpy hour across Yorkshire so that we could solemnly stand on the grass verge at the side of the road and cheer the cars carrying the wedding party of the Duke of Kent from York Minster to the bride’s home at Hovingham. Six hundred boys, however many buses, a brass band specially rehearsed, all in order to watch some cars that did not stop nor even, as I remember, slow down. Perhaps the bride and groom did a little, at least my image of the young Duchess is in focus, but not the others. The band played, we waved and feverishly shouted our hip-hip-hoorays, the cavalcade shot past, blurred faces in Molyneux and Hartnell, and then they were gone. The whole thing took five minutes from start to finish, if that. Then we climbed back into the buses and returned to school.
So it was that even a member of a minor, deposed Royal house seemed to confer a favour on every invitation they accepted in those dead days, and Dagmar was no exception. Her dynasty, the Grand Ducal House of Moravia, was not in fact very ancient. It had been one of those invented families, installed by the Great Powers in different Balkan states as the Turkish Empire gradually disintegrated throughout the second half of the nineteenth century. During those years, German and Danish, and in some cases local, princes were pushed on to thrones in Romania and Bulgaria, in Montenegro and Serbia, in Albania and Greece. Just such a one was the mountainous and modest state of Moravia, which bordered on almost all of the above. The Turkish governor having finally retreated in early 1882, a minor princeling of the House of Ludinghausen-Anhalt-Zerbst was selected, largely on the basis of his being a godson of the then Prince of Wales. Whether or not his selection reflected the British Prince’s close friendship with the boy’s mother at the time of his birth I could not say, although Lord Salisbury was asked by Marlborough House, as a personal favour, to suggest Prince Ernst for the post, thereby signalling our government’s approval. Since the territory was not much larger than the estate of an English duke, and considerably less profitable, it was not thought that a kingly crown would be appropriate and at the Settlement of Klasko, in April 1883, the area was solemnly proclaimed a grand duchy.
It must be said that the wife of the new Grand Duke was not enthusiastic. Until then, she had been having quite a jolly time between their home in Vienna and a sporting estate in the Black Forest, and after two years she was still writing to a friend that she thought she lacked an important requirement for the job, namely the smallest desire to remain in Moravia, but the couple persevered with some success. Their new country’s good fortune was to be located at a sensitive crossroads of many of the trade routes. This ensured invitations to every Royal fete around the world, as well as cheering offers for their daughters’ hands in marriage, and before very long a Russian grand duchess, an Austrian archduchess and a princess of Borbon-Anjou had all begun life in the airless, cramped nurseries of the hideously uncomfortable palace in the capital of Olomouc, a building not much larger than the dean’s residence in the close at Salisbury and a lot less manageable to run.
Surprisingly, perhaps, Grand Ducal Moravia made it as far as the Jazz Age, but the forces of Stalin, coupled with a swelling resistance to the monarchist solution, proved the undoing of the dynasty. By 1947 it was over and the ex-reigning Moravian family had taken up residence in a five-storey house in Trevor Square, a pleasant enough location and very convenient for Harrods.
But even easy shopping could not revive the spirits of the defeated Grand Duke and in a matter of months he had given up the unequal struggle. It was at this point that his son, having assumed the grand ducal title, the last of his family to do so, and released perhaps by the demise of his august papa, made a spirited decision that would vastly diminish his chances of regaining the throne of his forebears and vastly increase his chances of living well in the interim. With the dignified, if pained, acceptance of his widowed mother, a princess of a cadet branch of the Hohenzollerns, he contracted to marry the only daughter of a businessman from Leeds, one Harold Swindley, who had made a fortune in self-catering, package holidays. In the following three years, two children had arrived to bless this most sensible of unions, the new, so-called Crown Prince Feodor and his sister, the Princess Dagmar.
But for us, and even more for our parents, the Fall of the House of Moravia was still pretty recent and even the elevation of Miss Marion Swindley could not dim the lustre of a genuine crown. Only twenty years had passed since their deposition when Dagmar arrived at our parties. Besides, the Communist regime that replaced them was not popular, the family was still on the guest list at Buckingham Palace and there was talk at the time of a restoration coming in Spain. In short, forty years ago the Royalist cause didn’t seem hopeless by any means.
The new Grand Duchess had delivered. The Swindley money may not have been particularly fragrant but, for the first years of the marriage at least, there was quite a lot of it. And she learned her part pretty well until, like every fervent convert, she was soon plus Catholique que le Pape. Admittedly, she was not by any standards a beauty but, as the Dowager Grand Duchess was once heard to sigh when watching her daughter-in-law stump across a drawing room looking like a Marine in training, ‘Oh, well. One can’t have everything,’ and nobody could say she was not impressive. Her size alone guaranteed that. Nor was she a fool, having inherited more from her (discreetly invisible) father than she might care to admit in terms of solid, common sense.
For all the bowing and ma’am’ing that still went on in those days, the Grand Duchess understood that no throne awaited her timid daughter in the post-war world. She also knew that she had not anticipated the drain on her capital made by a husband who wished to live en prince but did not intend to do a day’s work, nor earn a single penny. She was, at heart, a sound northern lass and well aware that no fortune can hope to survive when the expenses are limitless and the income nil, and she was anxious to see the girl settled as well as might be, before the gilt had quite gone off the gingerbread. So she decided that, even though British princesses by that stage never ‘came out’ in any normal way and only occasionally appeared at the parties of special friends, nevertheless Dagmar would participate fully in the whole year-long business. The girl would thereby build a position for herself in British Society and, with any luck, land one of its prizes. The Grand Duchess also accepted – unlike many, if not most, Royals – that she would have to put her hand in her pocket to achieve this. By 1968, when the Grand Duke had
