Late one September morning a small boat holding a party of 16 adults and nine children slipped quietly out of Loch Fyne and headed out to sea and into the Sound of Bute. It approached a battleship; the party boarded. The gathering was for the christening of Lady Charlotte Campbell, the daughter of the Duke of Argyll, Hereditary Admiral of the Western Isles and Hereditary Master of the Royal Household of Scotland. The bridge was, suitably, the bridge of a 'duke' class frigate of the Royal Navy, HMS Argyll. And the godparents, two suitably grand Scotsmen, Lord Dalmeny and the Earl of Hopetoun. One would almost have expected Lord Darnley and Mary, Queen of Scots to have trotted onto the scene dancing a volta, except this was only a few months ago, and the Duchess – Eleanor – was slightly overtired from having finished unpacking an entire castle in time.
The so-called ‘Dirty Duchess’ made headlines in the 1960s, when her ex-husband claimed she had slept with 80 men during their marriage, including three members of the Royal Family
‘I unpacked the last box literally as the first guest arrived,’ she says plonking herself down in a drawing room at Inveraray, the 80-room fairytale castle she shares with her husband, Torquhil, the 13th Duke of Argyll. She is tall and striking and has a bouncy, deep, plummy voice. He is slight and fine-featured (he's 41; she's 36), the youngest of the 24 British Dukes and captain of the Scottish elephant polo team. It is no mean feat to rewire, replumb, redecorate and heat a castle which was started in 1745 and took 60 years to complete. ‘My parents had a fire in 1975, the roof burnt off, and there was a lot of damage,’ says Torquhil. ‘They put it back together but it was so expensive they didn't get the opportunity to put the frills on. One of them was central heating.' Two kitchens, 12 bathrooms and 109 radiators later, the Argylls have just had their first Christmas with heating, broadband and Sky TV.
And what a place to spend Christmas. Though Robbie Burns had a point: 'Whoe'er he be that sojourns here/I pity much his case, Unless he comes to wait upon/The Lord their God, His Grace/There's naething here but Highland pride/And Highland scab and hunger/If Providence has sent me here/'Twas surely in his anger.' It's a rugged area which really is all about His Grace's castle at Inveraray – an A-list stately. In the Armoury Hall one wanders past the skullcap that Torquhil's great-great-great-great-great-great-great great-great-grandfather wore for his post-Restoration execution. It's got a dose of royal magic: the 9th Duke's duchess was Princess Louise, one of Queen Victoria's daughters. And it's got a whiff of fabulous 20th-century sex scandal: it was once the home of Margaret, Duchess of Argyll, whose four-year divorce case scandalised the country in the Sixties. She went from most famous deb of her era – an era when debs were the supermodels of the day – to infamous nymphomaniac. There was the 'Headless Man' Polaroid evidence. There was the list of 88 men with whom the 11th Duke claimed she'd had affairs (Hollywood stars, three members of the royal family, and two government ministers). There were revelations of aristocratic sex games. She of course went on to be a Tatler columnist.
'I grew up in a little house in South Ken, continues the 21st-century duchess, Eleanor, formerly Cadbury (her parents are Peter and Sally, Joel et al are his first cousins), says of life before Inveraray. They married in 2002 at her local church in Gloucestershire – he proposed on top of Table Mountain, Cape Town – after about 13 years of on-off dating ('very on-off,’ she chuckles). Before getting married she was a PR for Fujifilms. 'I launched digital cameras in Britain,' she laughs. She went to Downe House, then Durham, while he was at Glenalmond, followed by Cirencester. They were introduced by his sister, Louise.
‘I found getting used to the lack of privacy tough.’ She's talking about the 80,000 visitors they get a year, which is quite a lot of people to have hoofing around one's home by anyone's standards. The castle is built around a central hall, the public and private apartments overlapping; the Duke and Duchess are quite visible to the tourists. 'This isn't a museum,’ points out Torquhil. 'This is our house. There are pictures of the family around, you can hear the children (Archie, aka the Marquess of Lorne, five, Rory, three, and now of course Charlotte, one) screaming. People actually really appreciate and enjoy the fact they can see us. "Oh look, there's the Duke! There's the Duchess." Although she gets mobbed a lot more than I do,' he smiles.
They're now quite used to being mobbed, these Argylls. In 2007 and 2008, 20,000 revellers a day descended on the 55,000-acre estate for a music festival, the three-day Hydro Connect, dubbed 'Middleclasstonbury’ by the Mail on Sunday and organised by the same crew as T in the Park. While Torquhil travels the world as a brand ambassador for Chivas Regal, the wine and spirits company, and while much of the year is spent in Brook Green, West London, the family business is, and always will be, Inveraray. ‘They came to us wanting to do a boutique festival that would attract a slightly older age group – 25 to 35 – with a bit more disposable income,' says the Duke. ‘The beer tents sold better-quality beer, there was a whisky tent. It was stylish.’
‘It was stunning,’ agrees Eleanor. ‘We had three stages, one down by the river with the castle as its backdrop. Instead of greasy fish and chips, we had oysters, local beef and lamb. The county of Argyll is particularly famous for its food. We have a food fair here at Inveraray too [the Loch Fyne Food Fair].’
The music festival may have been credit crunched but the Argylls haven't had a year off: 2009 was designated 'the Year of Homecoming' by the Scottish Executive (hatched to get the Scottish diaspora from across the world back to visit – and spend), which culminated in a mega clan gathering at Holyrood Park, Edinburgh, in July. Torquhil and Eleanor are the Brangelina of the clan world (the Duke of Argyll is 'MacCailein Mor,' the Chief of Clan Campbell) and on the first day 38,000 people turned up to see their Graces on show in the Campbell tent. 'I wouldn't say mobbed…’ trails off Torquhil, ‘but one could say a lot of people knew who we were. It was impressive to see how much to heart people take their Scottishness. It's really important to them. I think we tend to forget about it as a nation, but to a lot of “foreigners” it's very important.’
After the clan gathering, it was back to life on the West Coast. Holidays are spent on Tiree, a small island off Mull, and part of the Argyll's estate. 'It's got beautiful, white sandy beaches that go for miles. It gets the most recorded sunshine in the United Kingdom. Though my wife doesn't believe me.' Torquhil's been going there for the family holiday every summer of his life and paints an idyllic picture of their holiday haven. 'Yes,’ agrees Eleanor, 'it is a lovely. It is very sunny. But it's not the Caribbean, is it?'
This article was first published in the December 2009 issue of Tatler
