Strange chap, James
Wentworth Day (1899-1983), by my standards at least (and I do not pretend
not to be odd myself). Certainly to be
admired as a prolific writer with a profound love of his country and his native region of East Anglia, he was an arch
traditionalist, an ardent countryman and a right wing Tory. His type is both profoundly old fashioned and
absolutely enduring. He had an interest
in the supernatural and was staunchly behind the Royal Family. Both these facets of character stood him in
good stead when he wrote a book about the family of the Queen Mother, snappily called The Queen Mother’s Family Story (first published 1967; revised
edition 1979).
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| James Wentworth-Day |
More than a mere
fawning filler filled volume on the Scottish antecedents of Lady Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon, the volume
offers a thoughtful, though selective, exploration of events concerning the
family of Glamis. He also interviewed several members of the Strathmore family, as detailed below. Some of his omissions are
peculiar, to my eyes. There is a good
chapter on the involvement of the Bowes-Lyon family supporting the Jacobites in
the rebellions of 1715 and 1745, for instance.
But strangely he does not mention the extraordinary story of the
murder of Lord Strathmore in 1728.
It was not because he despised lurid historical drama, since he lavishly
documented the melodramatic soap opera concerning Lady Mary Eleanor Bowes and her psychopathic lover Andrew Robinson. (Four entire chapters are devoted to this sad saga.)
Instances of Second Sight.
In my previous post
I mentioned a story about the early 18th century earl, John, 4th
Earl of Strathmore, who was told that his four sons would all be earls by a man
he met on the road. John stated that he
hoped they would not be, because the prediction necessarily meant that at least
three of his sons would die premature deaths.
And so it happened. Wentworth
Day’s book has a story which is strangely analagous to the previous
prognostication. Some time around 1907,
when the future Queen Elizabeth and her sister were playing on the road in the
village of Glamis, a gypsy or tinker woman told her fortune: ‘You shall be a queen and the mother of a
queen.’ A story about her siblings in
the same chapter suggests that abnormal insight was also demonstrated within
her own family. Fergus Bowes-Lyon had
been killed in the First World War and the next eldest brother, Michael, was
reported dead. Another brother, David,
insisted, despite the evidence that Michael was not dead and accurately
reported ‘seeing’ him convalesce in a large house somewhere, which eventually
proved to be true.
The meat of the matter,
as far as the folklore of Glamis is concerned, comes in Chapter 11 of the book,
which is entitled ‘The “Monster” of
Glamis’, and it deserves to be examined in detail. The chapter covers the broad spectrum of
myths:
The Household ‘Beardie’ Legend.
The author repeats
the fallacy that the ghost of the old knight seen in the 19th century
represents the 4th Earl of Crawford, when of course he died as a
relatively young man, even by medieval standards. Although Wentworth Day
summarises the written authorities such
as Lord Halifax about the legend, he also gives the established view of the
Glamis household. So, he gives the tour
guide type summary of the tale given to him by Timothy Patrick, 16th Earl of Strathmore. The earl showed the author an uninhabited
room in a tower, replete with trap door.
This version says that the Lord Glamis of the day threw Beardie down the
stairs as the result of a gambling quarrel.
Beardie demanded someone else
gamble with him, but the chaplain forbade it.
He swore that, if no man would play with him, he would dice with the
Devil. Cue appearance of the Unspeakable
One. An inquisitive butler put his eyeto
the keyhole of the room where man and Satan gambled and his eyes was seared
yellow. Beardie died five years later.
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| The 16th Earl of Strathmore |
Regarding the
Monster legend, the earl told the author that that he believed the secret of
the ‘hidden heir’ died with his father (Patrick,
15th earl, who died in 1949), or with his own brother.
Wentworth-Day was also told by Sir David Bowes-Lyon of the story of the
mysterious Jack the Runner who races
across the castle lawns on moonlit nights.
Further to the
earl’s rather bland take on the tale, there was the added testimony of his
‘apple-cheeked Australian born cook’, Florence
Foster. Said cook told Wentworth
Day, ‘I’ve heard them [Devil and the Earl of Crawford] rattle the dice, stamp
and swear.’ She had also heard someone (was it Beardie, though, or someone
else?) knock three times on her bedroom door, but no-one was there. And she lay in bed afterwards shaking with
fear. (Other sources state that the cook reported the same story to a newspaper
in 1957.)
Mrs Maclagan’s Story
Wentworth Day also
includes what he describes as a hand-written copy of the account of Mrs
Maclagan, previously published at length (though not word for word apparently)
in The
Ghost Book of Lord Halifax.
While the Maclagan account in Halifax occupies many pages, the verbatim
account in The Queen Mother’s Family Story runs to a disappointing two paragraphs. Here the story related is confined to the
tall, cloaked figure seen by Dr Nicholson, Dean of Brechin, in ‘Earl Patrick’s
Room’. The Dean met Dr Forbes, Bishop of
Brechin, in Glamis the following year, along with the Provost of Perth. He Provost told the Dean he had seen the same
figure in the same room. Forbes offered
to exorcise it, but the 13th Earl of
Strathmore was too afraid to sanction it.
Lady Granville’s Gossip
The writer asked Lady Granville,
an elder sister of the Queen Mother (Rose Leveson-Gower, Countess Granville born Rose Constance Bowes-Lyon, 1890 – 1967), who was apparently at Glamis when he visited. She told him that children often woke at
night screaming in the upper storeys, saying a huge bearded man leant over
them All furniture was cleared out of
that particular room twelve years previously and nobody now slept there (nor in
the Hangman’s Chamber).
Lady Granville authoritatively told
Wentworth-Day that her parents [Claude,
14th earl and his wife]would never allow the children to discuss
the matter of the Monster. Claude and
the 13th earl, also Claude, ‘refused absolutely to discuss it’. This, as we have seen elsewhere (and will
examine again in the future), runs counter to some others’ version of what the
Strathmore family in the late 19th and early 20th
centuries was prepared to say. Lady Granville also told Wentworth-Day that she
had seen the Grey Lady in St Michael’s
Chapel (and the earl said the same thing).
Other revelations were the bloodstain that used to be seen on the floor
of King Malcolm’s Room (until boarded up by Rose’s mother), and an unseen ghost
which pulled the sheets off the bed in a
room. It was once a bedroom, but the
haunting prompted it to be converted and it was later the Queen Mother’s Bathroom.
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| Lady Granville |
The Monster of Glamis: a Lurid Version
Wentworth-Day steps up a gear to describe
the ‘Monster’ of Glamis, which he does with obvious relish. According to his take on the story, he vaguely states that some time over a
century previously a seriously deformed boy – ‘shaped like an egg’ – was born
into the family and kept untyil adulthood in the castle. He states that the Monster was housed in
the Secret Room constructed by the Earl
of Strathmore in 1684. But there are two
problems with this theory: firstly, the
cited evidence of The Book of Record written by Earl Patrick in the late 17th
century hardly conclusively records ‘a man with a passion for secret
hiding-places’ as supposed; secondly, why was this supposedly Secret Room constructed? Had it lain idle and empty – in wait as it
were – from the late 17th century until the early/mid 19th
century when the Monster took up its tenancy?
Physically, the deformed boy had an
exceptionally strong body, but underdeveloped arms and legs. The heir to the earldom was shown the
wretched captive when he came of age.
The child lived to an immense age and an un-named admiral told the
author that he lived until 1921.
Departing from other versions, Wentworth-Day
states that four people at a time (not
three) knew of the secret of the Monster at any one time: the earl, his heir, the family lawyer, and
the estate factor.
The Factors of Glamis: Proctors and Ralstons
James Wentworth-Day quite rightly states the
the office of estate factor at Glamis was passed down through only two families
from 1765 to the 1940s, the Ralstons and the Proctors. Peter
Proctor served from 1765 to 1815, succeeded by his son, David, who died in
1860. Then came Andrew Ralston (factor for fifty-two years), follwed by his son Gavin Ralston.
The author does not mention it, but the
first Proctor was the amiable gentleman who welcomed the young Walter Scott to Glamis and got him so ‘fou’
with wine that he went on the wrong road when he departed. The Proctors were an old family in the parish,
Jacobite minded like the Lyons, and a Peter Proctor, recorded as a workman from
Glen Ogilvy, is recorded as having fought with the rebel army in the ’45. In the parish records (dated 5th
August 1832) we find the reference to another likely family relative: ‘Francis Proctor and his wife Isabel
Isles...were rebuked for the sin of antenuptial fornication & rebuked from
church scandal.’ Another member of the
extended family was Robert Proctor, Writer to the Signet, son of Patrick
Proctor, writer at Glamis Castle, who died 5th January 1823.
Andrew
Ralston (1831-1914) is a better known figure, and it was he who allegedly
told a Countess that she was better off not knowing the secret of the Monster
of Glamis. The other well-known anecdote
is that he refused to stay one night under the castle room, but insisted on
workmen digging a path through snow drifts one night so he could reach his own
home. (This house was probably the
Glamis House or New House near the village.)
Wentworth-Day follows tradition by stating this first Ralston was dour
and ‘hard-headed’, though much respected, as was his son Gavin Ralston (1870-1951). Andrew married Jane Wallace and raised
six children in Glamis, including Andrew
Ralston (1866-1926), who was factor to the Earl of Hopetoun. Another son, William Henry Ralston (1863-1943), was employed by the Strathmore
family on their English estates. Other
sons were Claude Lyon Ralston (born
1867), who worked for a time for the Earl of Airlie, and Charles Ralston (born 1864), an employee of the Duke of
Buccleuch.
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| Gavin Ralston and the future Queen Mother |
The Paul Bloomfield Version
Following a length summary of Lord Halifax’s stories from The Ghost Book,
Wentworth-Day turns to the theories presented by the journalist Paul Bloomfield. The key points here are as follows: the real
Monster was the son of Thomas, Lord
Glamis, the son and heir of Thomas, 11th earl. This Lord Glamis married Charlotte Grimstead on 21st December 1820. Their first recorded son was Thomas George, who became the 12th
earl, born 22nd September 1822.
Bloomfield speculates that there was another son born before this
child. He cites Douglas’s Scots Peerage which states that Thomas
and Charlotte had a son who was born on
21st October 1821 and who died the same day. Cockayne’s
Complete Peerage states the
same, but give the date as 18th October 1821.
Which Earls Knew? Shane Leslie and Sir David Bowes-Lyon
Wentworth-Day
follows other accounts by saying that the Monster was long lived, but the 14th earl Claude George was not told of the secret when he attained his majority on
14th March 1876.
Sir Shane Leslie (1885-1971) wrote Wentworth-Day a letter which
stated that Pat Lyon was the last
family member to know about the secret, plus Abbot Oswald (David) Hunter-Blair (1853-1939) had two interesting
theories about the family Monster, which Leslie unfortunately never recorded.
Last word should be
given to Sir David who told the author that a great amount of rubbish was
written about Glamis in the Victorian era.
‘Most of them seized on the
monster as a peg and then thought up the most unutterable bosh.’
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