True tale better than fiction

LADY CATHERINE AND THE REAL DOWNTON ABBEY</br><b>The Countess of Carnarvon</b></br><i>Hodder & Stoughton
LADY CATHERINE AND THE REAL DOWNTON ABBEY</br><b>The Countess of Carnarvon</b></br><i>Hodder & Stoughton

There's nothing like television or movie exposure to pull visitors to a stately home and so it is with England's Highclere Castle, where the ITV drama Downton Abbey is filmed. 

The Hampshire property now sees about 1200 visitors a day in summer and tickets for April 2014 are already sold out.

The home of the 8th Earl of Carnarvon, Highclere's coffers have also benefitted from the efforts of his countess, Lady Fiona. Her Lady Almina and the Real Downton Abbey profiled the wife of the fifth earl, the backer of the successful search for Tutankhamen's tomb. 

Now, in Lady Catherine and the Real Downton Abbey, Lady Fiona has turned her attention to Almina's daughters-in-law.

Catherine Wendell was an American heiress who in 1922 married Henry (Porchey), 6th Earl of Carnarvon. She was only 19, her husband 24. Catherine had to learn to manage Highclere's large staff and host the house parties and banquets Porchey loved.

The marriage ended in 1936 when the couple divorced and the earl remarried divorcee Tilly Losch on September 1, 1939, the day Nazi Germany invaded Poland.

The result was that, from the start of the marriage, the couple were to share their home with strangers, starting with children evacuated from a North London school.

An inveterate womaniser, Porchey's second marriage also ended in divorce and although there is much less detail about this break-up than the first, this perhaps reflects the book's title.

The life of Highclere seen here is a better story than any of Julian Fellowe's Downton Abbey plots.

- Gillian Vine is a Dunedin journalist.

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