this glossy life
L
indy, the Marchioness of Dufferin and Ava, far from being preserved in aspic amongst the vice-regal splendours of her Co Down mansion, Clandeboye, is intent on steering its 2,000-acre estate into the 21st century. “I am not remotely interested in being posh or chic,” she pronounces. With entrepreneurial zeal, she
channels her energies into managing the estate that has the largest broadleaved woodland area in Northern Ireland, as well as romantic landscaped parkland, woodland projects, prize-winning dairy herds churning out delicious yoghurt, walled gardens, an art gallery and an arboretum. When a teenage Lindy Dufferin, then Lindy Guinness, won the Oskar Kokoschka watercolour scholarship two years in a row, she was photographed for the newspapers. Sheridan Dufferin – who was the fifth Marquess of Dufferin and Ava, and a Guinness himself – kept the newspaper cutting on his shaving mirror and thought to himself, “One day I am going to marry that girl”. In 1964, they married at Westminster Abbey before nearly 2,000 invitees, and Lindy became the Marchioness of Dufferin and Ava. When she first came to Clandeboye as a 19-year-old fledgling artist under the tutelage of Duncan Grant, she was undaunted as – being the granddaughter of the Duke of Rutland – she was used to the grandeur of Belvoir Castle in Leicestershire.
“I am not remotely interested in being posh or chic.” Clandeboye is a late Georgian mansion built on an informal plan by the architect Robert Woodgate, who was an apprentice of Sir John Soane. It is full of character, housing an extraordinary melange of artefacts, relics of the British Empire, antiquities, artefacts and antiques, Old Masters, ancestral portraits and modern art. The feeling of history is palpable as one steps over the threshold into the great hall, where there is a model of Mandalay and a Burmese bell (the first Marquess of Dufferin annexed Burma when he was the viceroy). Hanging on the walls is a collection of cutlasses, pistols and fly whisks that were used by acolytes to dust the altars in St Peter’s in Rome. The first floor is flooded in light as the first Marquess had a passion for occulae or great skylights. The bedrooms provide a virtual and rarefied tour round the world from Burma to Ottawa, as each one is themed and named after one of the Marquess’ diplomatic posts. “Rome”, for example, is a bedroom of reliquaries from his days as Imperial Paladin. Clandeboye, however, is not a museum, but a much-loved house with a constant stream of friends and family coming to stay in great comfort. It is centrally heated with gallons of hot water; the late novelist Lady Caroline Blackwood, who was Lindy’s sister-in-law, recalled that when she was a child, there was only “a little trickle of brown peat for a bath”. Maureen Guinness (one of the “golden” Guinness girls) was Lindy’s mother-in-law and kept Clandeboye going after WWII. She was a legendary hostess who loved practical jokes
The Rev Ian Paisley, who has posed for Lindy Dufferin, visits her gallery.
and would often arrive at parties wearing a false penis on her nose and a hidden fart machine between her legs. Her son, the late Sheridan Dufferin, had a passion for collecting, like his grandfather, the first Marquess. He championed 1960s art, including a young David Hockney, and was a partner in the influential Knoedler Gallery in New York. Sadly he died 20 years ago, aged only 49. Lindy continues to be a committed artist in the figurative tradition (though sometimes verging on the abstract), spending much of her time sequestered away in her studio, which was the old drawing room, and she has just had a sell-out show in Paris where Nat Rothschild and Sir David Davis were among her buyers. She is mercurial and gamine and her piercing, sapphire-blue eyes seem to dive straight into you. Dressed in tweed knickerbockers, Lindy receives Tesco buyers to talk yoghurt in the green music room. Her own painterly oil sketches of her cows grace the lids of the yoghurts. As the cake is cut, she suggests that there could be cow hoof prints on the supermarket
78 | September 2011 | T h e G l o s s M A G A Z I N e
Clandeboye yogurt is made using milk from the estate’s prize-winning cows.