UFO Info Week-End

Dressed in their finery – Beauchamp in a top hat and morning coat the countess festooned in lace-trimmed satins and studded with

Dressed in their finery – Beauchamp in a top hat and morning coat, the countess festooned in lace-trimmed satins and studded with jewels, beneath a parasol – they herded their disgruntled children on to a bus, down into the newly built Underground and back up at Hampstead to begin the long walk to Primrose Hill where their father approved of the vicar. (Lady Beauchamp only hired nannies who had a neat parting precisely drawn down the middle of their head because they reminded her of a Madonna in Renaissance paintings.)Every Sunday, when in London, the Beauchamps took the long and inconvenient journey on public transport to worship. Precision mattered.The entire household, including the 16 servants, was required to attend chapel twice a day. The drum of Anglicanism was beaten by the countess day and night.

Both parents approved of the tenets of the Oxford Movement; they disdained the slipshod habits of the Church of England, preferring Anglo-Catholic ceremonies and rituals of great precision, such as the ornate silverware placed exactly as if for a formal banquet and the ritualistic lighting by acolytes of the right candle before the left on the altar. Periodically, they would be summoned by their mother to be lectured on religion. They collected birds’ eggs along the four drives that led into their estate, scattered chickens in the poultry yard and, when the butler’s wheelchair-bound son came up from the village in his fustian best, they wheeled this imaginary Chinese emperor in his palanquin along furlongs of raked gravel and levelled lawns.God, French and exercise were the cornerstones of their upbringing. There was no such thing as “weekending” at any of their or others’ country residences – “That was considered common!”Isolated from other children, the Lygons took as playmates the characters from their storybooks and their imaginations. I had quite a long innings,” Lady Sibell conceded, “because she had a miscarriage in 1908.”The family migrated seasonally by private train between their three homes: Madresfield Court in Worcestershire, which had its own station; Walmer Castle in Kent, the official residence for their father in his role as Lord Warden of the Cinque Ports; and Halkin House in Belgrave Square, London. Yonge’s medieval and chivalric tales of derring-do overlain with the Christian values and the noble duties that he wished to impress upon these young minds.

As Lygons, he explained, they too had a long and distinguished lineage, rooted in Norman ancestry, but with this privilege came obligation. Remembering these afternoons, Lady Sibell recalled that the abiding lesson he taught them was “tolerance”.By contrast, Countess Beauchamp, like Queen Victoria, did not enjoy children’s company once they had reached the age of discretion – to her mind, two years old – “and then she got terribly bored with us We were each displaced by the next arrival. After formally greeting him, they would lie at his feet, and begin the daily ritual – listening to a story read by him.The earl selected sentimental Victorian novels with historical themes which echoed his ancestors’ past, such as William Harrison Ainsworth’s Boscobel (1872), an account of Charles II’s last stand at Worcester – in which Madresfield, their family seat, had played a part; Mrs Molesworth’s edifying dramas which exposed hypocrisy and oppression while promoting a Utopian spirit of Christian socialism; or Charlotte M. Her mother, n?Lady Lettice Grosvenor, was the sister of Bendor, second Duke of Westminster.