Deborah Cavendish, the Dowager Duchess of Devonshire and the last of the six eccentric Mitford sisters, who turned her husband’s ancestral estate into one of England’s grand country houses and wrote books about it and her own fairy-tale life, died on Wednesday. She was 94.
Her son, Peregrine, announced her death in a statement, which did not say where she died or provide a cause.
On the jacket of her 2010 memoir, “Wait for Me!,” is a 1952 photograph of the regal duchess. In a long black gown, against portraits and period furniture, she is a figure of alabaster loveliness from another epoch — one of country estates and fox hunts, furs worn to bomb shelters and clever talk over tea with dictators. She was married to a duke, had lost a sister, a brother and two children and had yet to define herself.
Being a Mitford, Deborah could have hardly been conventional. Diana married a fascist in the presence of Goebbels and Hitler. Jessica was a Communist and prolific author. Unity Valkyrie, in love with Hitler, shot herself when Britain declared war on Germany. As a child, Pamela wanted to be a horse; she married a fabled jockey. Nancy’s books satirized the upper classes. And Deborah, tentatively, became a connoisseur of fine poultry.
They had little formal schooling. Their emotionally detached Edwardian parents, who sent their only son to Eton, thought education was wasted on girls, who were expected to marry well. Deborah, the youngest, called Debo, grew up with governesses, tutors and servants in country seats, a London house and an island in Scotland. Despite the trappings, the family’s wealth was shaky and in the Depression years required economies.
From age 6, Deborah had a passion for chickens. In their drafty old Oxfordshire manse, she and her sisters hid in a linen cupboard heated by water pipes and made up secret languages. Her father, an irascible baron, hunted his children on horseback, with hounds. Visiting Munich with Unity in 1937, Deborah, 17, wrote home: “We have had quite a nice time here & we’ve had tea with Hitler & seen all the other sights.”
At 21, she married Andrew Cavendish, second son of the 10th Duke of Devonshire. His older brother was killed in World War II, and when his father died in 1950, he became the 11th Duke, inheriting vast wealth, including a castle in Ireland and Chatsworth, a 35,000-acre Derbyshire estate that had been in his family for generations.
Surrounded by 105 acres of gardens designed by Capability Brown and miles of meadows and wooded hills, Chatsworth’s magnificent 16th-century mansion, with ceilings painted by Antonio Verrio, had 297 rooms, 112 fireplaces, 68 lavatories, 26 baths, 32 kitchens and workshops, 17 staircases, and 1.3 acres of roof.
But it came with a catch: inheritance taxes of nearly $20 million, not to mention huge maintenance costs. Like many of Britain’s great country houses fallen on hard times, Chatsworth, outmoded and rundown, had long been open to the public, but its trickle of visitors and income left the duke and duchess in the red. They sold artworks and acreage to pay taxes totaling 80 percent of the estate’s value: $285 million in today’s money.
Transforming Chatsworth from a museumlike relic into a self-sustaining family business, however, was a more ambitious long-term project that, because of the duke’s alcoholism and other problems, fell largely to the duchess. She made it the core of her life’s work.
She put in central heating, phones, new wiring and plumbing for 17 new bathrooms; opened gift shops and a market that employed 100 people and sold meat and produce, including the Duchess’s Marmalade and the Duke’s Favorite Sausages. She began lecturing on farming, drawing 200,000 people a year. Later came restaurants, catering services, boutiques and other moneymakers, including two hotels near Chatsworth.
Recognizing the commercial value of her involvement, she took a hands-on approach to running the house, greeting and leading tourists through the public rooms, teaching classes and feeding her chickens: Leghorns, Rhode Island Reds, Buff Cochins, Welsummers and less notable types that ran loose on the grounds like marauding gangs.
In 2002, Chatsworth became self-sufficient for the first time, covering its $6.5 million annual costs with income from the Chatsworth House Trust and proceeds from visitors, country fairs and the restaurants and shops she had started. Some 600,000 people a year visit Chatsworth, making it one of Britain’s most popular rural tourist sites.
Visitors found the duchess gracious and down to earth, a straight-backed, silver-haired aristocrat who spoke animatedly with anyone about interior design, livestock, gardening, fine arts and Elvis Presley, whom she adored and whose memorabilia she kept. She was properly “your grace,” but regarded herself as less exalted. “I’m a housewife,” she told a reporter for The New York Times in 2003.
For many years, she and the duke, who was knighted in 1996, occupied 24 rooms that were off-limits to visitors. With the death of her husband in 2004, she became the dowager duchess, and her son, Peregrine, became the 12th Duke of Devonshire. Later, she moved to a nearby village, Edensor, and continued writing.
Since the early 1980s she had written a dozen books, many on Chatsworth, along with volumes of essays, reminiscences, cookbooks and letters exchanged with the travel writer Patrick Leigh Fermor. All were touched with autobiographical details. Her memoir’s title, “Wait for Me!,” referred to a lifetime of playing catch-up to her sisters.
She was born Deborah Vivien Freeman-Mitford on March 31, 1920, at Asthall Manor, the Oxfordshire estate of her parents, David Freeman-Mitford, the 2nd Baron Redesdale, and the former Sydney Bowles.
Denied formal educations, she and her sisters developed a rich fantasy life, creating a secret “Society of Hons,” which met in the warm linen cupboard at Swinbrook, another stone-cold family mansion.
There, they divided the world into “Hons” — or honorables, as barons’ daughters are known, and others they liked — and “Counter-Hons,” everybody else. They invented secret languages, Honnish and Boudledidge, which mimicked rural Oxfordshire accents, with distorted vowels and softened consonants, all pronounced in tones of hopeless yearning. A governess taught them the joys of village shoplifting.
They went their ways: Nancy (1904-73) wrote “The Pursuit of Love” and “Love in a Cold Climate.” Pamela (1907-94), married a horseman who became a physicist. Thomas (1909-45) was killed in the war. Diana (1910-2003) married Britain’s fascist leader, Oswald Mosley, and was imprisoned with him for most of the war. Unity (1914-48), who was Eva Braun’s rival for Hitler’s affections, died a decade after her attempted suicide with the bullet still in her head. Jessica (1917-96) eloped with Churchill’s nephew, and they moved to the United States. He was killed in the war, and she remained in America, writing “The American Way of Death” and other books.
Unlike her siblings, Deborah knew little of politics growing up. But her marriage to Lord Cavendish brought her into political circles. His uncle by marriage was the future prime minister Harold Macmillan, who found government jobs for him, and they had long been friends of the Kennedy clan (the families were related by marriage) and attended the inauguration and funeral of President John F. Kennedy.
Three of the couple’s six children died shortly after birth.
Besides her son, who holds the title Duke of Devonshire, her survivors include two daughters, Lady Emma Tennant and Lady Sophia Topley; eight grandchildren; and 18 great-grandchildren.
In 1999, Queen Elizabeth II named the duchess a Dame Commander of the Royal Victorian Order for her services to preserving Britain’s residential heritage.
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