By SARAH LYALL

EDENSOR, England ? Years after the fact, the Dowager Duchess of Devonshire, looked in her mother’s engagement book to see what had been written on March 31, 1920. Nothing.

“She didn’t refer to my birth at all,” the duchess said. “There was nothing for five days, and then, on the fifth day, in capital letters, it said ‘KITCHEN CHIMNEY SWEPT.’ No one took any notice of me except Nanny.” Now 90, the duchess is doubly famous. First, as the lone survivor of the six celebrated Mitford girls, who included Nancy (the novelist), Diana (the beauty ) and Jessica (the renowned Communist ).

And second, as the woman who transformed Chatsworth, one of the grandest of England’s grand houses, from a museumlike relic into a family house and self-sustaining business that is visited by 600,000 people a year. Along the way, Deborah Cavendish (her friends call her Debo), has become something of a national treasure, as grand as the queen but as approachable as anyone .


“There is this
extraordinary thing
called self-esteem
which is pumped
into the children now.”


“It is so kind of you to come all this way,” the duchess said recently, greeting visitors . Straight-backed and chic in a simple green wool skirt and black pumps, she shook hands with everyone, including the taxi driver, then led the way into her house. Her home is the former vicarage in this hamlet , part of the 14,164-hectare Chatsworth estate.

Birthday cards filled one wall, many reflecting two of her passions: chickens (she raises them) and Elvis (she worships him). Chatsworth loomed outside in the background, with its 297 rooms and its 18 staircases. The duchess had to move out several years ago, after the death of her husband, Andrew, the 11th Duke of Devonshire, and the accession of her son, the 12th.

She grew up in happy eccentricity . Her father, the second Baron Redesdale , had a “horror of anything sticky,” hunted his own children with bloodhounds, and hated socializing. “I had a marvelous time,” she said. Even when, she writes, her siblings surrounded her and chanted “Who’s the least important person in the room? You!”? “These things were all turned into jokes in our family,” she said.

“There is this extraordinary thing called selfesteem which is pumped into the children now.” She was famously lovely; her husband famously dashing. He inherited the dukedom when his older brother, Billy, was killed in World War II.

“Two of my brothers-in-law,” she said. “My only brother; Andrew’s only brother; my four best friends ? all killed within a month of each other.” “What can you do?” she asked. “Blow after blow came, but there was absolutely no reply, was there?” After the death of Andrew’s father, in 1959, the tax amounted to 80 percent of the value of the estate - estimated to be about $285 million in today’s money.

Works of art went to museums; the debt was finally settled in 1974. Raising the money, and making Chatsworth sustainable, required a top-to-bottom reorganization. Her memoir is full of encounters with famous people, including President John F. Kennedy, whose sister Kathleen was married to Andrew’s older brother .

The duchess’s marriage lasted 62 years, surviving Andrew’s alcoholism and his discreet dalliances. “It’s completely different to Americans, who all divorce each other the whole time,” she said. “Such a bore for everyone, having to say who’s going to have the dogs, who’s going to have the photograph books.” As it happened, the same taxi driver arrived to take the visitors away and was treated to a sight of the duchess waving goodbye. “That were the duchess, weren’t it?” he asked. “We all love her to bits.”