P.S. Ideas, Interviews & Features …
Approaching Lily: Louise Carpenter talks to Louise Tucker
A Day in the Life of Louise Carpenter
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When you’re growing up in a small townYou know you’ll grow down in a small townThere is only one good use for a small townYou hate it and you’ll know you have to leave.
LOU REED, ‘Small Town’
1 The Most Caring Place in the World
On 15 May 1979, on a draughty platform at Waverley Station, Edinburgh, Lord and Lady Galloway, fresh to their titles and in a muddle with their luggage, were preparing to board a train headed for London. ‘If I can have this opportunity of going to the House of Lords, I shall take it,’ Lily Galloway had told their French lodger, Marie-Laurence Maître, in their tenement flat as she packed.
Lily, dressed in a bottle-green velvet suit, which was a touch thin at the elbows and cuffs, but brushed up on the lapels, struggled as usual with their trunks while Randolph Galloway walked ahead, hands clasped stiffly behind his back. If anybody had cared to study their expressions, in him they would have observed a vagueness, as if he inhabited another world, one he did not much care for but from which he could not escape, and in her the opposite, the alertness of a proficient nurse in constant anticipation of a crisis. Randolph was easily unsettled by noise and commotion – as a child he would become quite hysterical if a train blew its steam – and he was prone to wandering off. Lily would have to maintain vigilance.
Their brief wedding announcement had been published in the court and social pages of the Daily Telegraph on 1 November 1975. Lord Garlies, then heir to the Earldom of Galloway, had married Mrs Lily Budge, youngest daughter of the late Mr and Mrs Andrew Miller, of Duns, Berwickshire. In February 1976, following their church blessing, a large photograph of them appeared over a page of the Edinburgh Tatler with a brief caption outlining how the reception had taken place at the Caledonian Hotel in Edinburgh. The picture alone revealed that Lily was some years older than her husband and would not by any stretch of the imagination be capable of providing an heir. And while blessed with a mop of thick black hair and two rows of straight, pearly white teeth, she could not be described as a beauty. To those in Scotland who followed the births, deaths, and marriages of the aristocracy, the announcement that the 12th Earl of Galloway’s son and heir had married came as a shock. The reception had not taken place at the family seat of Cumloden, Newton Stewart, and the 12th Earl of Galloway and his daughter, Lady Antonia Dalrymple, did not attend the party.
Randolph Galloway, recognised by the Stewart Society as head of the Stewart clan, noted in Burke’s Peerage, Baronetage and Knight-age as the 13th Earl of Galloway, Lord Garlies, Baron Stewart of Garlies and a Baronet (Sir Randolph Keith Reginald Stewart, 12th Bart. of Corsewell, and 10th Bart. of Burray) was now about to take his seat in the upper house. He stood at over six feet and possessed a broad, athletic build. He had thick black wavy hair, parted and combed back from his high forehead, a strong square jaw and light, piercing blue eyes, sometimes hidden behind heavy black-rimmed spectacles. He was slim and handsome in the new three-piece suit, picked and paid for by Lily.
On arriving in London unscathed by drama, Lily and Randolph went to 20 Great Peter Street, SW1, the clergyhouse of St Matthew’s, Westminster, offered by the Vicar Prebendary Gerard Irvine. (Shortly afterwards, they would move to temporary accommodation in SW5 and thereafter use a series of cheap tourist hotels such as The Hansel and Gretel, £12.65 a night including VAT and breakfast.) The following day, 16 May, Randolph took his seat and Lily settled herself on the red leather pews of the Peeresses’ gallery, front row, first in. She watched over him proudly as he sat mute on the Conservative benches in front of her. He did not deliver a maiden speech, which was for the best.
Outside the gates of Parliament, she posed for a photograph. ‘The Lords is the most caring place in the world!’ she later told a newspaper reporter. ‘If I had my way we would live in London permanently.’
When Lily was not guiding Randolph about the wood-panelled corridors or sitting in the chamber, with her eyes attentively trained on him in the manner of a dog to its master, she could be found in one of three places: in the House of Lords’ stationery cupboard, availing herself of as many complimentary cards and envelopes as would fit into her handbag; on the telephone to family in Scotland, a service which was also complimentary; or in the tearoom, knitting needles in hand, eating tea and toast with the Scottish peeresses who befriended her.
There was nothing in Lily’s outward appearance to distinguish her from the other peers’ wives except perhaps a little weariness. She was set apart principally because she had no interest in behaving as expected. Her occasional guests from Scotland saw that she liked to congratulate the other wives on their appearance – ‘My, Lady so and so, what a dear little hat you are wearing today’ – and every morning, on entering the House, she made a point of inquiring after everyone’s health – ‘Good morning Mr Skelton [then a junior doorkeeper], how are you? And how is your mother? Oh, will you send her my regards?’
Lily and Randolph considered themselves to have an important patron. The 17th Earl of Lauderdale, Patrick Maitland, a well-respected Scottish hereditary peer, former MP for Lanark, former reporter for The Times, and one of the last men in Britain to make use of a large ear trumpet, had come to know them through the ecumenical pilgrimages he organised to St Mary’s Kirk, his private chapel in the parish of Haddington, not far from Edinburgh. They were, he had long ago concluded, a very curious couple, at times exasperating, but of the sort that he found himself drawn to helping, often against his better judgement. When Lily had asked