As she writes in her latest book, “we also did well meeting the revived fashion for wooden lavatory seats, whose middles we made into cheeseboards.” It was opened to tourists, expanded to include a restaurant and so successfully equipped with lavatories that it won a Loo of the Year award. Under her aegis as Duchess of Devonshire, the 297-room Chatsworth House became a national treasure. Yet Debo, as she was known within her family, would later become responsible for turning one of the Devonshire’s great private houses into a virtual theme park. At Swinbrook “the woods belonged to my father and we never met a soul.” At a more modest family home, Old Mill Cottage in High Wycombe, outside London, the Mitfords had to take walks on footpaths that were open to the public. “I minded more than I can say,” she says about this transition. As a girl Deborah Mitford weathered the Great Depression with her parents and was forced to leave Swinbrook House, the Oxfordshire manse that she loved.
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