Friends remember Lindy Dufferin, who sparked life into one of Ireland’s last great houses - Clandeboye in Co Down

Just off the main road between Bangor and Belfast lies Clandeboye, the elegant Georgian home of the Dufferin family. They owned the estate from the early 17th century until the sad death of my dear godmother, the Marchioness of Dufferin and Ava, in 2020, aged 79. As Lindy Dufferin wrote in her diary: “The Dufferins came into Ireland, played a large role and then died out – while Clandeboye will go on for ever.”

The estate’s rude health today is in great part thanks to Lindy, who inherited it in 1988 after the premature death of her husband, Sheridan Dufferin, the 5th Marquess, aged only 49. She set up Clandeboye Yoghurt, using milk from her champion cows, bred by her manager Mark Logan. She built new gardens with her head gardener Fergus Thompson and set up a forest school for local children in the Clandeboye woods. Together with the fine Belfast pianist, Barry Douglas, she set up the Camerata Music Festival at Clandeboye. It will take place there this August, with a special concert in Lindy's memory.

For nearly sixty years, from her marriage to Sheridan in 1964 until her death in 2020, they made Clandeboye House a kernel of fizzing activity.

Among those invited to enjoy the place were King Charles III, Van Morrison and David Hockney – whose works Sheridan had dealt in, during the early sixties, at London’s Kasmin Gallery which he co-owned.

Van Morrison, David Hockney, Tom Stoppard, Peter Mandelson and Arlene Foster are among those who have paid tribute to Lindy in a new book I’ve just edited about her.

For 30 of those years, I was lucky enough to visit Clandeboye, see what great works this dynamic couple sparked into life and see one of the last great country-house hostesses entertaining in such relaxed style.

Again and again, her guests commented on her wildly diverging but strangely complementary characteristics. Professor Sucheta Mahajan of Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, describes first seeing her at tea in Clandeboye:

“I was taken aback by her appearance. I expected a dowdy English royal-type figure but was introduced to a figure out of the back page of a literary work – carefully casual jeans, tousled hair – who gave us organic yogurt, instead of scones, for tea.”

The following year, Professor Mahajan returned to Clandeboye with a Trinity College group during a literary festival. He says: “I saw a totally different side of her: organiser, host, hands-on with everything, including taking little children for a nature walk and telling them stories in a copse in the woods on the vast estate. She wore her family’s lineage and legacy so lightly, tramping around in wellies and khaki jackets, that by the end of my visit I found myself admiring her initiative and generosity.”

Clandeboye had long exerted this magnetic attraction on distinguished visitors in the years before Lindy arrived as a young bride.

The poet John Betjeman had been a great friend of Sheridan’s father, the 4th Marquess of Dufferin and Ava, killed in the war by a Japanese shell in 1945, aged 35. By a strange coincidence, he died in Burma, extremely close to Ava, the ancient Burmese capital, from where his grandfather took the name of his title.

Betjeman wrote a poem to his friend on his death:

"Friend of my youth, you are dead...

Humorous, reckless, loyal –

My kind, heavy-lidded companion.”

In his verse autobiography, Summoned by Bells, Betjeman talked about his 1920s weekends at Sezincote House, the Anglo-Indian pile in Gloucestershire, home to his Oxford friend Michael Dugdale:

“First steps in learning how to be a guest,

First wood-smoke-scented luxury of life

In the large ambience of a country house.”

Lindy taught me, too, how to be a guest, happily introducing me to friends from her generation and lifelong friends from mine – and all in newly redecorated splendour.

Soon after their 1964 marriage, Sheridan and Lindy redid all the curtains and covers at Clandeboye, using 6,000 yards of material. They bought 18th-century Irish furniture and glass. Lindy created the extraordinary Duncan Grant room, filled with her collection of paintings by her friend, the leading Bloomsbury artist.

They rehoused and added to the Indian sculpture collection. They modernised the heating and moved the kitchen next to the dining room from a remote wing, where Lindy then set up her painting studio.

And they built the grand stone steps in front of the house. In a typical combination of acute observations, Lindy modelled them on steps she’d seen while drawing at the Royal Hospital Chelsea.

And, ever on the lookout for a good deal, Lindy heard the old platform at Strabane Station was being demolished – the stone was promptly used for the steps.

Lindy wrote: “Over the years, we have presumed on our talented friends, using their skills in rearranging the collection of books, picking out gold lettering, designing trompe l’oeil devices and rehanging the paintings.

“On one of these occasions, David Hockney made an etching of the window and chair in the library.”

As Lindy said: “It is a house of dreams and enchantment that fill my thoughts and, as I grow older, the pleasure of being part of it grows greater.”

Thanks to Lindy – and Sheridan – Clandeboye remains the extraordinarily crammed treasure box it was when Harold Nicolson (the writer, husband of Vita Sackville-West of Sissinghurst fame, and nephew of the 1st Marquess of Dufferin and Ava) described it nearly a century ago.

The 1st Marquess was a wonder, holding the great imperial jobs of the 19th century: Viceroy of India, Governor General of Canada, British Ambassador to France, Russia and the Ottoman Empire.

Nicolson wrote of the Clandeboye hall in Helen’s Tower (1937), his tribute to his uncle: “The steps which led down to the front door were flanked by a double row of curling stones from Scotland and from Canada.

“In the plaster of the left wall were embedded a series of Greek inscriptions picked out in red paint.

“Beyond these inscriptions, a Russian bear reared enormous paws. On the right hand of the entrance, a mummy case, two cannon, a Burmese bell slung between carved figures and a second bear of smaller dimensions were artistically grouped.”

Lindy preserved all this while creating a future. She restored the woodland in line with the plans of the 1st Marquess’s landscape gardener, James Frazer. She renovated and redecorated the 12 main bedrooms at Clandeboye. But she also created a new one.

With her friends Julian and Bojana Reilly, she built the Cairo Room on the site of the old Museum Room in 2002. And she was determined to make it spectacular.

The tent was made by Tariq al Fattouh, a Cairo tent-maker from the Khayyamiyya, the Tent-makers’ Bazaar – the last remaining covered bazaar in Islamic Cairo (the others have all succumbed to fire or general decay over the years). It was, Julian Reilly reports, “the finest tent he had ever made”.

Julian adds: “The income from the tent – the biggest project Tariq had ever undertaken, and which he had done during the hot and therefore quiet summer months, when the absence of tourists means only a trickle of income to most – had in fact enabled him finally to get married!”

And what a splendid, ginormous tent it is – 24 yards of red and white roofed tent wall, decorated with Pharaonic and Islamic designs.

One of the many remarkable things about Lindy was that she would do utterly remarkable things – like taking Cairo to Northern Ireland – and it didn’t seem unusual at the time.

You were so used to her constant ideas. Now that she’s dead, you have the immediate benefit of hindsight – and realise how exceptional it all was.

She brought a painterly eye to Clandeboye’s renovations and innovations. That eye remembered Lindy’s first view of Clandeboye when she went in 1962, two years before her marriage to Sheridan.

On her first morning there, she woke “to see a magnificent, interlocking landscape of greens that led down to a lake. It was particularly beautiful: there were low, horizontal bands of Irish mist, allowing only certain parts of the landscape to be sharply defined; those mists that hung over the lake have a Japanese watercolour quality.”

In 2019, not long before she died, she installed the abstract stained-glass windows – the Sheridan Windows – she’d designed for the Clandeboye Chapel.

She wrote in her diary in 2019: “The windows have fitted in most endearingly and I’m so thankful that I’ve done them – they were like a kaleidoscope...They make the chapel much more holy.”

Her windows figured prominently on the desperately sad day of her funeral at Clandeboye just over a year later.

As her friend Professor Jane Ohlmeyer of Trinity College Dublin said: “The funeral service was very moving (even for those of us joining remotely), especially towards the end, as the sunlight streamed in through Lindy’s exquisite, blue stained-glass windows.”

What sadness it was to be there. What joy to recall the great things my dear godmother did at dear Clandeboye.

• The Last Marchioness: A Portrait of Lindy Dufferin, edited by Harry Mount, is available exclusively at www.heywoodhill.com or 0207 629 0647

The Lady Dufferin Opening Recital at the Clandeboye Festival will be held at the Clandeboye Banqueting Hall on Saturday, August 19, at 7.30pm,

Tickets £25/£10 from www.camerata-ireland.com