by Princess Diana’s aunt, Mary Roche, surprisingly left a modest estate of £425,983 when her will was published this week. Ten months after the nobleman’s death in March 2023, at the age of 88, the implication is that Roche somehow suffered a financial collapse due to friendship.
What happened to Belgravia’s mansions in the past? How could a woman whose family was closely linked to the Royal family for a long time, and who once ferried safari passengers around Kenya in her own plane, leave no part of her financial estate to her two daughters? , Anya and Jo? Daughters who, despite their ancestors, lived modestly on a housing estate in Frome, Somerset, until recently.
She bequeathed only her son, Edward, and her eldest daughter, Alexandra, which some unkindly interpreted as evidence of family discord.
Why there was naysaying and shaking of heads I cannot understand – especially when aristo penury is common these days. Of course, penury is a relative term, but hardly any aristocrats lead the life of extravagance and elegance that once defined them.
Instead, they rush around their stately homes trying to prevent leaking roofs or airing damp drawing rooms before hiring them for corporate shindigs and weddings. It’s just Silicon Valley billionaires, Indian maharajas and new money with the likes of Michelle Mone and her husband, Doug Barrowman, with their superyacht, Fatima Mannan and Mayfair homes teaming up with security and staff who can live like the nobles had.
Roche sounds like a cracking character. Her nephew, Earl Spencer, wrote about her aunt on Instagram, “Aunt Mary was many things – a free spirit; intellectual; an adventurer; and above all, an inspiration of great fun to all generations of her family.”
Instead of critics noting that she left two of her daughters out of her will, the explanation given by her son Edward to the Daily Mail that “my mother gave my sisters different things at different times and, to be fair, that’s how it ended up,” makes sense. Aristocratic possessions, such as rare paintings or objet d’arts, can be as personally meaningful as they are financially valuable.
Mary Cynthia Burke Roche was born in Peterculter, near Aberdeen, in 1934. She was the eldest daughter of Maurice Roche, the 4th Baron Fermoy and his wife Ruth. Queen Mary was her godmother and her mother, Lady Fermoy, was part of the Queen Mother’s family.
It was Lady Fermoy and the Queen Mother who inspired the idea that Mary’s niece, Diana Spencer, would be a suitable bride for Prince Charles. Diana’s mother was the sister of Mary Frances, and they had a brother, Edmund Roche, who became the 5th Baron Fermoy.
Fermoy and the Royals were so intertwined that Mary’s father, Maurice, rented Park House, Sandringham from the Royal family and was photographed with George VI at Sandringham on the day before the King’s death in 1952.
As was often the case among the aristocracy, Mary’s grandfather married into enormous American wealth. Cash for British titles. Pure The Golden Age. James, 3rd Baron Fermoy, married the American heiress Frances Ellen Work in New York in 1880. Mary Roche’s father, Maurice, and his twin brother, Frank, were raised among the rarefied society of Newport, Rhode Island.
The American aristocracy. Her maternal grandfather, Frank Work, made his fortune working with the famous businessman Cornelius Vanderbilt, who made his fortune building railroads and shipping.
A condition of Maurice’s inheritance was that he keep the name “Work” instead of “Roche” and refrain from traveling to Europe or marrying a European. He clashed with both when he succeeded to the peerage of Fermoy in 1920, moved back to Britain and in 1931 married Mary’s mother, Ruth.
The Society’s interior designer, Nicky Haslam, was a school friend of Mary’s brother, Edmund, at Eton. “The Roches were not rich by the standards of their American relations,” he says. “They had a wonderful house, Eddington House in Hungerford, which I remember well.
“Like so many members of the aristocracy, they would have valuable objets d’art passed down the generations but not mountains of silver.”
Mary studied at Heathfield and my alma mater, St Paul’s School for Girls. She came out as a delegate in 1952. Two years later, she married the Honorable Anthony Berry, son of the newspaper publisher, James Gomer Berry, 1st Viscount Kemsley who owned the newspaper. Daily Telegraph as part of his portfolio. The Queen Mother was a guest at the wedding at St Margaret’s Church, Westminster.
Lady Fermoy from her two daughters married well. Mary’s marriage took place only five months after her younger sister, Frances, had married Viscount Althorp, later the 8th Earl of Spencer, at Westminster Abbey. Queen Elizabeth II, Prince Philip, the Queen Mother and princesses Margaret and Anne were present when Diana’s mother married her father.
Máire had four children with Berry. During her early marriage she lived in Wilton Crescent, she moved to Chester Terrace in Regent’s Park in the sixties after her marriage failed. Sadly, in 1967, her sister, Frances also left her husband after 13 years of marriage.
The scandal of society affected the family when Frances began a relationship with Peter Shand Kydd, heir to a wallpaper fortune in Australia. Frances was labeled “the other woman” by his wife, Janet Shand Kydd.
It must have been a particularly difficult time for the Roche sisters when, in 1969, their mother, Ruth, gave evidence against her own daughter, Frances, in her divorce proceedings. This enabled Diana’s father to gain custody of his children when Diana was eight years old.
Diana’s deep fear of abandonment was understandable, creating complexity in their mother-daughter relationship.
When Diana married Prince Charles in 1981, her aunt Mary’s views were clear. She thought her niece looked “unhappy” at the pre-wedding reception. Máire was skeptical about the union. “They were at very different stages of development,” she once said.
“Diana was young and had limited life experience, and Prince Charles was already a great thinker. He read a lot. They were different people, maybe.”
Another tragedy happened to Mary when her brother Edmund took his own life, when he was only 45 years old. Mary was waiting for him to celebrate her 50th birthday party when the depressed Lord Fermoy shot himself.
By then Mary had moved towards academia. A mature student in her late thirties, she graduated in classics from University College London. She met Denis Geoghegan, a divorce tutor. They were married in 1973. The union did not last as Geoghegan prioritized his thesis and his flute over his wife. Their marriage was dissolved in 1980 and Geoghegan went on to become a monk.
Mary retrained as a teacher in her forties. She worked in a school in Camberwell, South London. She married in 1981 for the third time, to Michael Gunningham, head of Classics at a Jesuit school in north London. After eight years, peace prevailed and the couple divorced.
Her nephew, Earl Spencer, said at her funeral: “Aunt Mary’s boundless love of life was summed up by her declaration, the day before she died, that she was going to go on to write her memoirs. It would be a great story.” Gentiles. It would be a textbook story about the punishment of the nobles.
