There’s a word, the British upper class used to throw around in the 20th century. A word so loaded with judgment, it could end a woman’s social life in a single syllable. Bolter. What it meant was simple and cruel. A woman who walked out on her marriage, her children, her entire aristocratic existence for another man.
Once that label got stuck on you, good luck peeling it off for the rest of your natural life. You were finished at every house weekend from Cornwall to Caithness, cut from every guest list that mattered. In 1967, a three one-year-old mother of four got branded with that word, and the British tabloids spent the next three decades treating her like she’d committed some kind of unforgivable sin against British decency.
Her name was Frances Roche and Kidd. Here’s what nobody wants to admit about that woman. The so-called bolter raised the most famous human being of the late 20th century, buried an infant son who lived 10 hours, lost her other children in a courtroom where her own mother testified against her, watched her daughter become a princess, then watched that daughter die in a Paris tunnel while the two of them weren’t speaking.
In her late 50s, she converted to Catholicism. Her final years were spent pushing wheelchairs through the grotto at Lourdes. So, yeah, bolter seems a little reductive. I’m going to tell you the story of Diana’s mother today. Not Princess Diana, her mom, a Norfolk-born aristocrat who got married off at 18, lost almost everything she loved by 35, and somehow clawed out a life on a windswept Scottish island where she sold trinkets to tourists and drove way too fast on country roads.
Frances Ruth Burke Roche, the woman history tried to flatten into a footnote. On January 20th of 1936, Frances Ruth Burke Roche was born at Park House, a big Victorian pile on the Sandringham estate, and I mean on the Sandringham estate. Like a few minutes walk from where the King of England actually lived.
Park House had been leased to her parents by King George V himself, which tells you pretty much everything you need to know about where this baby ranked in the British pecking order, born into the royal orbit, literally. Her dad, Maurice Roche, was the fourth Baron Fermoy, Conservative MP, Irish barony, the whole aristocratic package.
Ruth Gill, her mom, played piano beautifully and possessed the kind of steel spine that would one day, decades later, lead her to testify against her own daughter in a custody battle. We’ll get to that. Foreshadowing. The Roche family goes way back. Irish Catholic aristocracy in County Cork, centuries deep with the Fermoy barony kicking around since 1856.
But the more interesting part of Frances’s bloodline came from the other side of the Atlantic, because her great-grandmother was an American heiress named Frances Ellen Work. Frank Work, a New York stockbroker and the heiress’s father, did not like the British, like at all. His suspicion of European aristocrats marrying his money ran so deep that he wrote it into his will.
Any descendant who accepted a British title forfeited their inheritance. Full stop. No negotiation. Spoiler alert, they took the title anyway. Maurice Roche briefly renounced his British connections to grab the American cash, then later quietly reclaimed the Fermoy barony when the dust settled. Classic have your cake and eat it, too, aristocratic maneuvering.
You got to admire the audacity. So, that’s the family situation. Irish title, American money, a house on the royal estate, and a mom who was tight with the royals themselves. Ruth Fermoy would go on to serve as a confidante and woman of the bedchamber to Queen Elizabeth, the Queen Mother, from 1956 until her death in 1993.
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37 years of whispering in the ear of the royal matriarch. Frances grew up playing with the future Queen Elizabeth II and Princess Margaret, because that’s what you did when you lived at Park House. The royal kids would come over, or you’d go over there, and the proximity was casual and constant. An older sister named Mary and a younger brother, Edmund, who would eventually inherit the Fermoy title, rounded out the family.
But let’s be honest about who mattered in that nursery. The kids who actually counted were the ones down the road at the big house. Frances’s childhood was standard-issue British upper crust, ponies, nannies, governesses, and eventually boarding school. Downham School in Hatfield Heath, Essex, was basically a finishing institution for girls of her class, full of deportment lessons and French conjugations, and not a lot of, you know, actual education in the modern sense.
Then came Paris. Finishing school in the French capital, because what’s the point of being a baron’s daughter if you can’t order dessert in fluent Parisian? By the time she came home, she was 17, tall, blonde, strikingly pretty, and ready for the part of her life that would determine everything else.
The 1953 London season. Okay. Quick context for anyone unfamiliar. The season was this bizarre, almost feudal ritual where debutantes from aristocratic families were formally presented at court and then paraded through a series of balls and house parties for several months with the unstated but crystal-clear purpose of husband acquisition.
Think of it as in-person Tinder for the hereditary ruling class, except everyone is wearing gloves and your mother is watching. 1953 was a particularly big deal. It was also the coronation year of Queen Elizabeth II, and Frances got presented at court during the most high-profile season in a generation, which meant photographers, newspaper columns, breathless gossip about who might marry whom.
Into that circus walked a 30- year-old man named Edward John Spencer, Viscount Althorp, heir to the Earldom of Spencer, one of the most eligible bachelors in Britain. Johnny Spencer, as everyone called him, came from a family so old and so grand that it made the Roches look like new money. The Spencers had been Spencers for roughly forever, sitting on enormous estates and mountains of silverware, and Johnny himself had served as an equerry to King George VI and then to the young Queen Elizabeth II.
There’d been a brief engagement to Lady Anne Coke before that fell apart. Now, he was looking. Frances looked back. Their engagement happened fast. She was 18. 12 years separated them, with Johnny being 30. >> >> And in the context of 1950s Britain, this was mildly eyebrow-raising, but not scandalous, because aristocratic marriages tilted this way all the time.
On June 1, 1954, Westminster Abbey. Yeah, you heard that right. Westminster Abbey, the place where monarchs get crowned and buried, was where they got married. Queen Elizabeth II attended. Prince Philip, too, obviously, along with the Queen Mother, because Ruth Fermoy was her best friend in the world.
Every major player in the British aristocracy showed up, and the newspapers called it the society wedding of the year. And for once, the newspapers weren’t exaggerating. Picture an 18-year-old girl walking down the aisle of Westminster Abbey while the Queen watches from the pews. That’s the starting line for Frances’s adult life. As Viscountess Althorp, she moved into the Spencer family properties and got to work doing what 1950s aristocratic wives were expected to do, which was to produce children, preferably male children, preferably right now.
Frances delivered her first child on February 19, >> >> 1955, a girl, Sarah. A good start. Girls were fine, but the expectation was always crystal-clear, because the family needed an heir, a boy, and the title. And the estate at Althorp and the whole dynastic apparatus required male continuation.
Cynthia Jane arrived February 11, 1957. Another girl. Lovely, healthy. Also, fatally in aristocratic terms, not an heir. Now, the pressure intensified. In aristocratic families of this vintage, a woman who produced only daughters was quietly considered to be failing at her primary job. Not officially, nobody would say it to her face, but it was there in the silences and the pointed questions and the Harley Street specialists her husband would soon be booking appointments with.
On January 12, 1960, a son, John. He was named after his father. The child lived 10 hours. Medical records from the time are vague and the family kept the details fiercely private. What we know is that the baby was born with severe complications and died within the span of a work day and Frances never held her son conscious.
She woke up from anesthesia to the news. And what Johnny Spencer did next tells you everything about the marriage Frances was in. Processing his own grief in his own way, he concluded that the problem was his wife, that something was wrong with her, that her body was defective in some way.
And so, he sent her to Harley Street, the famous London medical street, where the wealthy get poked and prodded by the country’s top specialists to undergo evaluations to determine why she hadn’t produced a healthy male heir. His wife had just lost a son and his response was to have her medically investigated like a broken piece of livestock.
Who I feel worse for is genuinely a tough call. Frances being treated like a reproductive malfunction is the obvious answer. But honestly, Johnny, >> >> so encased in the expectations of his class that he couldn’t see what he was doing is also kind of tragic in his own way. Probably Frances, though.
Let’s be honest. It’s Frances. She went through the tests, endured the humiliation. On July 1, 1961, she gave birth to another daughter. Her name was Diana. Diana Frances Spencer arrived in this world as what her parents considered another failure, a consolation prize, another girl when they needed a boy.
And Frances would later reflect on how awful it was to see her newborn daughter greeted with such open disappointment in the delivery room. The most famous woman of the late 20th century, the princess whose face sold more magazines than anyone in history, was born into a room where her arrival was mourned as a setback.
Finally, on May 20, 1964, Frances delivered the longed-for son, Charles Edward Maurice Spencer, the heir, the future ninth Earl Spencer, the guy who would one day write a memoir that would recontextualize every single thing you’re about to hear. But by 1964, something had already broken in her. The marriage, the miscarriages, the treatment, the grief, all of it had taken a toll she couldn’t keep hiding.
She was still in her 22nd and she was done. Her father, Maurice Roche, died in 1955 and this created an opportunity because the lease on Park House, Frances’s childhood home on the Sandringham estate, was passed to the Spencers. So, Frances, now Viscountess Althorp, moved back into the house she’d been born in.
That should have been comforting. It wasn’t. Park House became the scene of her marriage’s slow-motion disintegration. The kids were raised there. Diana’s earliest memories were of Park House. Sarah, Jane, Diana, and Charles running around those Norfolk lawns, playing with royal cousins next door. Living what looked from the outside like a genuinely charmed childhood.
From the inside, different story entirely. Their parents were increasingly unhappy, increasingly distant, increasingly bitter, with the bitterness leaking into every room of the house by the mid-1960s. And here’s where I have to pause and tell you something important. The accounts of what went on inside that marriage are contested and the most explosive claims came out in 2024 when Charles Spencer published a memoir called A Very Private School.
In that book, he alleged that he had witnessed his father physically abuse his mother, framing her eventual departure as an act of self-preservation, not abandonment. Johnny Spencer died in 1992. The guy can’t defend himself. These allegations come from a son who was very young at the time of the events he describes, a son who has his own complicated feelings about his father, a son who also suffered horrific abuse at a boarding school his father sent him to.
Charles’s memoir is one man’s account of his own family and it deserves serious weight, but it’s also not a court record or an independently verified investigation. So, I’m going to tell you what Charles Spencer has publicly claimed and you can weigh it however you want to weigh it. The upshot, however you slice it, is that by the mid-1960s, Frances was miserable in that marriage.
It’s 1966. Peter Shand Kydd was Australian-born, heir to a successful British wallpaper business. And I know wallpaper sounds like a joke punchline, but it’s genuinely where the family fortune came from and you can make a lot of money in wallpaper if you’re in the right spot at the right time, which the Shand kids were.
He was 41, married with three kids of his own, and by every account, the guy was fun, warm, relaxed, the opposite of Johnny Spencer’s stiff-upper-lip, don’t-feel-anything aristocratic energy. Peter laughed, drank, told stories, listened when women actually spoke. Frances fell for him. Their affair began sometime in 1966 and for the first few months they kept it quiet or quietish because high society London in the 1960s was basically a village where everyone knew everyone’s business within 48 hours. Rumors circulated as they always
did. Nobody said anything out loud. Then, in late 1967, Frances did the thing aristocratic women weren’t supposed to do. She left. Packing up the two youngest children, Diana and Charles, she moved to a house in Belgravia, London, with the idea in her own mind being that this would be a trial separation, a way to sort things out with the kids going back to boarding school and her figuring out the next move.
Johnny Spencer had other ideas. Christmas 1967 came and went. The children went to Park House for the holidays to see their father and then, when Christmas was over, Johnny refused to send them back, just flat refused, packed their trunks back up for school when term started and left Frances standing in London with no kids and no legal standing whatsoever.
He’d lawyered up, filed for custody, and the custody battle was on. Okay. I need to prepare you for what’s coming because this part of Frances’s story is brutal in a way that’s hard to overstate. British wardship proceedings in the 1960s were sealed and largely still are, so we don’t have a public transcript of what happened in that courtroom.
What we have are second-hand accounts from biographers and family members that have leaked out over the decades and those accounts are not pretty. Here’s the outline. Frances expected to win custody because in her mind, >> >> the case was obvious. She was the mother, the children were young, and she was the primary caregiver, which in most modern divorces is a slam dunk.
But 1968 Britain was not modern Britain. The legal system of the time was more than willing to punish a woman who had left her marriage, especially for another man. Adultery carried serious weight in family court. Character witnesses mattered enormously. The court wanted to hear from people who knew the family intimately.
Among the people called to provide evidence was Frances’ own mother, Lady Ruth Fermoy, devoted servant of the Queen Mother, keeper of aristocratic propriety, stepped up for her son-in-law. The exact nature of her intervention has been debated by biographers for decades, but the outcome isn’t in dispute. She sided with Johnny against her own daughter.
Think about what that does to a person. You’re fighting to keep your children. You’re in a courtroom trying to prove you’re fit to raise them, and the woman who gave birth to you walks in and tells the judge you’re not. Frances lost. All four children went to Johnny with her limited visitation as the only leftover thread.
The divorce was finalized in April 1969. She was 33 years old. And the British press absolutely savaged her over and over and over. The word the papers used was bolter, a woman who had abandoned her children for another man. A cautionary tale, a character flaw dressed up as a news story. Aristocratic mothers whispered about her at dinner parties.
Guest lists pruned her out one by one. Ruth Fermoy, her own mother, stopped speaking to her for years. Meanwhile, her children were growing up at Park House. And then, after Johnny inherited the earldom in 1975, at Althorp itself, nannies raised them. Boarding schools raised them. A grieving father, whatever else you want to say about him, raised them in his own distant way.
Diana, in particular, never fully got over the loss of her mother. She told Andrew Morton in the famous biographical tapes that she remembered crying herself to sleep at Park House listening to her brother call out for a mom who wasn’t there. The crunch of her mother’s car on the gravel the night she left stayed with her forever.
Diana’s ambivalence about Frances would shape their entire relationship for the rest of both their lives. Love tangled up with resentment, tangled up with longing, tangled up with anger. On May 2, 1969, Frances married Peter Shand Kydd. Her second wedding was nothing like the first. No Westminster Abbey. No queen in the front row.
Small, private, deliberately low-key because after what she’d been through, she wanted to disappear. A farmhouse on the Isle of Seil became their home. A small island off the west coast of Scotland connected to the mainland by a single stone bridge. Seil is beautiful in that particular Scottish way, where beautiful means cold, wet, and devastatingly isolated from anything resembling London society.
The island’s population is a few hundred people. The nearest town of any size is Oban, about half an hour’s drive away on winding single-track roads. Frances loved it. Fishing for salmon became one of her great passions. And by every account, she got seriously good at it, which is way harder than it sounds and requires an almost monastic patience.
She walked the moors for hours. She drank in the local pub with farmers. Her friendships with the local fishermen and shopkeepers grew deep precisely because those people had absolutely no idea or interest in her aristocratic background. For the first time in her life, Frances was just Frances. A gift shop in Oban became her next project, selling tweed scarves and shortbread and little woolen sheep and the usual Scottish tourist fare.
She ran it herself, stood behind the counter, chatted with tourists who had no clue they were being rung up by the mother of the future Princess of Wales. This, I think, is the Frances worth spending time with, not the woman in the Westminster Abbey photos. The woman in a fisherman’s sweater, hair a mess, counting the till at a tourist shop in the Scottish Highlands while the wind hammered the harbor outside.
Her marriage to Peter was happy for about 15 years. They had a life together that nobody in her old London circles would have recognized, but it was hers, and that mattered more than recognition. Her children visited when they could. Diana, in particular, would make the trip up to Scotland when she was a teenager, and those visits became precious to Frances, who tried her best to rebuild a relationship with her daughters that had been severed in that 1968 courtroom.
Slow going, awkward at times, at least it was real. Then, in the late 1970s, something happened that pulled Frances back into the world she had spent a decade trying to escape. Diana started dating the Prince of Wales. On November 1977, Diana, 16 years old, met Prince Charles at a shoot at Althorp, where Charles was dating Diana’s older sister Sarah at the time.
>> >> You cannot make this up. Aristocratic dating pools were genuinely that small. By 1980, Charles and Diana were an item. On February 1981, they were engaged. Frances, tucked away on her Scottish island >> >> and minding her own business, got sucked back into the spotlight whether she wanted it or not.
On July 29th, 1981, the royal wedding happened at St. Paul’s Cathedral. 750 million viewers worldwide. One of the most watched events in human history. Frances attended, of course, watching her daughter become the Princess of Wales. But the seating arrangements were a logistical nightmare because she and Johnny had been divorced for over a decade and couldn’t be anywhere near each other.
The organizers split Diana’s mother and father onto opposite sides of the cathedral. Johnny walked Diana down the aisle, having suffered a severe stroke >> >> that left his health fragile. But he made it through the ceremony on sheer willpower. Frances watched from her seat. Her first grandchild, Prince William, would be born less than a year later.
Throughout the entire 1980s, Frances occupied a strange position as the mother of the most photographed woman alive, but also a divorced aristocrat who had been publicly humiliated 20 years earlier and had deliberately chosen a life away from cameras. Interviews? She didn’t do them. Quotes? She didn’t give them.
From Scotland, she watched. Diana’s marriage, meanwhile, was doing exactly what Frances’ had done, which was falling apart in slow motion. By the late 1980s, the whispers about Charles and Camilla were everywhere, along with Diana’s bulimia and her depression and her unhappiness and her isolation, all of it echoing patterns Frances herself had lived through a generation earlier.
You’d think this would bring them closer. Sometimes it did. Frances was genuinely supportive during the worst years of Diana’s marriage. But here’s the thing about Frances as a mother. She was not, by temperament, a warm and nurturing type. Diana needed someone to hold her and tell her everything would be okay.
Frances was better at telling her to buck up and go for a long walk. Both types of mothers have their virtues, but they weren’t always the mother Diana needed, and Diana sometimes said so loudly. Meanwhile, back on the Isle of Seil, the Kydd marriage was cracking up, and nobody ever got a clear public explanation of what went wrong between Frances and Peter.
What we know is that by 1988, Peter had moved out and eventually married another woman, Marie-Pierre Palmer. Their divorce was finalized in 1990. Frances, at 54, was divorced for the second time. Here’s where her life could easily have spiraled. Alone, twice divorced, estranged periodically from her now famous daughter, living on an isolated Scottish island with nobody to fish with anymore.
Instead, Frances did something nobody saw coming. In 1994, Frances officially converted to Roman Catholicism. Now, you might be thinking, “Okay, a religious conversion, not that big a deal.” But for a woman of her background, raised Church of England, closely tied to the British royal family, this was a bigger move than it sounds.
The British royals had spent 450 years being professionally not Catholic. Ruth Fermoy, Frances’ own mother, was a pillar of Anglican propriety who had spent four decades at the Queen Mother’s side. Converting to Catholicism was Frances quietly telling her old world to get lost. She took it seriously. Her Catholicism then channeled into a specific charity that became the center of her later life.
The HCPT, the Pilgrimage Trust, is a British Catholic charity that organizes pilgrimages to Lourdes for sick and disabled children. Every year, volunteers take thousands of kids to the French shrine town where a 12-year-old girl named Bernadette claimed in 1858 to have seen the Virgin Mary and the grotto there became a place of pilgrimage for the sick who go hoping for healing.
Frances threw herself into HCPT with the kind of energy she’d once spent on salmon fishing. Year after year, she went to Lourdes even as her own health started to decline, pushing the wheelchairs of disabled children through the narrow streets of the town. Every single volunteer who worked with her in those years tells the same story.
She refused special treatment. Frances Shand Kidd, née Roche, debutante of 1953, mother of the Princess of Wales, in a rain slicker pushing a kid in a wheelchair through a French town because she believed it mattered. I don’t know what you believe about any of this religiously, but as character development, not too shabby.
All right, let’s pump the brakes and acknowledge that Frances was not a saint because she wasn’t and she’d probably be the first person to tell you so. A complicated woman with complicated habits, one of which was driving way too fast on Scottish country roads while under the influence. >> >> In 1996, she pleaded guilty to drink-driving in Scotland, earned a 14-month driving ban, and paid a substantial fine.
Her incident became a national news story because of who she was, which she hated bitterly. For a woman who had spent decades trying to stay out of the papers, having her name splashed across every front page because she’d blown over the limit was a humiliation she genuinely didn’t deserve, but she’d brought it on herself and she knew it.
She took the punishment without complaint, served out her ban by getting friends to drive her around the island, and paid the fine in full. Local Oban court officials reportedly said she was one of the more well-behaved celebrity defendants they’d dealt with, which, frankly, is not a high bar when you consider the field. Diana’s marriage to Prince Charles had been officially over since August 1996, and the divorce settlement had stripped her of the HRH style, meaning she was no longer technically her Royal Highness, just Diana, Princess of Wales. A
demotion in royal protocol terms that generated enormous tabloid noise on both sides of the Atlantic. Frances, now 61, gave an interview to Hello! magazine on the topic of her daughter’s divorce, and in that interview, she said something that I think she genuinely believed was supportive, but which Diana experienced as a knife >> >> in the back.
Her mother told the magazine she thought it was absolutely wonderful >> >> that Diana had lost the HRH, framing the loss as liberating, arguing that now her daughter could find her own identity. Now she could stop being defined by the royal family. >> >> Now she could just be Diana. From Frances’s own perspective, this was a reasonable thing to say because she herself had spent her life trying to escape the constraints of aristocratic identity, and she saw the loss of the title as an opportunity rather than a wound. Diana
did not see it that way. She felt publicly demeaned by her own mother, and she reacted the way she often reacted when she felt betrayed, which was to cut off contact completely. Their phone calls that spring and summer got worse. The mother-daughter relationship, which had already been fragile since 1968 for reasons you now understand, finally shattered. Then came August 31, 1997.
I don’t need to tell you this part of the story. Everyone knows this part. Princess Diana died in a car crash in the Pont de l’Alma tunnel in Paris in the early hours of August 31, 1997 at 36 years old. Frances and Diana had not spoken in months. The two of them had not spoken in months, and they would never speak again because somebody had to call Frances on Seil Island in the middle of the night and tell her that her daughter was dead, and that the last conversation they’d had was a fight. I cannot imagine
what that phone call was like. I genuinely don’t want to try. Charles Spencer, Frances’s son, would later give the eulogy at Diana’s funeral at Westminster Abbey, the same cathedral where his mother had been married 43 years earlier. Frances attended, stone-faced, British stoic to the end because that’s what her generation did at funerals for daughters.
Her relationship with William and Harry continued quietly in the years after. Occasional visits at Eaton or Highgrove, private conversations that never made the papers because she refused to talk about them. Of all the things she managed to protect from the tabloids, her grandsons topped the list, but the years after Diana’s death were hard because Frances was dealing with the loss, with her estrangement, with the public autopsy of Diana’s life that went on and on and on and on for what felt like the rest of the decade.
On October 2002, Frances, now 66, got called to testify at the theft trial of Paul Burrell, Diana’s former butler. Burrell stood accused of stealing items from Diana’s estate. The trial became a tabloid circus in which every detail of Diana’s private life got dragged back into public view, and Frances had to take the stand.
Under cross-examination, she was forced to discuss the breakdown of her relationship with Diana, confirming under oath that they had not spoken for months before Diana’s death, responding to claims from aides that she had been verbally abusive on the phone during those final conversations, claims she vehemently denied, but which were now part of the court record.
The damage was done regardless of what she said. The whole painful last chapter of her relationship with her daughter was back on the front page. The trial itself collapsed in November 2002 when the Queen suddenly recalled a conversation that exonerated Burrell. An absolute farce of an ending to a case that should never have been brought in the first place, but Frances had already been put through the wringer, and there was no putting that back.
Frances was sick for longer than the public knew. Parkinson’s disease came first, then sometime in the early 2000s, she was diagnosed with a brain tumor. She continued to live at her home in Callanish on the Isle of Seil, continued for as long as she could to participate in parish life at the Catholic church in Oban, and continued to refuse interview requests from every newspaper in Britain.
On June 3, 2004, Frances Shand Kidd died at home. She was 68. Her funeral was held on June the 1st at the Cathedral Church of Saint Columba in Oban, a gray stone building overlooking the harbor where she’d run her shop for so many years. Princes William and Harry attended. Charles Spencer came with his sisters Sarah and Jane.
Prince Charles, notably, did not come. Frances was buried at Pennyfuir Cemetery on the outskirts of Oban. If you go there today, her grave is simple. A stone, a name, dates. That’s it. No Westminster Abbey funeral for her, no royal carriage, just a Scottish burial in the town where she’d run her gift shop for 30 years, attended by the neighbors and family members who had actually known her rather than the avatar the tabloids had constructed.
It’s the funeral she would have wanted. It’s the funeral she got. Okay, let me try to answer the hard question. Who was Frances Shand Kidd? The tabloid version said she was a bolter, a woman who walked out on four kids for a wallpaper heir, >> >> a selfish aristocrat who got what was coming to her. The revisionist version, which has gained ground, especially since Charles Spencer’s 2024 memoir, casts her as a survivor, a woman fleeing an abusive marriage, a victim of a patriarchal legal system that punished her for leaving.
Both of these versions have truth in them. Neither of them is the whole story. The Frances I come away with after reading everything I could find about her is more layered than either of those takes allow. She was, first and foremost, an ordinary woman born into extraordinary circumstances, which is actually the opposite of the usual biographical frame, where we say the subject is an extraordinary person in ordinary circumstances.
Frances was not a genius, not a world historical figure, just a reasonably smart, reasonably athletic, reasonably good-looking British girl who happened to be born at Park House instead of in a terraced house in Newcastle. That accident of birth put her on a track she did not choose and could not really escape until she finally forced the issue at 31. She made bad decisions.
Marrying at 18 was a bad decision. Having an affair while married was an ethically ambiguous one. The Hello interview in 1997 was tone-deaf and hurt her daughter badly. Her drink-driving >> >> in 1996 was dangerous and wrong. She was capable of being cold and her children, especially Diana, sometimes experienced her as emotionally unavailable in ways that left marks.
But she also had real courage. Leaving Johnny Spencer in 1967 took nerve, whatever the exact trigger was. Living through the custody loss without completely falling apart took nerve. Rebuilding her life in Scotland took nerve. Converting to Catholicism at 58 and spending her remaining years pushing wheelchairs through Lourdes took a kind of quiet moral seriousness that you don’t usually find in fallen debutantes.
And she had enormous, unglamorous dignity. No tell-all memoir, no paid interviews, no cashing in on being Diana’s mother when she could have made millions doing so. Year after year, when the chance came to become a tabloid fixture, she went back to her island and ran her shop. The phrase that keeps coming back to me, reading her own words, is something she said in one of her rare interviews.
I am not a recluse. I just like my own company. That’s maybe the closest thing to a self-description Frances ever gave. After everything the press did to her, after everything the aristocracy did to her, after everything the courts and her own mother and her first husband and her second husband and her most famous daughter did to her, she just wanted to be left alone with her salmon rod and her rosary and her Scottish weather.
I told you at the start that the British upper class used to throw around the word bolter >> >> like it settled the question of a woman’s worth. It didn’t. Frances Shand Kydd was a complicated woman, not a saint, not a victim, not a villain, just a human being who lived through an amount of loss that would break most people and who kept going anyway, mostly quietly, mostly on her own terms, mostly in a place where the press couldn’t reach her.
She raised, partly at a distance, the most famous woman of the late 20th century, buried a son who lived 10 hours, lost three more children to a sealed courtroom in 1968, outlived her second daughter in the worst possible way a parent can, died of two diseases at once >> >> in a stone house on a Scottish island in 2004.
Through all of it, she found a gift shop in Oban and a grotto at Lourdes and a salmon river in the Highlands and a faith she had not been born into and she built a life on the rubble of the one that was taken from her. Her grandsons, William and Harry, still speak warmly about their grandmother on the rare occasions they mention her at all, which isn’t often, because the family learned long ago not to feed the tabloid machine.
William is now the Prince of Wales, holding the title Diana held, a title that in some chain of cosmic bureaucracy Frances’s great-great-grandfather Frank Work would have absolutely hated. Frances would have thought that was funny, I think. Her sense of humor was dry, the kind that comes from watching your own life get misreported in the papers for 50 straight years.
There’s one detail I want to leave you with because it keeps sticking with me. When Frances was dying, in the last months of her life, she was too sick to travel to Lourdes anymore. A decade of annual pilgrimages, pushing the wheelchairs and singing the songs and believing whatever she believed about the water and the grotto and the Virgin Mary, and then in 2004, she couldn’t make the trip.
So her friends from HCPT, the volunteers she had worked alongside for years, sent her a little container of water from Lourdes. They brought it all the way back to Seil Island, gave it to her at home. She kept it by her bed until she died. A woman who had finally found something to hold on to after a lifetime of losing things and who held on to it all the way to the grave at Pennyfuir.
Thanks for watching this one. It took me longer than usual to research because the sources on Frances are scattered and contradictory and many of the people who knew her best are no longer around to ask. If I got something wrong or if you have a family story or a local memory of Frances from the Oban years, drop it in the comments. I read them.
