The following obituary written by Alistair Lexden was published anonymously — as is the custom – in The Daily Telegraph on 10 March, with some editorial amendments. The piece was illustrated by a wedding picture and one of a state visit to Hungary with the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh in 1993.
DIANA, LADY FARNHAM, who has died aged 90, combined immense charm with a sharp mind and great organisational skill.
Her wedding photographs show how very beautiful she was as a young woman. She retained her striking good looks, accompanied by great poise and elegance of bearing, until the end of her life.
For more than 30 years, she placed her talents unreservedly at the service of the Queen as a Lady of the Bedchamber. Once a political appointment (Robert Peel famously rejected the premiership in 1839 when Queen Victoria refused to replace her Whig Ladies), the post had long since become entirely administrative and ceremonial. The task of looking after the royal clothes passed to others. The principal duties came to involve accompanying the Queen on official visits and providing her with support and companionship.
It was a role for which Diana Farnham, with her gifts for friendship and unerring loyalty, was well fitted. Appointed in 1987, she was made a Dame Commander of the Royal Victorian Order (DCVO) in 2010, and was still in the Queen’s service at the time of her death.
The work was not free from hazard. At one grand occasion, there was a mighty crash. A large vase of gladioli had fallen on her. The Queen looked at her with concern from across the room. She responded with a vigorous thumbs- up.
Her close and affectionate relationship with the Queen was demonstrated memorably at the Diamond Jubilee Service of Thanksgiving at St Paul’s Cathedral in June 2012. The Duke of Edinburgh was in hospital. The Queen asked Diana Farnham to accompany her in the royal Bentley. After the service they proceeded to the Mansion House for a reception, and then on to Westminster Hall for lunch.
She was born Diana Marion Gunnis on May 24 1931, the elder of two sisters, into a family with Glaswegian roots. She spent her early years at Sissinghurst in Kent, where Harold Nicolson and Vita Sackville-West were near- neighbours. Her father, Major Nigel Eric Murray Gunnis of the Royal Artillery, fought in North Africa and Italy during the Second World War before becoming part of the British Military Mission to Romania.
From her mother, Elizabeth, neé Morrison, a strong-minded woman with a tendency to domineer, she inherited Irish connections through descent from the Hills, Marquesses of Downshire. Her parents divorced, and she spent much of her childhood, not altogether happily, with her mother at Codicote in Hertfordshire.
From the fashionable Hatherop Castle School in the Cotswolds, she went on to the egalitarian-sounding House of Citizenship, which was in fact a finishing school for young ladies.
Her natural intelligence was sharpened, and her appreciation of the arts enhanced, by assisting her charming bachelor uncle, Rupert Gunnis, the art historian, with the research for his well-regarded Dictionary of British Sculptors 1660-1851, published in 1953.
A blissfully happy marriage in 1959 strengthened her Irish links. Barry Maxwell, the 12th Baron Farnham, inherited his Irish title from his grandfather, as a result of the early death of his father, Somerset Maxwell, Conservative MP for King’s Lynn, who was fatally wounded at El Alamein in 1942. She later inherited a cottage from her grandmother at Burnham Overy Staithe on the Norfolk coast, which she called her “seaside escape”. Since it was close to Sandringham, it was probably not altogether an escape during her long years of royal service.
The young Farnhams had to face up to the challenge posed by the large run-down remnant of the once enormous Irish family estate, some 26,000 acres in 1870, in Co. Cavan, now close to the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic.
Farnham House itself was in a perilous state. They enlisted Claud (later Lord) Phillimore, an expert in reducing the size of huge, uneconomic Irish mansions. All went well until he proposed to build an entirely new staircase instead of moving a splendid James Wyatt creation from a part of the house that was to be demolished. Wyatt carried the day.
In the remodelled but still substantial house, Diana Farnham created an interior that combined modern comfort with restrained grandeur. It became a much-loved family home, particularly when the Farnhams’ two adopted daughters were young and spent much time there with her. They were joined by Barry Farnham when he could get away from his work as one of London’s leading merchant bankers and his duties as the second most senior Freemason in the country. As the years went by, however, it became increasingly difficult for them to find time for visits.
On the death of her husband in 2001, Diana Farnham decided reluctantly that she would have to sell their Irish home, which is now part of a luxury hotel and leisure complex. She took care, however, to place the large and important collection of Farnham family portraits on long loan in the Cavan County Museum to ensure that the family connection with this part of Ireland, stretching back 330 years, was not forgotten.
In 2011 the Queen paid her historic state visit to Ireland, the first by a British monarch since most of the country gained independence in 1922. The most Irish of her Ladies was on duty by her side throughout this hugely successful occasion. Her many Irish friends always said that she owed her wonderful turn of phrase and sense of humour to the ancestry which she shared with them.
She undertook a great deal of public work outside the royal sphere . She helped to settle refugees who fled from Hungary when the Soviet Union invaded their country in 1956. She served as a magistrate in east London for many years. A passionate devotee of ballet, she took a deep interest in the work of the Dance Teachers’ Benevolent Fund, of which she was vice-president, and was a huge supporter of the English National Ballet. She was a trustee of the British Kidney Patient Association and patron of Friends of the Elderly, a not-for-profit charity that runs care homes in seven counties.
Fun, she always said, was an essential ingredient of life. She strummed her guitar with gusto, and danced to Sinatra or Pinky & Perky. In her later years she would rush with her daughters and grandchildren to the shore by her Norfolk home to watch them sailing or shrimping, activities which she had enjoyed in her youth.
The twinkle in her eye never faded. “Pop out and get a bottle of whisky”, she said to her devoted young priest from the Chapel Royal when she was in hospital, pressing a £20 note into his hand. “I am an hour closer to eternity and it may not be available there.”
She is survived by her two daughters .
Diana, Lady Farnham, born May 24 1931, died December 29 2021
