231027 Collection Digital Cover 1 - Flipbook - Page 136
“All he wanted from the discovery of the tomb was to write
a book that would be accessible to everyone, with Howard
Carter providing the drawings. But he died before he was
able to do so… So, I tried to write it for him.”
It is the story of the 5th Earl that brings me to Highclere: 2023 marks
the Centenary of the official opening of Tutankhamun’s tomb when,
on 18th February, in the presence of the Carnarvons, Carter, the Queen
of Belgium, Lord and Lady Allenby, and assorted dignitaries, the seal
to the holy of holies was broken. Lady Carnarvon’s fifth and latest book
about Highclere and her husband’s family, The Earl and the Pharaoh,
relates the story of this remarkable amateur archaeologist, sportsman
and eccentric. “All he wanted from the discovery of the tomb was to
write a book that would be accessible to everyone, with Howard Carter
providing the drawings. But he died before he was able to do so,”
she tells me. “So, I tried to write it for him.”
It is a page-turner, entertaining snippets peppering the Egyptian
narrative. We meet a bon vivant Earl who enjoyed opera, sailing,
cricket, horse-racing, photography and motor-racing, and who
supported Geoffrey de Havilland in his early Heath-Robinson attempts
at flight. An eccentric, who was evicted from the Royal Enclosure at
Ascot by Edward VII for his unorthodox attire and who, the third man
in England to possess a motor car, was also the first to incur a speeding
ticket. (His younger half-brother was no less colourful a character,
and the inspiration for Sandy in John Buchan’s Greenmantle. Working
in the Intelligence Service, he was twice offered the Crown of Albania,
and telegrammed asking whether he should accept. The Earl’s answer
was succinct: No – Stop – Carnarvon. The role eventually fell to King Zog).
It was the Earl’s passion for Egyptology, however, that takes centre stage.
And that he was able to indulge this passion, from 1905 until his death
in 1923, was in no small part due to his wife, Almina – the illegitimate
daughter of the fabulously wealthy Alfred de Rothschild who, as part
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of her dowry, bestowed twice yearly payments of £12,000 (roughly £1.5
million today) on the Earl. It was a timely windfall, as the Earl was then
in debt to the tune of some £150,000 (£21 million).
Theirs was, nevertheless, very much a love match, with the Countess
frequently accompanying her husband to Egypt, where they stayed
at the Winter Palace Hotel, in Luxor. While the 5th Earl supervised
his first dig (which unearthed a mummified cat), his collaboration
with Howard Carter at various sites in Thebes, from 1907 onwards,
would yield treasures dating from the 12th to the 20th Dynasties.
Yet the discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb almost evaded the pair.
When, in 1914, the American archaeologist, Theodore Davis abandoned
his concession for the Valley of the Kings, thinking there was nothing
left to be found in the area, the licence was acquired by Lord Carnarvon.
Due to inscriptions that had been found, both he and Carter believed
the tomb of the little-known boy-Pharaoh, Tutankhamun, lay in the
area of the tomb of Rameses VI. But the Great War intervened.
Almina turned Highclere into a hospital for wounded soldiers (it was
visited by Lord Kitchener, and Julian Fellowes, Downton’s creator and
husband of Kitchener’s great-great-niece, unfolds a similar story line
in the series). Carnarvon did not return to Egypt until 1919, in somewhat
straitened circumstances. In 1922, at Carter’s urging, he reluctantly
agreed to finance one last dig. The rest, as they say, is history.
