My kind of nanny

Every once in a while I find myself inside the Wikipedia maze, clicking link after link of British history going back to The Conqueror and even before. There’s just so much of it, most of it quite remarkable and sometimes I get lost.

It doesn’t much help that they’re still making it. I was browsing the BBC news feed this morning over breakfast and saw this item about poor Lady Diana and her travails within the House Royal. It’s sad, really. The frightened wanderings of lonely, isolated mind, trapped in a hostile Court of Saint James.

With apologies though, that sort of thing is not really my cup of tea, so I mostly skimmed until my eyes came to rest on this:

Diana also thought both she and Camilla Parker Bowles, now the Duchess of Cornwall, were to be “put aside” in favour of royal nanny Tiggy Legge-Bourke.

Who among us could become aware for the first time of the existence a “Tiggy Legge-Bourke” – a royal nanny for whom Charles might overthrow not just Diana Spencer but also Camilla Parker Bowles – and not have their curiousity piqued.

Not I.

Further research reveals that Ms. Legge-Bourke was considered not quite the thing by some in the Court, although her distaff relationship to the delightfully hyphenated Richard Grosvenor Plunkett-Ernle-Erie-Drax surely ought to have counted for something among the blue bloods.

Still, I like to make my own mind up about such things, and it was this quote that won a spot for Tiggy Legge-Bourke in my heart:

“She gives [her children] a tennis racket and a bucket of popcorn at the movies,” she was reported as saying of Diana, whereas “I give them what they need at this stage.” Friendship, affection and intellectual stimulation? Nope: “Fresh air, a rifle and a horse.”

That’s a keeper.