The Dowager Countess of Strathmore and Kinghorne, gregarious chatelaine of Glamis Castle

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09-05-2025

The Dowager Countess of Strathmore and Kinghorne, who has died aged 92, succeeded with her husband in turning Glamis Castle into a liveable family home, and later into one of Scotland's leading tourist attractions.
When in 1956 she married Captain Fergus Bowes Lyon, a first cousin of Queen Elizabeth II, the castle of Glamis – childhood home of the Queen Mother – was not an inheritance she was expecting. It had passed to the Queen Mother's eldest brother Patrick, who became the 15th Earl, and then to his son Timothy, the 16th Earl.
But when Timothy died unexpectedly in 1972, aged 54, the next in line was his first cousin Fergus (son of another brother of the Queen Mother), who by then was working as a stockbroker in Edinburgh; he duly succeeded as the 17th Earl of Strathmore and Kinghorne.
The many-turreted Glamis Castle in the Vale of Strathmore had been in the Lyon family for 600 years, although for much of the 18th and 19th centuries the family had deserted Glamis in favour of more comfortable houses in Co Durham and Hertfordshire. By the 1890s, however, the high baronial drama of the neglected castle was back in favour, with the family installed in a new Victorian wing.
But the house was less well-suited to family life in the 1970s. As Mary Strathmore put it in a later lecture, 'Glamis was a daunting prospect for any woman to contemplate. It was a very long time since it had been a happy family home.' Her five-year-old daughter Diana summed up the general mood succinctly when she announced: 'I am not going to sleep in that horrible old castle.'
Briefly daunted, and sad to abandon their happy home in East Lothian, Mary Strathmore sat in the warmth by the sundial at Glamis, felt suffused with peace and decided: 'On we go.' From that point, her resolve never wavered.
The first problem to be tackled was that there was no division between the public and private sides of the castle, which left the family with no privacy. Another was that the kitchen, as she put it, 'had to be seen to be believed'. Moreover, all food had to be carried up a spiral stone staircase to be consumed on the floor above. There was no entrance hall: 'only a gloomy back passage leading from a garage'.
They enlisted the architect James Dunbar-Nasmith who transformed the rambling back regions into a sensible private dwelling. A garage was demolished to create a new porch; the old boiler room became their front hall; the mouldering kitchen became an office for Lord Strathmore; and a new kitchen was made on the floor above, near their dining room.
Mary and her children recalled those three years of building work as a very happy time, exorcising the gloomy spirit of the house and filling it with cheerful bustle. 'There seemed to be a transistor radio going in every room,' she recalled.
The family moved in at Easter in 1975, and next set about making the castle more amenable to its thousands of annual visitors. A high-powered time and motion study was commissioned, but when Mary Strathmore asked Bert Tosh, who had worked at the castle for decades, what he thought of its suggestions, he replied: 'I don't know about all those statistics but what I do know is that the public wants tea and toilets, and in that order!'
They were soon nicknamed 'Strathmore and Tosh', in homage to Steptoe and Son, for their energetic clearing of detritus from top to bottom of the castle. They transformed the enormous 18th-century kitchen into a tearoom, and gathered interesting objects – including the brooch that the future George VI had given to his bridesmaids when he married Lady Elizabeth Bowes Lyon – into a little exhibition room.
Indefatigable, cheerful and a perennial tidier, she was extraordinarily friendly, habitually inviting people with whom she had fallen into conversation at bus stops to 'do come and see Glamis'. She was taken at her word by a good many of these new acquaintances, and she maintained long correspondences with several.
Among her more exotic correspondents were several Nasa astronauts, who had come into her orbit in her capacity as president of the Tayside Space School. One, Colonel Jim Reilly, was married at Glamis – at Mary Strathmore's urging – and presented the chapel with a Celtic cross made out of metal that had been to outer space.
Another, Colonel Alvin Drew, tried to ring Mary Strathmore at home in 2011 from the International Space Station during the shuttle Discovery's final flight, and ended up leaving a message on her answering machine.
'I think I must be the only granny in Great Britain who has had a call from outer space, which my grandchildren thought was pretty cool,' she observed.
The youngest of three children, Mary Pamela McCorquodale was born on May 31 1932 at her grandparents' house in London. Her father was Brigadier Norman McCorquodale MC, of the McCorquodale printing family; her mother was Barbara, née de Knoop.
Having lived near Edinburgh before the war, the family moved south when her father inherited Winslow Hall in Buckinghamshire, one of very few private houses attributed to Sir Christopher Wren. It was later requisitioned by the RAF, and Mary recalled wandering into the stable block to hear the whirr of their machines. While her father was away serving with the Scottish Horse, her mother ran their dairy farm, and Mary later described her 'war work' as milking the cows.
Mary had lessons at home with a governess before being sent aged 13 to school at Brondesbury-at-Stocks near Tring. After a few months in Paris to improve her French, she attended the Wychlea House of Domestic Science, where she enjoyed bicycling around the city and following the Christ Church & New College Beagles.
On a voyage to America with friends aged 20, she had shared a cabin at sea with a woman who advised her that she would be good at 'public relations'. She never knew what that was, but as chatelaine of Glamis she later discovered she had something of a genius for it, and recalled that stranger's prophesy.
In 1987, however, her husband Fergus died of a heart attack, aged 58. The role she had never sought, but had found such a flair for, was suddenly redundant. Her son Mikie suggested she should carry on as before for another five years, rather than any abrupt transition, a gesture she much appreciated. In 1991 she moved to the dower house at Glamis, where she spent a happy 18 years, before moving to Melrose in the Borders to be closer to her daughters.
A pillar of the county of Angus, she was Deputy Lieutenant in 1989, and a doughty supporter of numerous good causes including the Multiple Sclerosis Society, Age Concern, Cancer Relief, the Day Care Committee for the Elderly, the Nursing Benevolent Fund, the Brittle Bone Society and the Child Psychotherapy Trust.
She enjoyed the theatre and theatrical life, and was delighted to befriend the crews whenever the BBC came to film at Glamis. She was also a supporter of the Whitehall Theatre, Tayside Symphony Orchestra and the National Theatre of Scotland.
One friend recalled her as 'a walking treasury of history, life, experience and wisdom.' Having been steered away from formal examinations as a child, she was very proud in 2002 to be created an honorary Doctor of Laws by Dundee University.
She is survived by her two daughters, Lady Elizabeth Leeming and Lady Diana Godfrey-Faussett; her son, the 18th Earl of Strathmore and Kinghorne, died in 2016.
The Dowager Countess of Strathmore and Kinghorne, born May 31 1932, died April 28 2025
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