A meal fit for a king in waiting

You could argue that the last time the nation felt a sense of collective happiness was on July 29, 1981. That sunny summer's day most of us were wholly and joyfully absorbed in the wedding of Charles and Diana, an event whose fairytale quality seems to grow with the passing of time and the hindsight which tells us it was downhill from then on.

After the day's pageant had passed its resounding climax, the newly-weds prepared to return to Romsey in Hampshire to begin their honeymoon at Broadlands. It's where the Queen and Prince Philip began their honeymoon too.

The couple take the train from London and are met at the station by the Queen's chauffeur who drives them to the old home of the Queen's cousin Lord Mounbatten.

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So the scene is set. It's 6pm and one person is nervously waiting in the Marble Entrance Hall to open Broadlands' front door to the two people who are the object of the world's rapt attention.

She is Betty Thornton from Leeds. The door swings open and Betty, standing in the doorway, has her big moment. She curtseys. "Welcome your Royal Highnesses." Prince Charles sweeps in and says of his new wife, "Isn't she beautiful – and am I a lucky man?" Then he spins round and his first question is, "has Vic videoed it?" Vic is the butler, charged with recording the day's television wedding coverage. Vic and Betty, plus two others, are the only Broadlands staff present. The house's owners, Lord and Lady Romsey, have departed for London for the Royal Wedding and left the house for three days to the Royal newly-weds.

Betty descends to her basement kitchen, an oasis of calm in a house which for weeks has been under siege by the world's media and is bristling with tension and security men. She stands by the long wooden table and no longer feels nervous because she knows exactly what to do. Over the past nine months Lady Diana Spencer has been a regular weekend guest here and by now her favourite foods and those of Prince Charles are known.

Betty had sat with both of them the previous weekend at this same table for a jolly conference about the post-wedding cooking arrangements. The menus had been discussed and the watchwords were informality and flexibility. As Betty begins to prepare the food, Vic hurries down to tell her of a change of plan. So as not to break the mood of this momentous day, Charles and Diana are to eat outside on the portico in the warm twilight. The first course for the first meal of the honeymoon goes out and Betty waits for news about how it's been received. Vic and Bryan the footman return and say, "Marvellous. HRH is serenading Princess Diana with Moonlight Becomes You".

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Time flies. The washing up is done, the kitchen tidied, the floor mopped. Betty climbs up the steps out of the basement, lets herself out of the North Door and savouring the happiness of the day and her part in bringing it to a perfect conclusion, walks under the stars to her flat over the garage at Broadlands.

Betty's professional journey started in a different setting. It's 1930 this time, the surroundings are the family kitchen in a Victorian terrace house near the Hyde Park Picture House in Leeds. Four year-old Betty Foster stands on a stool to watch her mother bake bread and a lifetime's passion for cooking begins to rise up like the warm dough resting on the hearth.

At the start of the Second World War the Fosters move to Bradford where Betty's father, a wool man, stands day-in, day-out, in exactly the same spot at the Wool Exchange as the representative of Priestley's Ltd. The kitchen at home becomes Betty's territory when she's 14 after her mother falls ill. Her skills are fostered at school, Pudsey Grammar, which takes domestic science seriously and she studies the subject for her school certificate. In wartime, putting tasty food on the table means making much of little. Betty learns more about getting the upmost from her ration coupons by attending cookery demonstrations at Bradford's gas showrooms. In 1943 a teenager called John Thornton walks into her life. Their first meeting? In her kitchen of course. John has made a bit of a name for himself as a sculptor and Betty shares his artistic leanings. Her other passion, following her father this time, is textiles. She studies at Bradford School of Art and hurries home after lectures to do the family's cooking. After college Betty freelances as a textile designer and marries John after his demob from the army in 1948. He has an army education grant to study sculpture in London and his new wife, who by now had a job as a lecturer at Bradford School of Art, gives it up to join him. In 1951 with John's studies completed – and now with the first of three children in tow – the couple return to Yorkshire where John has a teaching job at Betty's old college in Bradford lined up. The job falls through and their efforts as freelance artists and makers don't bring in enough money.

They find work on a farm near Wombwell in South Yorkshire where a tied cottage is available. Here for the next six months, Betty's kitchen abilities are tested again. She only has a scullery and no cooker, just a fire range in the living room. Their next move is to more farm work with a cottage attached, this time at Newby Hall near Ripon. They spend seven years here until arthritis puts paid to John's farm work. He finds a job as a butler in a mock castle near the Lake District – 8 a week for 54 hours a week – and Betty starts doing some relief cooking. In the spring of 1965 they spot an advertisement in the Yorkshire Post for a cook and butler back at Newby Hall. Its owner, Major Edward Compton, takes them on and Betty enters the country house kitchen full-time.

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She recalls their 11 years there fondly. It's the mid-Sixties when deference becomes a dirty word as seismic cultural shifts brings down old barriers. But not in this house. At Newby Hall the last vestiges of the old Upstairs Downstairs domestic arrangements and social distinctions are preserved.

"It was like the films Gosford Park or Remains of the Day," says Betty. "Edward Compton was an Edwardian link with the past. He was a disciplinarian, but so fair. He could run a house beautifully.

"They kept on with what they'd always had to eat – brawn, stand pies, that sort of thing. They liked simple, good food. Not the theatrical lifting of the lid and saying 'tah-rah!' I was confronted for the first time by half a pig's head, to make brawn. I thought, 'no-one else is going to do it Betty, so you'll just have to get on with it'.

"Major Compton told me that if he had the choice, he'd have cauliflower every day of the week. That was the difference between that man and today's extravagance."

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The scale of operations for a traditional cook in a country house run on the old lines where shooting parties and dinner parties were part of the everyday round sounds huge. "For a dinner party, you needed to keep your adrenaline going. Then afterwards you'd go very light-headed. The average number you served was 16, I never went beyond 20. The great thing was to do as much as possible beforehand."

Was this all single-handed? "To be truthful, unless you have a helper tuned-in to your way of working, it's easier to do it yourself. Sometimes I had a washer-upper if it was a big party. For a late finish you had to mop the floor before you went home. That's the more mundane side of it.

"You started at 7.30am and it was up to you to plan your day. You do as much as you can for the rest of the day and then get home by 1.30pm, that's your time then. You go back in the evening at 6pm and if there was a party, you would be up till midnight. You had one day off a week and on that day you had to leave food for the housekeeper to serve. My goodness, you made the most of your day off.

"John was an artist, whatever he was having to do in the daytime. He did a lot of work for the National Trust restoring chimney pieces. I enjoyed history and art and we blended well, we worked as a partnership. I enjoyed textile design and I was doing quite well at it. We married young at 21 and I suppose we trolled off to London because we felt we'd got to show everyone we could make a go of it."

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By the August Bank Holiday weekend of 1979, Betty was 56, and she and John were living in their own home in Harrogate, when they saw on the television news that the IRA had murdered Lord Mounbatten at his holiday home in the west of Ireland. One of his grandsons, Nicholas Knatchbull, had also died in the bomb blast.

A few months later Betty took a call from her recruitment agency. A job had come up they thought she would find interesting. It was at Broadlands, the Mountbatten home.

"I don't think I realised what I was walking into. Sadness haunted Broadlands. Lord Mountbatten had been quite an autocrat in his own house and it was difficult with the older staff who would say, 'Lord Mountbatten wouldn't have let you do that...' It was where Lord Mountbatten had been doing the matchmaking for Prince Charles, along with Lady Fermoy and the Queen Mother.

"They were now building up this new household and once I settled into my routine I felt confident. Broadlands was more gossipy than Newby Hall, more of a celebrity place. Lord Mountbatten had been head of the British Film Foundation, so film stars came too."

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One legacy of this was the in-house cinema to which Lord Mountbatten had invited guests and his staff. This tradition was kept alive. The staff had to assemble first and stand by their seats at the front and be ready to bow and curtsey when the main group arrived. It was the end of a long working day, the seats were plush and the room warm. But knowing the Queen was seated immediately behind them kept staff alert.

"Chocolates were passed around and we got what was left. I remember a James Caan film which had lots of four-letter words in just one sentence. The Queen kept saying, 'what is he talking about?' and Prince Philip kept interpreting for her.

"Princess Diana arrived at the house for the first time nine months before she was married. I ran upstairs waiting for her car and when I saw her for the first time I thought, 'you're a bit special'. She was colourful and had lovely dark blue eyes and she started coming down for weekends. Diana spent a lot of time in the kitchen. It was a refuge really. She'd sit on a high stool and chatter. She was a girl who needed mothering. She was so young.

"For her first appearance for the world's Press she was doing the traditional Mountbatten thing, planting a tree. They all did it, Charlie Chaplin, Pandit Nehru... Before it started Diana came downstairs to see us and asked, 'Should I wear a hat?' It was arranged that Samantha, the housekeeper's daughter, would give her lilies of the valley.

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"When Diana was first pregnant they came back to Broadlands for a christening. Prince Charles came down to see us and said she had morning sickness but was happier in the evening. 'Does it go on a long time?' he asked. We weren't asked to make any special foods for her.

"Broadlands had these lovely artichokes growing and I invented this omelette to make use of them. I made ice cream from the fruit of Mulberry Trees planted by James I – so 300 year-old ice cream. Diana's favourite was strawberry ice cream with crushed strawberries on top.

"We were all called to the salon about May time (in 1981) and sworn to secrecy about the wedding. The Press was everywhere. I had an offer by letter from a publication offering to pay me 10,000 for a photo of them. It would have been so easy, but it never entered our minds."

What does she think about the Royal staff who did eventually cash in very handsomely?

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"I really did like Stephen Barry, Prince Charles's valet before his marriage. Lady Diana didn't like him, he knew too much of his inner life. I knew how sad he was to leave.

"Ken Stronach (the valet who sold photos and information to the News of the World) hadn't been with Prince Charles long."

What was she asked to cook for supper on the night of the Royal Wedding? "They said 'Can we just make it very simple?' When you come from a wedding like that it's not surprising and they were both practically vegetarians. All that stuff about bulimia with Diana. Some girls are just nibblers."

Betty was at Broadlands for three years and then moved on – the usual thing, she says, in this line of work.

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"Take no notice of the first six months, that's the honeymoon period for employers and employee. Life in a country house in those days could get very institutionalised and very petty – more among the staff, I'd say. The old time staff knew all the little dodges. They were more into the politics of living a very closed life."

She says her life "has been about timing". But in big houses it seems the cook is no more. "Now is the day of the chef. The butler is now called the house manager, old-style butlers have gone."

The last grand kitchen she worked in was in Gloucestershire. When John died six years ago she moved back to Bradford to be closer to her roots.

It gave Betty, now 83, time to write a slender self-published memoir which has just come out. In it her ability to recall the smell, look and atmosphere of the kitchens she's known – and the implements and products she had used – is pin-sharp. "Everyone kept saying 'you ought to write this down' and John got very keen for me to do it and I promised him at the end I'd finish it."

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Having met sprightly Betty – and shared her lunch – it seems exactly right that of all the ingredients this cook has used, she reckons the most valuable is humour.

Meet Me in the Kitchen: Bedsit, Farm or Stately Home by Betty Thornton. Athena Press, 8.99. To order a copy from the Yorkshire Post Bookshop, call free on 0800 0153232 or go online at www.yorkshire postbookshop.co.uk. P&P is 2.75.

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