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Emma Watkins was born in 1963 on a farm called Heartsease on the Welsh borders, and had an extremely happy childhood. Her father John was a successful farmer and he gradually acquired enough land to leave farms to both her brothers but there was no land for her. Her job was to marry a local farmer, and her father’s first question about any boy she went out with was: “So, Em, how many acres does he have?”
She was a total country girl, pony mad, who joined the beaters on shoots and learnt to pluck pheasants. But she was “slow” at school, an undiagnosed dyslexic who could barely read and found numbers incomprehensible. Her salvation was her wonderful singing voice, which won her a scholarship to the Guildhall School of Music in London. But after a year she realised she was not cut out to be an opera singer, and anyway, “What I wanted was a farmhouse with an Aga and a brood of children running around.”
So, rather cunningly, she went on a land management course at Southampton College, where she was one of only two girls, surrounded by young men who wanted to live on the land. “In other words, this was the perfect place to find a potential husband.”
Unfortunately the first one she took home brought a CD player, which her father decided was a machine for playing blue movies, so he told him that “he wasn’t going to stand by and watch his only daughter being ‘polluted’ by this muck” and that was the end of him. Then there was one called Peter who took her to Cheltenham Races, but she overheard one of his former girlfriends asking if he was serious about her and him replying “Oh no – but she’s a lot of fun.” So she walked out of the enclosure and hitchhiked back to Hereford.
She finally met her young farmer at a dinner party in London. He was not particularly handsome and he had a gammy leg and a withered arm, but he was keen. He asked her for lunch at his home, the Old Saddlery, in Leicestershire, and she noticed an enormous castle up the road and asked who lived there. He said: “My parents.”
He had previously given her his business card which said David Manners, Marquess of Granby, which should have been a clue but she assumed the Marquess of Granby was a pub. Anyway, she was soon invited to a shooting weekend at Belvoir Castle and met David’s parents and when her father asked his usual question “How many acres?” she was able to tell him “Around 17,000.”
David proposed, and they married at Belvoir, with 500 guests, and the Rutland tiara arrived under armed guard. Then she and David settled down to live in the Old Saddlery. She had looked forward to running her own home but Mrs Pacey the housekeeper was still in charge and told her off if she put the mustard on the wrong shelf.
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