In July 1975 Chryssie Lytton Cobbold, the chatelaine of Knebworth House in Hertfordshire, was expecting a few visitors for drinks. They went by the name Pink Floyd and were on a high after a spine-tingling rendition of Dark Side of the Moon.
The band had just headlined one of Knebworth’s highly successful early concerts, with a vast crowd, Spitfires flying past and a huge rocket on a zip wire roaring above the arena. Expecting only the five bandmates, Cobbold did not open the house’s large picture gallery and instead put out drinks and ashtrays in a small study.
“It was a great mistake,” she admitted afterwards. “People poured into the house, including friends and ‘liggers’ [hangers-on], who would walk in confidently and help themselves to a drink.”
The police and drugs squad arrived to recap on the day’s events and have a whisky in the kitchen, so with the band and their friends “probably rolling joints — and worse” in the overcrowded study, she dashed around, desperately trying to keep the two groups separate. She recalled: “I almost collapsed with relief when the police eventually left, blissfully unaware of all the naughtiness going on next door.”
For Lady Cobbold, as she became, though known to friends as Chryssie, this was all in a day’s work.
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In 1969, she and her flamboyant husband David, later the 2nd Lord Cobbold, had begged to open his mother’s dilapidated family seat Knebworth House and its 250-acre park to the public to help with the running costs. His parents — Cameron (Kim), the 1st Baron Cobbold, a long-serving governor of the Bank of England who became chamberlain to Queen Elizabeth, and Lady Hermione (née Bulwer-Lytton) — had no time to keep the house going and it needed substantial restoration work, with a 14-acre “wilderness garden, extensive dry rot, fungus and every sort of beetle”.
The young Cobbolds were then in the vanguard of historic house owners sharing their heritage, but with far less money than rivals such as Longleat and Woburn Abbey. The struggle to keep the estate afloat amid wildly fluctuating fortunes dominated the next 35 years of the Cobbolds’ lives, but they approached each setback and windfall with humorous stoicism.
In 1974 the first of Knebworth’s famous rock festivals was staged to rave reviews. Van Morrison and the Allman Brothers headlined. Later festivals featuring the Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, Genesis, Pink Floyd and Freddie Mercury’s final concert in 1986 brought Knebworth worldwide publicity.
When in 2000 the couple handed on the estate, by now protected by a charitable conservation trust, to their eldest son Henry and his American wife Martha (née Boone), it was a thriving business that had welcomed millions of visitors to events ranging from medieval banquets and Wild West reenactments to wedding receptions and athletics meets.
Lady Cobbold was born Christina Elizabeth Stucley in 1940 in north Devon, into a clan of country squires. Her father, Sir Dennis Stucley, who owned both the fortified gatehouse Affeton Castle near Bideford and the imposing Hartland Abbey, hunted four days a week and founded the Taw and Torridge pack. Chryssie and her four siblings loved hunting on Exmoor on their shaggy ponies, prawning, baiting lobster pots and catching moles for their skins, which her father sold to a London furrier.
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Her hunting prowess belied a quiet and unassuming manner. When she took on the transformation of Knebworth, she already understood the challenges of running a historic house — as her husband remarked, he had married one of the few women in England whose childhood home was bigger than his.
Following an education at Southover Manor School in East Sussex, where art and needlework trumped academic pursuits, she started work as a pattern-cutter for Worth at £3 a week. This genteel drudgery was leavened by a ritzy round of debutante dances and house parties. A parade of young “debs’ delights” were intrigued by her English rose looks and enigmatic smile, which concealed a sharp wit and wicked sense of humour. When she was invited to David Cobbold’s 21st birthday party at Knebworth, she knew almost no one and, feeling self-conscious, fell asleep in a fishing cottage beside the lake — until David woke her at dawn to suggest a romantic, mist-shrouded row. As she later recorded: “I was glad I had agreed to come after all.”
After Cambridge University, David — who changed his name by deed poll to Lytton Cobbold in honour of his mother’s distinguished line — became a trainee banker with Morgan Guaranty and proposed on Barnstaple station platform so that Chryssie could accompany him on his first posting in France.
Following a society wedding in 1961 at Hartland Abbey with 400 guests, the couple spent the early days of their marriage first in Paris, then in Manhattan, where Henry was born. However, Knebworth was in David’s blood and with the reluctant agreement of his parents, they took the plunge and moved to Hertfordshire.
Once a large, plain Elizabethan mansion, the house was substantially reduced and its remaining rear wing rebuilt in the 1840s for Elizabeth Bulwer-Lytton, mother of the Victorian man of letters Sir Edward Bulwer-Lytton, who was David’s great-great-grandfather. But Bulwer-Lytton — an opium enthusiast famous for his oft-parodied lines including “the pen is mightier than the sword” and “It was a dark and stormy night’’ — remodelled the house in the Tudor gothic style of minarets, copper domes, battlements and striking “bat and barrel” gargoyles. The latter was an architectural pun on the name Lytton (“lyt” meaning bat and “ton” meaning barrel).
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By the late 1960s much of the fabric was crumbling and the Cobbolds began drastic renovations to 60 rooms, shoring up dangerous sections of masonry, plugging roof leaks and tackling infestations of mice. Ever practical, Chryssie reupholstered ancient chairs and stitched new curtains, cushions and hangings to replace the rotten ones; she also prepared the house’s treasures for the first tours. These included Jacobean furniture, Bulwer-Lytton’s vast library, family portraits and an atmospheric painting of the banqueting hall by Winston Churchill, who had been an admirer of David’s grandmother, the society beauty Pamela, Countess of Lytton.
On Good Friday, 1971, they opened the house and park to the public, having installed an adventure playground and a two-mile drive. Chryssie, by now pregnant with the couple’s fourth child, ran the restaurant from a marquee, serving hamburgers and hot dogs cooked over two gas rings. Despite assorted dramas and an outlay of £366,000, they hosted almost 100,000 visitors in the first season, with 26,000 visiting the house.
Over time Knebworth became a popular location for scores of films including The Shooting Party, Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut and Tim Burton’s Batman. The business expanded rapidly with air displays, classic car rallies, a successful centenary exhibition on Bulwer-Lytton, Scout jamborees and jousting in the park. Here the fearless “David of Knebworth” defied all health and safety edicts, taking on other “knights” with a 12ft lance, while his wife rode side-saddle in the procession.
The pair became popular members of Hertfordshire society, which included Ken and Barbara Follett and the romantic novelist Dame Barbara Cartland. During house parties, the inimitable Cartland seemed to insist on treating the hostess like her own ladies’ maid — Cobbold recalled her astonishment at once being asked to manhandle Cartland’s voluminous bosom back into her skin-tight dress and zip it up after a visit to the cloakroom.
During social gatherings she would work tirelessly in the background as her extrovert husband, who inherited the barony in 1987, took centre stage. They held “Dickens and Bulwer’’ evenings after David learnt that his great-great-grandfather had put on amateur theatrical performances with Charles Dickens and decided to recreate them, with the help of the actor Gerald Dickens, a descendant of the novelist. On another occasion they threw a “London Underground” party featuring an entire Tube train carriage that was towed into the courtyard to provide a quirky dancefloor. The fancy-dress theme meant that guests came as different stations, including a borderline-pornographic Cockfosters.
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The Cobbolds’ long and loving marriage weathered the challenges of their distinctly freewheeling lifestyle and various romantic entanglements on either side. United in their disdain for convention, they installed a bath in the kitchen of their London house, where they would relax in the tub, discussing the day’s events over champagne. This inspired the title of Lady Cobbold’s book on how they transformed Knebworth: Board Meetings in the Bath.
When not creating beautiful gardens, she enjoyed the company of her 11 grandchildren, among them the former Burberry model Morwenna Lytton Cobbold and her brother Edward, a rock promoter and heir to the Knebworth estate.
The Cobbolds’ four children survive her: Henry, the 3rd Lord Cobbold, a former Hollywood screenwriter and keen naturist, is Knebworth’s current custodian; Peter manages a property rental business in Spain; Richard is the director of an international tech company; and Rosina is an artist and alternative education pioneer. Lady Cobbold is also survived by the Ugandan brothers Danny and Harry Matovu, whom she and her husband informally adopted. They were two of Henry’s closest friends at Eton whose parents had suffered persecution under Idi Amin, and who went on to become successful barristers.
After handing over Knebworth to the next generation, the Cobbolds moved to a house nearby where Chryssie cared for her husband as he faced Parkinson’s disease. When he died (obituary, May 11, 2022) she ordered a coffin decorated with the artwork from his favourite Pink Floyd album and erected a memorial bench beside his grave in Knebworth garden inscribed: “See you on the Dark Side of the Moon”.
Lady Cobbold, chatelaine of Knebworth House, was born on April 25, 1940. She died of pancreatic cancer on April 7, 2024, aged 83
