Daphne, Lady Acton

Daphne Strutt: born London 5 November 1911; married 1931 Lord Acton (died 1989; five sons, five daughters, and one daughter deceased); died Birmingham 18 February 2003.

Birth, brains and beauty are seldom combined at such a high level as they were in the case of Daphne, Lady Acton.

Born Daphne Strutt in 1911, she was the daughter of the fourth Baron Rayleigh, Professor of Physics at Imperial College London and President of the Royal Institution, and granddaughter of the third Baron, Nobel prizewinner, Chancellor of Cambridge University and discoverer of the gas argon. The prime minister Arthur Balfour was a great-uncle; she was the child of a brilliant family. It now seems extraordinary that, although clearly gifted, she was given no formal education beyond what governesses could supply; but a background like hers must have stimulated her natural talents because, by the time she came out and very soon was married, she was known for her intellectual gifts.

Her husband, John, the fourth Baron Acton, also came from a family renowned for its brains, his grandfather being the Roman Catholic historian the first Baron Acton, whose vast library, once housed at the family seat, Aldenham in Shropshire, is now part of Cambridge University Library.

Despite this distinguished lineage on both sides, there were difficulties about their marriage. Her family distrusted Catholicism so much that the couple, on her father's insistence, were married civilly in 1931 and only three years later, when she became a Catholic, were the troubles resolved. They went on to have 11 children, five boys and six girls (one of whom died as a baby), and by the time of her death the amazing number of 62 descendants.

Her wish to become a Catholic led to what was probably the most important friendship of her life, certainly the best-known, with Monsignor Ronald Knox, whom her sister-in-law, married to the editor of The Tablet, Douglas Woodruff, had chosen to give her instruction for six months before her reception into the Church. For the next decade, the pair were intellectually inseparable. Knowing of Knox's difficulties in finding peace and quiet, as well as financial security, in which to continue the translation of the Bible which he had begun, Daphne Acton invited him to live as family chaplain at Aldenham (a charming chapel near the house made this suitable), where for a couple of happy years his work continued.

Then came the Second World War. Life changed for the Actons as it did for everyone: he away for much of the time with his regiment, she running a nearly thousand-acre farm, and the house taken over except for a few rooms by a convent of nuns from London and their pupils. The pressures of wartime life, local responsibilities (among much else, she was County Commissioner for the Girl Guides), the increasingly large family, all were managed with assurance and what seemed like ease, while Fr Knox, though dragooned into helping with the farmwork, mainly the pigs, carried on with his translation and acted as chaplain to the school.

Both of them behaved as traditional explorers in the jungle are said to have done: from the muddiest and most bedraggled of outdoor gear they changed into evening dress, she making a glamorous appearance on the main staircase in what seemed like ball dresses, he in a cassock with tiny puce buttons all down the front, puce socks and buckle shoes.

The end of the war saw an end too to this way of life when Lord Acton, frustrated by the difficulties of working under the post-war government, sold Aldenham to his wife's family and took his own, including the pigs, to farm in Southern Rhodesia. There his wife came into her own as matriarch on a wider scale.

Their home, M'Bebi, near Mazoe, became a centre of Catholic activity (a church was built in the grounds) and, as time passed, of political dissent. Though technically refugees from the Labour government in Britain, the Actons were liberal, even left-wing, in their allegiance: the youngest son was sent to an all-black school, the eldest (Richard, the present Lord Acton) married the daughter of the liberal prime minister Garfield Todd, and among white neighbours their relationship with the blacks was often viewed with suspicion.

English visitors were temporarily absorbed into its life of plain living and high thinking and political uneasiness. In 1958 Ronald Knox died of cancer; he and Daphne Acton had not met since he stayed at M'Bebi for a month four years earlier. Political tension in Rhodesia increased. The Actons were strongly opposed to Ian Smith and his Unilateral Declaration of Independence, and their way of life was breaking up. In 1970, after a couple of moves in Africa, they went to live in Majorca. In 1989 Lord Acton died; the children had scattered and for the rest of her life his widow lived with members of her family, including, for several years, her sister-in-law Mia Woodruff.

Aldenham (which, being in Blandings Castle country, was said to have housed, in P.G. Wodehouse's imagination, one of his fictional characters) was lost, not just to the families (it was sold on rather quickly), but to its past and the atmosphere so many had shared. The enormous library, the size of a railway station, where the historian had kept his books (all 70,000 volumes), was demolished and the space it occupied is now grassed over. The chapel, with its fine sculptured memorials, was knocked down to make way for changing rooms for an ineptly sited swimming pool – only the façade rather gruesomely survives. The memory of Daphne Acton's extraordinary looks, when she brought it all to life for 16 strenuous years, the children born there, its spirit and religious connections, all make Aldenham revisited a melancholy place.

Perhaps only Evelyn Waugh, who called Lady Acton "the most remarkable woman I know" and wrote of "her supreme sanctity radiating supernatural peace", could have done justice to the chapel's pathetic remains.

Isabel Quigly