The country CEOs

When Diana, the Dowager Countess of Devon was a little girl, she loved Pony Club camp. One summer in the 1960s, Hugh Courtenay, the heir to the Earl of Devon, came to help out. He met young Diana Watherston, and the pair hit it off. Some time later, Hugh took Diana home to Powderham Castle, the Courtenays’ home since 1391. “We turned on to the drive, and there was this huge castle – my mouth fell open,” she remembers. Out of the front door “came this smartly dressed man in a tweed suit. I thought he was the butler, and I said that my suitcases were in the back, before I realised that it was Hugh’s father”.

Hugh and Diana married in 1967, and after a few years took over the running of Powderham. Overnight, she had become a chatelaine and began with quite the wrong mindset, she says. “When we got married my one passion was to persuade Hugh to get rid of Powderham. Wasn’t that stupid? Now, I would fight like a tigress to keep