It’s half-term and instead of the Baftas and Anmer Hall in Norfolk, the Prince and Princess of Wales have decamped en famille to Mustique. Old pictures of Kate and Wills walking along the Caribbean seafront hand in hand and a young Prince George in a green polo shirt are accompanied by newspaper commentary detailing how Kate deserves a rest in what is thought to be her favourite place. So far, so very lovely.
Mustique itself, though, has always struck me as a rather sinister place. Far from a moneyed Caribbean idyll, Mustique has to me always been synonymous with Princess Margaret, fag-in-mouth, sent raving mad by the booze and shagging gangster John Bindon, or poor old Lady Anne Glenconner suffering one of her husband’s famous temper tantrums and being beaten up with a walking stick made from shark’s vertebrae. There must be a reason why Lady Anne, resourceful to the last after her late husband left his St Lucian estate to a manservant, wrote a 2020 novel entitled Murder on Mustique in which a ‘thrill-seeking’ young heiress comes to a sticky end. In a life stranger than fiction, perhaps the dark Mustique chapters were best kept out of her best-selling 2019 memoir Lady in Waiting.
I happened upon a 1971 episode of Whicker’s World titled ‘A Giddy Head – In Paradise’, in which Alan Whicker, consummately dressed in a suit and tie throughout, interviews Mustique’s owner Colin Tennant, Lord Glenconner, as they tour the island on one of Tennant’s golf buggies. From the off, things appear distinctly strange. Asked in the pouring rain why he wanted to buy the supposedly sun-drenched island, Tennant, dressed like Willy Wonka in a striped pyjama suit, explains that it works out cheaper than heating his Scottish estate. Whicker says nothing while the camera focuses on a large reptilian creature wading around in the mud and a horse with a ‘giddy head’ bolting off into a wind-whipped sea.
In this strange island universe, Whicker proceeds to press Tennant on why making Mustique ‘the Debretter the better’ would be a good idea; Tennant, drink in hand, equivocates, occasionally giggling and imperiously greeting the locals who tip their hat at him in fear. In by far the most bizarre scene of all, Whicker asks a young woman seated next to Tennant at dinner what the allure of the island is while Tennant looks on. ‘It’s hard,’ she says sadly, before Tennant silences her by stroking her hair.
Lord Glenconner – by all accounts a troubled man – bought Mustique from the Hazell family in 1958 for the princely sum of £45,000. When the farming of the unforgiving landscape proved difficult, he turned his hand to property development, eventually connecting the island to royalty by giving Princess Margaret a plot of land as a wedding present after her marriage in 1960 to Antony Armstrong-Jones.
As a PR masterstroke, Tennant could not have hoped for more. Princess Margaret built her house, Les Jolies Eaux, on the island and visited it often, claiming that it was ‘the only place she could truly be herself’. If ‘being herself’ was a euphemism for a life of extreme debauchery, then Mustique, famed for its privacy from prying courtiers, was certainly the place, even if the pictures of her swimming alone in the sea appear drenched in melancholy.
These days, Mustique retains its royal connections despite Les Jolies Eaux having been sold by David Linley in 1998. The Sussexes and the Cambridges are said to enjoy their time there, although presumably not together. Tennant’s Old Etonian network presides over the island in a no-nonsense, sun over the yardarm, boozy way. ‘It’s Balmoral-on-Sea,’ one told me, ‘nothing as naff as Barbados.’ People drink G&Ts in Basil’s – the only ‘destination’ on the island – and are apparently expected, by three-line whip, to turn up at the Cotton House on Tuesday evenings as a sort of debs’ ‘coming out’ ceremony for the purposes of dinner party planning. When so much of the Caribbean has been appropriated by Sandals resorts and infinity pools, Mustique is unknowable, still in thrall to its upper-class, tight-lipped mafia.
When writing this piece I ask around various friends, trying to get a sense of the place from those who have been. Friends put me in touch with those who have grown up there or know it well, but the trail quickly runs cold. ‘It’s a closed circle,’ one says, ‘they’ll never tell.’ I think of Princess Margaret swimming in the sea, and I think of the reptile eyeing Tennant, and I’m rather glad I don’t know. Call it envy if you like, but I think I’ll stay away.
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