WINDLESTONE Hall and parkland, set magnificently near Rushyford in south Durham, was for 100 years until 1936 the garden of Eden, though little in the garden seemed rosy.

The Edens were one of County Durham’s oldest and most distinguished families – Castle Eden originally – Sir Anthony to become a short-lived Prime Minister in the 1950s.

It is to the wild and wanton ways of Lady Sybil, his mother, that recent columns have alluded, however, and to which, shocked, we now return.

Today’s column is very largely based on Robert Rhodes James’s 660-page biography of Sir Anthony, published in 1986 and now pristine-purchased from Amazon for a penny.

Though he acknowledges Lady Sybil’s many good works – the former miners’ hospital in Bishop Auckland long bore her name, the poor blessed it – Rhodes James was invited to write the biography by Sir Anthony’s widow and had access to much of his correspondence.

Everyone thought her a marvellous old lady, generous and kind – except for her children who frequently and almost legally had to bail her out, sometimes on the brink of major scandal.

“I think my mother preferred the simpler relationship which existed between donor and recipient,” wrote the future PM coldly, “than the more complicated one between mother and child.”

AMONG the joys of Robert Rhodes James’s book is that it has an index. Thus fingered, it is possible to bypass Suez (say) and to head instead for Spennymoor.

Anthony Eden, who at 20 had become the country’s youngest brigade major in the First World War, was reluctantly recalled from Oxford in 1921 to command the Spennymoor detachment of the Defence Force, then stationed at Barnard Castle, as a general strike seemed imminent.

The following year he was Conservative candidate for Spennymoor in the general election, noting – page 63, thanks – that the party locally had no money and no organisation, but was at least enthusiastic.

Accused at hustings of being one of the idle rich, he turned out his empty pockets as if to show he was one of the workers. He lost, heavily.

National Indexing Day was marked a fortnight ago, though perhaps never more memorably than by the late Keith Waterhouse’s observation that the Society of Indexers should really be Indexers, Society of, the.

The most celebrated footnote, however, concerned another former Tory prime minister – Sir John Major – after Ms Edwina Currie had revealed their extra-parliamentary liaison.

Asked why she’d spilled the beans, Ms Currie replied that she had read Sir John’s autobiography – “and I wasn’t even in the index”.

DAUGHTER of Sir William Grey, he of the Hartlepool shipyards, Lady Sybil was said to be one of the kingdom’s most beautiful women – “almost the last remaining example of the Madonna type of loveliness now so rarely seen,” observed Woman magazine in 1893.

In 1886 she’d married Sir William Eden – himself frequently described as “strange” and certainly ill tempered – and bore him four sons and a daughter. He hadn’t been her first choice.

Though Windlestone life bored her, she quickly won the affections of the impoverished of County Durham for her acts of conspicuous charity. The problem, observes Rhodes James, was that the generosity rested upon the most slender of financial foundations.

Chiefly, for this is one of those stories which suggests that there really is nothing new under the sun, Lady Sybil had reckless recourse – reckless and feckless – to moneylenders.

“She turned to them and they were delighted to respond, at dizzying and dreadful rates of interest. To repay them she borrowed more, heedless that the interest rates had risen even further.

“The poor people of County Durham adored her, the avaricious and eager County Durham money lenders hardly less so. It was a recipe for catastrophe, and catastrophe duly followed.”

IT may not only have been in financial matters that Lady Sybil was, shall we say, a little liberal. If she were the most beautiful woman in the land then George Wyndham, debonair darling of London society, was in turn reckoned the most handsome man.

Rumours abounded that the future prime minister wasn’t an Eden at all, but a Wyndham. Rhodes James treads carefully – “that he was the father is far from being impossible” – while acknowledging that the young Anthony bore a marked physical resemblance to a younger Wyndham.

“That Lady Sybil was infatuated by Wyndham is beyond doubt, but so were many others. On such matters it is impossible to be certain but Eden himself did not discount the rumours completely.”

If not immoral, his mother was certainly amoral, he wrote.

Sir William and his wife spent their later years apart, the book acknowledging that her surviving sons’ feelings towards their mother were little short of hatred. “I believe her to be a very unscrupulous and untruthful person,” Sir Anthony once wrote.

Frequently her children were obliged to settle her personal debts, said after the First World War to be more than £20,000.

Their mother appeared ungrateful and even unscrupulous in return, even complaining to the press about their parsimony. When all else failed, paintings and other valuables began to disappear from the hall.

The Durham moneylenders still hovered happily.

WITH the Edens and their family home facing ruin, Windlestone was sold in 1936. It became a school and latterly has been much in the news for further unedifying reasons.

When in his 70s, Eden – by then the first Earl of Avon – paid his first visit for 40 years. “What had been spacious and elegant was now gaunt and vacantly lonely,” he wrote. “My eyes travelled sadly along the avenue that led to the chapel. Here was frank ruin.”

Lady Sybil Eden died in London in 1945, in squalor and (of course) in debt. She was buried, as she had wished, in her wedding dress.

Still she had recourse to moneylenders, never had a bank account, still pawned valuables that weren’t hers to dispose of.

Soon after her death, Anthony saw his and his brother Nicholas’s silver christening cups and “some very good old spoons and forks” from Windlestone in a pawnbroker’s window in London.

“It was,” writes his biographer, “a not inappropriate valediction”.

THE column’s old mother – directly or indirectly quite likely one of Lady Sybil’s beneficiaries – had many Shildon phrases which may best be described as quaint, though “Jump up and give your leg a dother” was one of Aunty Betty’s. Mum’s most memorable, or at least the most printable, was that someone talked like a ha’penny book.

Twice the price, how do Amazon sell penny books? There’s much on the internet about it, none of which offers much enlightenment to the technologically illiterate. Suffice that they still seem to make a profit.

In for a penny in for a pounding, the column returns in a fortnight – and thenceforth, every Wednesday.