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Dame Frances Campbell-Preston (1918-2022)
Dame Frances Campbell-Preston, who died last year at 104, was the Queen Mother’s oldest surviving lady-inwaiting. She served her from 1965 until the Queen Mother’s death in 2002.
She is pictured, right, on her 100th birthday. Her thanksgiving service was held at the Wren Chapel, Royal Hospital Chelsea, where she worshipped until she was 13.
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Her grandfather Sir Neville Lyttelton was Governor of the Hospital, 1912-31. Dame Frances remembered meeting, as a little girl, four veterans of the Crimean War at the hospital, including one who’d met Florence Nightingale.
In the service sheet, Dame Frances wrote, ‘I trust my funeral will be cheerful and that the coffin will be carried out to the tune of the Regimental March of the Black Watch, to alert my husband that I am on my way. That is my “plan for the future” and it makes me smile.’ A piper did indeed play Hielan’ Laddie, the Regimental March of the Black Watch, in memory of her husband, Patrick CampbellPreston. He was imprisoned at Colditz after being captured at St Valery in Normandy in 1940. He died in 1960, aged 49.
In the early months of Dame Frances’s widowhood, her sister-in-law Joyce Grenfell visited her. She was inspired to write the poem Life Goes On, read at the service by Dame Frances’s son Robert Campbell-Preston.
It includes these lines:
Dame Frances’s other son, Colin Campbell-Preston, read a family prayer. Viscount Bridgeman read from Journal of a Soul by Pope John XXIII.
Lord Chartres, former Bishop of London, paid tribute: ‘She loved this place, the scene of her 100th-birthday celebration in 2018. She was so down to earth and such fun. She was not intimidating but she had immense presence.’
The hymns were Tell out, my soul, the greatness of the Lord!, Immortal, Invisible, God only wise and Guide me, O thou great Redeemer Earl Rosslyn represented the King and Queen Consort. Lady Susan Hussey, Dame Frances’s niece, represented the Princess Royal. The Hon Mary Morrison represented Princess Alexandra.
JAMES HUGHES-ONSLOW
