Cambridge-born author Eliza Harrison: ‘I was shocked to discover the identity of my real father’
Raised among the Cambridge intellectual elite with a distant father and authoritarian mother, Eliza Harrison grew up feeling inadequate and alone. But her parents’ friends offered support – notably the Rothschild family and Lord Bob Boothby.
“Being brought up in Cambridge when your parents are usually there because of their academic achievements and success, for the children of those parents it was very, very difficult – I wasn’t alone in that,” says Eliza, a former drama school student who studied stage management.
Speaking to the Cambridge Independent from a “very remote little hamlet” in Cumbria about her new memoir, In Search of Truth, she explains that after leaving Cambridge she lived in London for 10 years, before moving up north.
She continues: “I certainly was no academic, so all the time you feel you’re being judged or assessed. Maybe in Oxford it’s the same thing but I would say it [Cambridge] is a different kind of environment to any other, in that so much is based on academic achievement.
“There’s one story I tell in the book where somebody who was really good to me as a child and as a young adult realised that I felt insecure and uncertain of myself, and that was Lord Victor Rothschild, who of course was a prominent name in Cambridge at that time.
“I must have been about eight and he asked me to look up some complicated word in the dictionary – well the dictionary in the Rothschild household was volumes of the Oxford English Dictionary. It was 10 volumes that I had to sort out and try and find this word.
“But at that point I had a fascinating realisation, and there was a knowing that what he was trying to make me do was stupid and at that point I realised that being clever and being wise were two very different things.
“And that gave me a whole different perspective then on my life in Cambridge and what was expected of me and what I could contribute to the world and that I wasn’t a part of that.”
Eliza says her early life was challenging in many ways, and not just because she felt she didn’t belong in that academic world. “I was also shy,” she recalls, “and quite introspective, whereas my older sister could get away with... socially she was much more proficient than me.
“Because of my uncertainty, I just went inside myself and that was my form of self-protection – and then of course, as I found out at a much later stage in my life, I wasn’t even my father’s daughter, so that was the shock.
“My mother had two children by my presumed father, who was the head of the Cambridge University Press, and then two more children by her lover. I was the youngest one.”
Eliza, whose mother was a Cambridge councillor for a number of years and was also mayor of the city at one point “devoted to the socialist cause and very well-known within those Cambridge circles at that time” (she was later made a peer by James Callaghan), knew her real father growing up because he was a close family friend.
His name was Lord Robert Boothby, often known as Bob Boothby, a well-known Conservative politician who is probably now most remembered for his ‘colourful’ private life and his association with the notorious Kray twins.
“It’s a huge story,” says Eliza, “it involves so many people... and of course Bob Boothby was a very conscientious politician, he served his East Aberdeenshire constituency – he was devoted to the fishermen and farmers there – for 40 years.
“He served them very, very well. He was also a huge TV and radio personality; he was one of the first people to really have that media acclaim.”
Eliza notes that these days her biological father, who passed away in 1986, is better known for the scandals that rocked his private life – he was also bisexual at a time when homosexual acts were illegal – and adds: “So there was all that to readjust to when I found out, which was only two years ago.
“And then, because so much of my life has been a search for my true identity or my true self, it’s been a spiritual search and I’m aware that we all build these belief systems within ourselves about who we are and what we believe in, etc, but then for a central one like that to be knocked away two years ago was quite a revelation.”
Was Lord Boothby aware that he was Eliza’s father? “It seems now, more and more, that everybody knew, apart from my sister and me,” replies Eliza, whose first husband was the actor Martin Potter, star of the Federico Fellini film Satyricon.
“A lot of people knew. Even a couple of days ago I had a very strange experience...” She elaborates: “Another of my childhood experiences was being sent away all the time; I was sent away to boarding school the other side of the country, or to stay with the Rothschilds.
“When I was away at school there was a close group of friends in my year and I’ve invited a few of them to the book launch in late May, and one of them was Polly Toynbee, who writes for The Guardian, and Polly wrote immediately back to me and she said, ‘Well here’s a surprise for you, Eliza, I already knew that you were Bob Boothby’s daughter because my mother told me.’
“With my mother it seems there was no shame. She carried on her affair with Bob Boothby quite openly, and in those days of course it was very different. The press wasn’t intrusive or tried to call people out as it does now.
“Married people could carry on their affairs without much disturbance; I mean Bob Boothby had a 30-year affair with Dorothy Macmillan [wife of former Prime Minister Harold Macmillan] so they were very different times…
“So it seems that a lot of people knew – certainly the Rothschilds would have known, friends of my parents in Cambridge would have known, and of course in retrospect it made so much more sense of my childhood, because my mother was very authoritarian.
“She would get angry very quickly if I didn’t come up to scratch in my homework, and of course looking back it feels as though I was never the person that maybe she wanted me to be. I wasn’t the academic, I wasn’t the high-flyer.
“Also, maybe I was a mistake, maybe I was the runt of the litter, and I always felt like the unwanted one or the one that didn’t belong... So the revelation two years ago, that I was Bob Boothby’s child, made me feel, ‘Well maybe that’s the reason why’.”
Eliza Harrison’s search for truth has led her to explore spiritual paths in both the East and the West and establish a meditation centre in Cumbria.
Alongside her work as a spiritual guide, she is a photographer and author and has documented the life and landscape of Northern England and told her own story in two books, In Search of Freedom and a novel, The Mystery of Martha.
Expect further stories and revelations related to her life, to Fellini, to legendary Italian actor Marcello Mastroianni, to working in the Cambridge Arts Theatre and with the Cambridge Footlights alongside the likes of Eric Idle and Germaine Greer, and even references to the Cambridge Spies, in her new memoir.
In Search of Truth, published by The Book Guild, is officially being launched tomorrow (Thursday, May 25) at the Nomad Bookshop in Fulham at 6.30pm. It is available in shops and online from Amazon.