INTERVIEW:Sacha Hamilton is one of Ireland's biggest landowners, in line to the British throne, which makes her preoccupation with Irish education all the more surprising, writes UNA BRADLEY
THE DUCHESS OF ABERCORN arrives brandishing a wicker basket. Inside are homemade cookies, each resplendent with a chocolate and pecan flourish. Alexandra “Sacha” Hamilton has her cords tucked into black Ugg boots. Her anorak is a variation on regulation Barbour.
She ushers me to her car to whisk me off for our interview in the wooden “dacha” she had built on her estate, the 1,500-acre Baronscourt in Co Tyrone. She and her husband, James Hamilton, the Duke of Abercorn, also own Belle Isle in Co Fermanagh, an estate with castle and cottages to rent and a famed cookery school. Hamilton is also a force in Irish cultural life. For the past 25 years, her Pushkin Trust charity has been bringing together schoolchildren from both sides of the Border to nurture their creativity in the fashion of her great, great, great grandfather, Russian poet Alexander Pushkin.
Writers, dancers, musicians and artists work with the children during one-day workshops. It’s all free, the charity funded by donations and grants, with a modest annual turnover of around £250,000.The annual creative-writing competition has been judged by the likes of Doris Lessing, Roald Dahl and John Banville. The late Ted Hughes, a long-time friend of the duchess, was involved in the early years.
Educators from all over Ireland have paid tribute to the ability of Pushkin to inspire; but, listening to Hamilton, you sense that Pushkin is merely the starting point. She wants a revolution – not only in education, but in parenting, healthcare, business, politics, down to the very structures of our democracy. Trained in Jungian psychology, her conversation is serious, fired by the notion that the creative arts can set us free.
Her strong, maternal instinct is what led her to Pushkin in the first place, so concerned was she when her daughter Sophie started having nightmares, related to the Troubles.
“I thought to myself, if this is happening to Sophie, how many more children must be experiencing this?” she remembers. “A huge proportion of them were being traumatised – that was clear – and I just couldn’t let it lie.”
Around the same time, Hamilton travelled to Russia for a Pushkin commemoration and was struck by what she learned about her famous forefather. “Pushkin used to sit at the fire each night with his nanny, who would tell him stories that had been handed down, not in writing but through the oral tradition.
“That storytelling tradition is very Slavic, but also very Celtic, and I wanted to bring something of that spirit of Pushkin – of bringing together different traditions, of uncovering our universal humanity – back to Ireland.” She got the green light to launch a pilot programme with schools in Donegal and Tyrone. Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney and poet Michael Longley, came on board as co-patrons.
Hamilton is undoubtedly one of the North’s most well-connected aristocrats. She and her children are in the line of succession to the British throne. Her sister, Natalia, is married to the Duke of Westminster, named by the Sunday Times last year as the richest man in Britain. Natalia is also godmother to Prince William.
Hamilton is also distantly related to Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh, with whom she is good friends. Much was made of their relationship in a biography of the Queen and Prince Philip, written by Gyles Brandreth.
Given her connections she is more fluid in her political views than one might expect. She likens Ireland to a “whole body” that has been “split” into head and heart, with the Border representing the wound. “That’s why Northern Ireland struggles to find its voice,” she says. “Its throat has been cut. I want to try to bring the two parts closer, so they can find more balance.”
Her own background has its share of diversity. She was born in Arizona to English parents, just after the second World War. Her parents, too, had colourful backgrounds. One of Hamilton’s grandmothers was Russian, the other Peruvian. Her Russian grandmother was descended both from Pushkin and Csar Nicolas the First – rival bloodlines, one Russian and the other Romanov.
Hamilton and her family returned to England when she was to go to the boarding schools favoured by British aristocracy. At 19, she became engaged to James, then the Marquess of Abercorn and 12 years her senior.
“It was a glorious day,” she says. “We were in Donegal. I thought all the days would be sunny. I knew nothing about Ireland – I thought of moving there as some great adventure.” That was 1966. Three years later, when Hamilton was in hospital in Belfast giving birth to the first of three children, the Troubles were breaking out.
“I sat in my hospital bed looking out at the city,” she says. “It was ablaze. I thought, What am I doing, bringing a child into this?” Though the Troubles affected people from all walks of life, for the resident British establishment – James Hamilton was the Lord Lieutenant of Tyrone, the Queen’s representative – the threat from Republican paramilitaries was very real.
“Those years were like a long dark tunnel,” says Hamilton. “We lived one day at a time.” Now that the children have flown the nes, the Hamiltons can devote more time to their causes.
Pushkin may be Hamilton’s main preoccupation, but she also sits on the external advisory board of Trinity College’s Long Room Hub, a think tank dedicated to exploring the role of the arts in Irish society. It was there she came across the ideas of radical educationalist Ken Robinson – now she wants Ireland to become one of his “creative districts”, modelled along already-established districts in the US and New Zealand.
“They’re basically pilot projects that bring together culture, business and education. The idea is that, if we create enough of them around the world, one day they will all just explode through and the world will be transformed.”
The Pushkin Trust's silver jubilee concert, fronted by Katie Melua, is at Belfast's Grand Opera House on May 13th. pushkintrust.com
