Socialites, Instagram sensations and business women, Lady Violet, 27, Lady Alice, 25, and Lady Eliza, 23, are the daughters of the 11th Duke and Duchess of Rutland – David Manners and Emma Watkins. Their ancestral home is Belvoir Castle in Leicestershire where they grew up surrounded by priceless art, palatial staterooms, towers, turrets and 15,000 acres (6,070 hectares) of land.
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It took seven minutes fast-walking to get from her bedroom to the front door – passing through vast chambers decorated with enough menacing swords, muskets and cannons to wage any battle – Lady Violet told Vanity Fair in 2017. She also related a story about when she and her sisters were young, they liked to hide under tables and jump out to scare the tourists.
Although not royal, the family are landed gentry nobility whose family line dates back to the Norman conquest and the Battle of Hastings in 1066, and there has been a castle on this site since that time. Although the castle has been rebuilt several times, the current one which dates back to the 1700s, has 356 rooms and the family live in a corner of it, and the rest is open to the public.
The castle is a popular setting for television and film productions, and has been featured in The Crown, The Da Vinci Code, Victoria and Abdul and The Young Victoria.
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The three girls attended Queen Margaret’s School in York with each sister taking a different track after high school with Lady Violet deciding to skip college for work experience in marketing and public relations. She now has her own marketing and brand strategy consultancy LVM Creative Relations.
Lady Alice attended the Conde Nast College of Fashion& Design after which she worked as a personal shopper at Selfridges, a stylist and model, signing with Leni’s Models and posing for Bare Minerals, Ralph Lauren and walking runways for Dolce & Gabbana. She also has a fashion column in The Sunday Telegraph.
The youngest sister Lady Eliza went to Newcastle University to study business management and also a Dolce & Gabbana model. She is now an interior designer and owns a sustainable table setting business which only uses Newcastle University items.
The sisters have two younger brothers, Lord Hugo Manners and Charles Manners, Marquess of Granby.
All five are Tatler darlings but it is the sisters’ partying and outlandish behaviour that caught the attention of the tabloids. The Manners sisters burst onto the London social scene with a vengeance several years ago. Their London home, a five-bedroom house in Fulham, was party central with their circle of aristocratic friends such as Princess Diana’s niece Lady Kitty Spencer and Lady Melissa Percy, daughter of the Duke of Northumberland to name a few, being frequent guests. And of course, London’s celebrity offspring such as Bryan Ferry’s kids, Tara, Isaac and Otis, and Gus Cameron, son of David, according to the Vanity Fair article.
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The regular loud parties on what used to be a quiet neighbourhood lead to complaints from neighbours and soon caught the attention of the tabloids and mainstream newspapers – The Telegraph headlined “Rutland’s daughters infuriate neighbours with wild all-night parties” and the Daily Mail proclaimed “The bad Manners sisters of British high society: Duke of Rutland’s leggy, loud and frightfully naughty daughters who make Downton’s Crawley Sisters look like angels”.
But for all their controversy, the Manners sisters are hardly the stereotypical bored aristocrats who live to party. Each sister has carved out a successful career for herself. They are also Instagram sensations, sharing everything from their pouts to riding and skiing, which earned them the title of the “UK Kardashians”.
They have been offered television shows based at Belvior Castle in the genre of Keeping Up with the Karadashians, but so far they have not taken the bait. They are not ruling it out though if the right future project comes along.
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During the Covid-19 lockdown, the sisters have been riding it out at home in Belvoir Castle with their brothers and parents, and Lady Alice’s long-time boyfriend Otis Ferry. They have had to do their own cooking and cleaning as there are no staff at this time – but Lady Alice has said that they have enjoyed having to do everything for themselves for a change.
Another interesting family fact is that their parents divorced more than eight years ago but neither wanted to move out of the family home, so they lived in different parts of the castle with their new partners. After all, when you have that much space, social distancing might have been an easy way of life all along.
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