Virginia, Countess of Airlie, lady of the bedchamber to Queen Elizabeth II

When President Trump dropped into Windsor Castle for tea with Queen Elizabeth II in July 2018, it took an American member of the royal household to match his notorious “grab and yank” handshake. In a clip widely shared on social media, Virginia “Ginnie” Ogilvy, Countess of Airlie, gripped the president’s hand firmly and appeared not to let go, even as he tried to pull away.
As the first American to serve a British monarch as a lady-in-waiting, Ogilvy was the ideal companion for royal visits to the US. In 1991 she attended a state dinner in honour of the Queen given by President George HW Bush at the White House, and in 2007 she accompanied the Queen to commemorations of the 400th anniversary of the first English settlement at Jamestown, Virginia. That visit also included a state dinner at the White House, this time hosted by President George W Bush.
Witty and unconventional, Ginnie (never Ginny) Ogilvy had been appointed lady of the bedchamber in 1973 and remained with the Queen until her death in September 2022. She brought a breath of fresh air to the royal household, often pedalling her old boneshaker bicycle to Buckingham Palace. So close was she to the Queen that when Ogilvy celebrated her 70th birthday at Annabel’s in 2003, the monarch made what was thought to have been her only visit to a nightclub since her marriage.
Virginia Fortune Ryan was born in London in 1933, the daughter of John Ryan, an American journalist-turned-industrialist who was heir to a fortune made in railways, tobacco and insurance. Her mother Margaret (née Kahn), a devoted anglophile known as Nin, was also an heiress, in her case to the Jewish-American financier Otto Kahn who gave St Dunstan’s Lodge, his Regent’s Park mansion, to be a home for blind former servicemen. She had a brother, also called John.
She was raised at the family home in Newport, Rhode Island, and sent to the exclusive all-girls Brearley School, on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, before continuing her studies at art school. Each year her mother migrated to an apartment overlooking St James’s Park, central London, for the maximum 90 days allowed by the British tax authorities, often accompanied by her daughter.
On one of these visits the 16-year-old Ginnie was at a dance at the Savoy hotel when she met David Ogilvy (Lord Ogilvy), an investment banker seven years her senior who had served in the Scots Guards during the Second World War. His grandmother, Mabell, Countess of Airlie, had been lady of the bedchamber to Queen Mary; his father was lord-in-waiting to George VI; and he had been a childhood friend of Princess Elizabeth, their friendship surviving a rocky start. At one early birthday party he was presented with a pedal car and his father suggested that he should invite the princess to take a ride. He recalled his tantrum: “I said, ‘Certainly not. This is my birthday, this is my car, and nobody else is going to have a ride in it’.”
The couple were engaged in July 1952, though the emerald centre stone in her diamond engagement ring was speedily changed to sapphire because of a family superstition that “an Ogilvy and green should never be seen”. Many years later David told The Times that it dates back to when the Ogilvys wore green kilts in a disastrous battle against the Lindsay clan.
They were married three months later. Thousands of people gathered in Parliament Square for their nuptials in St Margaret’s Church, which were featured on British Pathé News in the nation’s cinemas. As a wedding gift her parents gave them a Regency terrace house in Chelsea. The Queen and Prince Philip were unable to attend because they were opening a dam in Wales, but the guests included Douglas Fairbanks Jr, the Queen Mother and Princess Margaret, for whom Ogilvy had once been touted as an eligible match. Ironically, his younger brother Angus joined the royal family in 1963 when he married Princess Alexandra.
Petite, animated and down to earth, the new Lady Ogilvy was a fine dinner-party host and an excellent Highland reels dancer who was credited with knocking any residual Scottish dourness or shyness out of her husband. Having learnt that several members of her mother’s family were victims of the Holocaust, she became involved in postwar relief efforts and in 1955 joined the Duchess of Atholl, the actor Peter Ustinov and other well-known names in sponsoring a scheme for the Refugees Defence Committee to provide holidays for former concentration camp victims who still remained in displaced persons camps in Germany.
In 1968 her husband succeeded as 13th Earl of Airlie, a title that dates from 1639. Strictly speaking he was the 11th earl, if one observed two 18th-century “attainders” imposed because of the family’s support of the Jacobite rebellions of 1715 and 1745, and only lifted by parliament in 1826. He died last year (obituary, June 30, 2023), having been the last witness to the coronation of 1937 as a page to his father, and she is survived by their six children: Doune, Jane, David (the 14th Earl of Airlie), Bruce, Elizabeth and Patrick.
In the early years of the Queen’s reign the Ogilvys were invited to shooting weekends at Balmoral and Sandringham. On one such occasion in 1973 the Queen took her aside and asked if she would be interested in becoming a lady-in-waiting. “I said, ‘You realise I am still an American subject, and David is a banker, and I have six children. Perhaps you should get someone more steeped in it all’. She said, ‘No, no, I would like you to do it’,” she told Sally Bedell Smith, the royal commentator, who interviewed the Ogilvys for her book Elizabeth The Queen: The Life of a Modern Monarch (2012).
Her husband entered royal service in a similar way when in 1984 the Queen informally asked if he would succeed Lord Maclean as lord chamberlain. At that point Ginnie Ogilvy considered stepping back, telling the Queen that “you don’t want too many Airlies around”, but the monarch was adamant that they should both be part of the household. “He and I hardly ever met [at work],” she said. “I kept away except when I was on duty.”
She described how his first task had been to practise walking backwards in the Queen’s presence. “I used to say to him, ‘Find a pattern in the carpet and stick to it.’ I was always afraid he would fall over,” she told Bedell Smith. He took her advice, with one additional precaution: “I knew I mustn’t drink too much.”
The pair supported the Queen through her “annus horribilis” of 1992 in which the Prince of Wales separated from Princess Diana and a devastating fire broke out at Windsor Castle. The earl is credited with encouraging the Queen to meet most of the restoration costs herself and to pay tax. In 1997 he played a key role after the death of Princess Diana in Paris, receiving the aircraft carrying her coffin at RAF Northolt and chairing the funeral planning committee.
Away from her duties in the royal household, Ginnie Ogilvy maintained her interest in the arts, including as a member of the Royal Fine Art Commission. She was a trustee of the Tate Gallery (and chairman of Friends of Tate Gallery), the National Gallery in London and the National Galleries of Scotland, and served as chairman of the American Museum in Britain, in Bath, from 1997 to 2000. However, in 2012 she was fined £120 by Skipton magistrates after breaking a temporary 50mph speed limit on the A1 in her Volkswagen Polo.
Home was Cortachy Castle, at Kirriemuir in Angus, north of Dundee, a 15th-century castle that was “romanticised” in the 1820s and extensively rebuilt by the Ogilvy family after a fire in 1883. There she ran a bulb and flower farm in the grounds of the 69,000-acre estate, where she and her husband hosted the annual Cortachy Highland Games. The couple’s London home was a spacious flat near Lower Sloane Street. Her sitting room at the back of the apartment had high ceilings, walls painted apple green, shelves filled with books, and pretty paintings. A desk between the windows was piled high with papers; “more messy” than her husband’s, she confessed.
Ogilvy continued to take her place at the Queen’s side, whether on tour or at Buckingham Palace receptions. She told how on one occasion a diplomat brought as his guest his yoga teacher, who offered her advice against jet lag. “Every morning when you wake up you should put your feet against the wall above your head, legs straight out, to get the circulation going. I have done it for several days and it has helped my back problems,” she said of the techniques that had perhaps given her the strength to shake Trump’s hand so hard on his visit to Windsor Castle in 2018.
Virginia, Countess of Airlie DCVO, lady of the bedchamber to Queen Elizabeth II, was born on February 9, 1933. She died on August 16, 2024, aged 91