Halfway up the stairs of a remote Exmoor cottage is a cupboard where a young Boris Johnson liked to hide himself away from the world.
The pictures he drew on the walls of the snug at Nethercote Cottage are there to this day — a poignant reminder of the happy times he spent at his grandmother’s home, when thoughts of becoming Prime Minister were but a dream.
Last week, he placed ‘Granny Butter’ on a list of his five most inspirational women, to celebrate International Women’s Day. She sat with the likes of Iceni Queen Boudicca and Nobel Prize winner Malala Yousafzai.
Johnson cited his granny’s ‘sheer unconquerable optimism’ as his main reason for including her.
Boris Johnson cited his grandmother Yvonne Eileen Irene Johnson (pictured), among his five most inspirational women
The 55-year-old praised the way she survived life on a rainswept hill farm in the Exe Valley in Somerset, managing for years without electricity or central heating and raising four children, a gaggle of grandchildren and a menagerie of animals, while maintaining what the PM describes as ‘the greatest human gift of all: of being overjoyed to see you’.
‘It didn’t matter what you had done,’ he recalled. ‘ “Darling,” she would cry, “how wonderful to see you.” ’
But delve beneath the surface of the PM’s memories and it’s clear Granny Butter’s influence went further than just showing a young Boris how to eat crisps with a knife and fork, or teaching him to swim in the river near her home.
Long before he was born, Yvonne Eileen Irene Johnson’s indomitable spirit had already earned her the nickname ‘Buster’ at Cheltenham Ladies’ College, where she excelled in lacrosse.
And behind the Johnson family snapshots of a woman who rescued orphaned lambs and churned butter by hand in a kitchen converted from a cow byre, is a remarkable story stretching back — as she once told a wide-eyed young Boris — ‘to the crowned heads of Europe’.
It was only later, long after her death in 1987, aged 80, that he discovered she had been telling the truth.
The biggest clue to Granny Butter’s extraordinary past lies in the PM’s full name — Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson. Growing up, he was aware that the ‘de Pfeffel’ came from his grandmother’s side, but he didn’t take seriously her claim that she was descended from French nobility, or that the oak chest in her kitchen contained the ‘de Pfeffel silver’.
But Granny Butter was indeed related to the French baron Charles de Pfeffel.
Boris (pictured, aged five) had no idea of his royal connection, although his grandmother could trace her ancestry back to King George II
She was born in 1907 at the height of the Parisian ‘Belle Epoque’ in a house at Versailles — and she could also trace her ancestry back to King George II.
As a child, Boris had no idea of his royal connections, believing his grandmother’s most obvious legacy was ‘the beaky noses, the fair hair, the sturdy proportions’.
In a foreword to her posthumous memoir, Alas Poor Johnny, published in 2015, Johnson recalls ‘Granny Butter’s risotto’, the dish she liked to called her ‘meisterwerk’, made from Uncle Ben’s rice, chopped tomatoes, onions and tuna. One of his memories is of the day she dropped a giant bowl of it. While the rest of the family watched in horror as their lunch smashed on the floor, she scooped it up for them to eat, saying: ‘Never mind! I am sure it will be delicious.’
It was her ever-smiling, can-do attitude that Johnson found so alluring. Despite her rudimentary kitchen, Granny Butter always managed to get by, creating simple but loving feasts for her four children and, later, grandchildren.
Much of his admiration appears to have stemmed from the fact that Granny Butter didn’t bat an eyelid when things went wrong — as they did when once she forgot to pierce the lid of a Fray Bentos pie before putting it in the Rayburn. The stove door was ripped off its hinges by the subsequent explosion.
She raised her family without a washing machine, dishwasher or central heating. The stove often took half a day to heat up. The family’s temperamental Land Rover was parked on a slope so it could be bump-started.
Boris (pictured) was taught by his grandmother how to swim, in the river Exe in Somerset
As well as teaching Boris to swim in the river Exe, where he and his siblings, Rachel, Leo and Joe, had made a dam, she showed him how to skim stones and climb trees. She also taught him to read.
Given her high birth and education — she read French and Russian at Oxford — she might have expected more from life. As she put it in her memoir ‘few people can have been less qualified than I was to be a farmer’s wife’.
Irene, as she was known to her French family as a girl, was born in the Pavillon du Barry in the Avenue de Paris. Her early life was one of upper middle-class splendour.
Her French mother was Marie Louise de Pfeffel, the last of a long line of de Pfeffels.
But, despite these regal beginnings, Irene’s childhood home was a villa in Bromley, Kent. She lived with her mother and her English father, Stanley Williams, a Harrow and Oxford-educated underwriter at Lloyds of London.
Irene and her three younger sisters were cared for by a penniless Russian princess who became their nanny after fleeing the Russian Revolution.
Irene recalled in her memoir: ‘My mother had secret hopes that I would marry an ambassador because of my languages.’
After getting caught up in ‘unsuitable romantic entanglements’ she was dispatched to work in Cairo. It was here she met her future husband, Wilfred ‘Johnny’ Johnson. They returned to England and wed in 1936.
Boris’s grandmother (pictured) who died of cancer, didn’t live to see her grandson fulfil his ambition of becoming Prime Minister
Her first child, Peter, was born in 1937; her daughter, Hilary, in 1939. When war broke out, her husband joined the Civil Air Guard, while Irene and her family lived in Cornwall, where Boris Johnson’s father Stanley was born, and then Devon, where a fourth child, Gillian, completed the family.
After the war ended, they returned briefly to Surrey, before moving to Exmoor in 1951.
In October 1986, the Johnsons celebrated Buster and Johnny’s 50th wedding anniversary at Nethercote with a cake in the shape of a Land Rover.
Sadly, she didn’t live to see her grandson fulfil his ambition to be Prime Minister. She died from cancer in 1987. When her memoir was published in 2015, Johnson spoke at the book launch.
‘I certainly think that Granny Butter has been immensely influential on all our family with her general optimism and dynamism,’ he said.
‘In her view, there was no such word as can’t — you’ve got to try everything.’
He went on to share some of her pearls of wisdom in his tongue-in-cheek ‘Grannifesto’, which included a call to ‘make Scrabble an Olympic sport’ and to ‘bring back manners in young people’.
The Johnson family still own the farm Irene made her home for more than 35 years. As for the ‘de Pfeffel’ silver — it was sold at Sotheby’s in 1977 when Granny Butter and Johnny needed to pay for flights to Australia to see their eldest daughter, Hillie.
This week, Hillie paid tribute to her mother from her home in New South Wales. ‘She was always extremely positive, and even in the face of adversity she looked on the bright side of life,’ she said. ‘These are all qualities that you can see in Boris.’