Saturday 13 August 2022 10:07 PM The secret aunt Camilla never met - born after her womanising grandfather ... trends now

With little fanfare, a death notice for Sylvia Bunn was placed in the pages of a Sussex newspaper. 

It said she had passed away on December 11, 2007, aged 87, adding: 'She will be sadly missed.' 

A Requiem Mass was followed by a burial at Bexhill Cemetery. No flowers were requested but it was suggested that donations could be given to the charity Help The Aged.

Few people knew Sylvia, a retired dentist's widow. But it emerged that her will, written the year before her death, had given the clue to a remarkable family connection. 

For those in the know, her birth name linked her to Camilla, Duchess of Cornwall, of whom she was the forgotten aunt.

Today, The Mail on Sunday can tell the fascinating life story of Sylvia. Although Camilla never met her and a spokesman at Clarence House declined to comment, it is believed the future Queen Consort is aware of Sylvia's existence.

Sylvia was the half-sister of Camilla's father Bruce Shand, and her life was largely lived away from England, in part to cloak the sadness at having been rejected by her family.

She was born in 1920, the daughter of Eton and Cambridge-educated journalist Philip Morton Shand, a serial adulterer whose life featured a string of mistresses whom he seduced in a chaotic, disorderly fashion. 

The incorrigible but charming womaniser was married four times: first to Margot Harrington, a secretary, who gave birth to Camilla's father Bruce in 1917, and secondly to Sylvia's mother, Agatha Alys Fabre-Tonnerre, with whom he began an affair while Margot was pregnant. 

It was not long before Alys, as she was known, a 25-year-old London University graduate from a distinguished French-Indian family and seven years his junior, also became pregnant.

The couple escaped to Edinburgh, where they holed up at the St Andrews Hotel in preparation for a hastily arranged wedding. 

Two students were hauled off the street to act as witnesses, and just a fortnight after the nuptials, Alys gave birth to a girl they called Doris – a name the girl grew up to dislike and which she ditched in favour of Sylvia.

The newborn's half-brother, Bruce, who had been cast aside in Morton Shand's rush to consummate the latest love in his life, was barely a toddler.

Attempting to throw a discreet veil of modesty over the elopement and swift birth, Morton Shand and Alys stayed in Scotland for several months until they felt it safe to return to London. 

But once again, the marriage was doomed to failure. The couple staggered on together for four years but then Alys, barely 30, petitioned for divorce in 1925 on the grounds of her husband's adultery. 

A month after the decree was granted, Morton Shand married for a third time – only for that relationship to end and for him to go on and marry his fourth and final wife.

Alys, whose mother had died in childbirth and whose father passed away when she was very little, had been brought up by relatives. 

As a young woman she understandably longed for a family and a home to call her own, but perhaps her dependency on Morton Shand, a man incapable of providing such a thing, proved her undoing.

While he went on to establish a name for himself as a writer on subjects such as food, wine and architecture, and befriend the future Poet Laureate John Betjeman, Alys and their daughter Sylvia were forced to rely on charitable handouts from his parents. 

This was possible because his mother was the heiress to a shipping industry fortune and able to bankroll her latest grandchild and ex-daughter-in-law.

But the cavalier Morton Shand had no time for his children. He barely ever saw Bruce, though they were briefly reconciled before his death in 1960. He never saw Sylvia again.

And so Sylvia's lonely and peripatetic life with her mother began.

She had no siblings – her nearest blood relative being Bruce, but she never saw him either.

During her childhood years, leading up to the Second World War, Sylvia and her mother moved between flats in West London's Maida Vale. 

When Sylvia was 18, Alys took a job as a window dresser in a Kensington store to help pay her daughter's university fees – for Sylvia had inherited her father's fierce intellect, if not his love.

Eventually Alys moved to a flat in Malvern, Worcestershire. By now, Bruce had had a successful war (winning the Military Cross twice) and had married into the super-rich Cubitt family. 

His wife, Rosemary, was the granddaughter of Edward VII's mistress Alice Keppel.

Bruce developed a career as an upmarket wine merchant with a blue-chip company called Block Grey & Block, and divided his time between Kensington and a country house near Lewes in Sussex, where he embedded himself in the local gentry by joining the South Down Hunt.

In 1947, Camilla Shand was born – the same year that her aunt Sylvia took up a post teaching German at a technical school in Malvern. 

'Sylvia was a lively talker, very independent,' recalls France-Odile Winter, whose mother was a fellow teacher. 

'She always dressed elegantly with high heels, she wore a hat and fur jacket – she was lovely. Forthright, but very charming.'

Sylvia became France-Odile's godmother. It is hard to fathom why there was no romance in the life of someone quite so attractive, but Sylvia

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