Page 34 Daily Mail, Saturday, August 17, 2019
by Kathryn
Knight
T
his was a romance
that made headlines:
a modern fairytale
alliance between the
descendant of one ofscotland’s most distin-
guished families and a man
from humble Welsh farming
stock. And it traversed not
just class but countries.
The bride was Lady Kristyna
Drummond-hay, a 37-year-old
Melbourne-dwelling brunette, and a
granddaughter of William huntly
Drummond, the 15th Earl of Perth,
whose family seat was once the
austere, 23-bedroom stobhall Castle,
sitting amid almost 200 acres near
the River Tay.
her family had ruled parts of india
during the British Raj before her
father emigrated to Australia.
The groom, engineer Michael Lloyd,
35, was raised on the island of
Anglesey in North Wales where his
parents were dairy and beef farmers.
he’d worked on the family farm before
joining the Army and serving with the
Royal Engineers in Afghanistan.
This unlikely couple were brought
together by Muddy Matches, a
dating website for people who love
the countryside, and married in
Australia in February this year
following a whirlwind romance.
Their lives were said to be split
between his home in Conwy, and
Glencarse in Perth and Kinross, as
well as Lady Kristyna’s home in
Australia. The charming tale was
enhanced further when, last month,
The Times reported that Lady
Kristyna was advertising a ‘dreamjob’ for six aspiring young
conservationists — at £3,000 a month
— to work on isla Drummond hay, a
remote island wildlife sanctuary on
Chile’s south Pacific coast which
belonged to the family.
in an interview with the North
Wales Live website, Lady Kristyna
declared: ‘My family and i pride our-
selves on our philanthropic work. We
have poured millions into the upkeep
of the island due to erosion, plastic
pollution and other environmental
hazards,’ she is reported as saying.
‘We have decided that this wonder-
ful space could be better utilised so
are opening our doors.’
Little wonder that the feel-good
story was picked up by media
outlets around the world, drawn
to the beautiful aristocrat who,
having met the man of her
dreams, now wanted to share her
good fortune.
Alas, that fairytale lies in tatters:
today, Kristyna and Michael’s
marriage has ended after less than
six months, amid accusations by
the latter that Kristyna is a fraud
and a serial fantasist who only
married him in order to obtain a
UK visa, something he says he
had helped fund to the tune of
thousands of pounds.
he says he now believes that his
wife’s real name was Kristyna
halyburton, that she was a secre-
tary from Melbourne and she had
no aristocratic links.
it was, therefore, highly unlikely
that her father had been friends
with Diana, Princess of Wales,
that as a baby she had shared a
cot with the young Prince William
— just one of the lurid claims that
Kristyna had, according to
Michael, made during their court-
ship. ‘she has caused me nothing
but trouble,’ he said bitterly.J
AMEs strathallan, the
current and 18th Earl of
Perth, has cast further
doubt on Kristyna’s
illustrious lineage, declaring that
she ‘certainly had nothing to do
with my family’.
‘she sounds like a naïve
fantasist,’ he added.
They are devastating
accusations in an increasingly
tangled story and Kristyna
robustly refutes them all.
Breaking her silence from her
home in Melbourne yesterday —
she refuses to disclose where,
although her last known address
was thought to be a one-bedroom
rented bungalow — she insists
that she is the real victim in this
sequence of events, deceived by
her new husband, and that she
has ‘nothing to hide’.
‘i’ve not done anything wrong,’
she says. ‘i am a Drummond-hay
by birth and my family do have
an amazing colourful history and
that is undeniable.
‘i am adamant that i am
descended from the 15th Earl of
Perth, William huntly — my
indian birth records do not lie. i
have quite a lot of proof of that
but i’m not prepared to release
anything yet.
‘Michael and his family want to
paint me as the bad guy, but they
know what he has done and it has
caused me a great deal of distress.
‘i’m not a scammer — i’ve got
absolutely nothing to hide, i
genuinely loved Michael and the
really sad thing is that even after
he cheated on me, i still loved
him. And the idea that i married
him for a visa is ludicrous — i
don’t need him to get to the UK.
i could apply for a work permit ormy family connections would get
me an ancestry visa.
‘My only regret is compromising
on my values and my standards
by going ahead with the marriage
when i knew in my heart of hearts
that it wasn’t right. i gave him a
chance and he promised me it
[cheating] was all in the past.
she insists that the title of ‘Lady
Kristyna’ was ‘given to me by the
newspapers — i have never
claimed it for myself.’
Kristyna sounds convincing,
breaking down in tears during our
phone conversation at what she
calls the ‘terrible slanders’ she has
endured. Yet she is also frustrat-
ingly vague about crucial details
of her past, claiming she wants to
protect her extended family.
What we do know is this: copies
of Kristyna’s birth certificate
and childhood passport seen by
the Mail show her to have been
born Kristyn (without the ‘a’)
Drummond-hay in June 1982
in Mount Lawley, Perth,
Western Australia.
The youngest of four children,
her parents are named as harry
Denzil Drummond-hay andFrances Diana, both of whom
were born in Bengal in india.
Kristyna maintains her
relationship to the 15th Earl of
Perth, William huntly Drummond
— the man she claims is her
grandfather — has its roots there.
William, along with his English
wife, was sent to india in the early
20th century to work as an official
in the Raj.
But while records show he died
childless in 1937, Kristyna believes
her father harry was his secret
son, the product of a possibly
bigamous marriage to an
unnamed woman. By the early
sixties, harry and Frances had
moved to Australia, and while
reluctant to be drawn on the
details of her childhood, Kristyna
says it was ‘very comfortable’.
By the time she was in her teens,
harry, who died in February 2014,
had left the family home. he went
on to remarry and have three
more children — a decision that
prompted Kristyna to later
change her name to her mother’s
maiden name of halyburton.
‘i hadn’t seen my Dad for a while
at that stage — i didn’t see him
during my teen years for a time. i
was angry and stroppy,’ she says.
‘But recently i have wanted to go
back to my birth name.’
When asked about her career
she is vague: while Michael claims
she told him she was, variously, a
lawyer, a veterinary science experta lady...
s a - d y s , a m t o - g e f r s t o eShe says: I’m
descended
from Scottish
aristocrats with
properties around
the world including
this castle...
STH