Rachel Watkyn OBE, founder of the Tiny Box Company and one of Dragons' Den's most successful female entrepreneurs, has revealed that she was raised believing she was a baroness, but a hidden chest of secrets exposed the truth about her father's elaborate deception. In her memoir, The Baronesses, co-authored with her half-sister Claire Hornby, Watkyn details an extraordinary childhood marked by neglect and abuse, all under the shadow of a fabricated aristocratic identity.
The box of secrets
Watkyn's birth certificate was stapled to a solicitor's letter declaring her the natural daughter of "Graham Dean Gaisburgh-Watkyn, the Count de Lengham". As a young woman, she was styled as the Baroness de Gaisberg. However, as the count lay dying in 2017, he told her about a hidden chest. When Rachel and Claire opened it, they unearthed a dark truth that challenged everything Rachel thought she knew about her parents and her own identity.
The family moved into a series of large, derelict houses with rotted floors, no electricity and no indoor bathrooms. Rachel and her sisters were forbidden from using the indoor Portaloo reserved for their mother, instead using an outside lavatory with a bucket underneath. They were often locked out of the caravans where the family slept, left to roam fields for hours.
A father's elaborate lies
Rachel's father convinced owners of grand estates like Butley Priory that he would refurbish the buildings, securing them for a peppercorn rent before leaving them in disrepair. "In those days, all you needed was some headed paper and the signature of a count and no one would question you," Rachel explained. The final cracking of the mirror came when she found a thank-you card in the chest from Prince Henri of Monaco, thanking the 'count' for a bottle of port from the 1980s. A former employer from Shirburn Castle had mentioned Graham left under a cloud, accused of stealing a bottle of vintage port. "My God, he was a common thief as well," Rachel recalled.
The intricate family tree claimed kinship with Maximilian I of Habsburg of the Holy Roman Empire and traced a lineage to King Charles III. When Rachel uploaded the family tree and coat of arms into ChatGPT, the AI said the documents were "characteristic of amateur or fabricated genealogies" and told her she was not officially a baroness.
A journey to self-discovery
Rachel's mother, Bridget, referred to her children as 'it' in letters. In one, she wrote: "I saw Rachel today for the first time since the police kidnapped it." Bridget died of non Hodgkin's lymphoma in 2011. Rachel was made a ward of court and taken into care for 18 months in the early 1970s, entering the system severely developmentally delayed.
In 2024, Rachel was awarded an OBE for services to sustainability, exports and ethical business growth. She hid at home with her husband Steve, concerned people would think she was a fraud like her father. "In my head, I felt like I didn't deserve it," she explained. "And, therefore, I must have faked it." But the honour was real. Today, her house is stocked with towers of lavatory paper and mountains of socks, a visceral reaction to a childhood where she had to use torn-up pages of the Yellow Pages. The Baronesses: A true story of sisterhood, survival and a secret that rewrote their past by Rachel Watkyn and Claire Hornby is out now.
