Queen Bees: Six Brilliant and Extraordinary Society Hostesses Between the Wars – a Spectacle of Celebrity, Talent, and Burning Ambition Read online

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  First published in Great Britain in 2016 by Two Roads

  An imprint of John Murray Press

  An Hachette UK company

  Copyright © Siân Evans 2016

  The right of Siân Evans to be identified as the Author of the Work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  The text and image acknowledgements constitute an extension of this copyright page.

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library

  Ebook ISBN 9781473618046

  Audio Digital Download ISBN 9781473631434

  Hodder & Stoughton Ltd

  Carmelite House

  50 Victoria Embankment

  London EC4Y 0DZ

  www.hodder.co.uk

  For my father, David Meurig Evans.

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Dramatis Personae

  Introduction

  1. Origins

  2. The Edwardian Summer and the Successful Hostess

  3. The Great War

  4. The Aftermath: 1918–1923

  5. The Roaring Twenties

  6. The Great Depression: 1929–1933

  7. Parties and Politics: 1933–1936

  8. 1936: The Year of Three Kings

  9. The Coronation, the Cliveden Set and the Munich Crisis

  10. ‘Bravery under fire’: 1939–1945

  11. Peace and Austerity

  12. Legacies

  Source notes and acknowledgements

  Picture acknowledgements

  Acknowledgements

  Index

  About the Author

  Picture Section

  Dramatis Personae

  Lady Nancy Astor, née Nancy Witcher Langhorne, 1879-1964. Energetic Virginian-born political pioneer, and militant teetotaller.

  Lady Sibyl Colefax, née Sibyl Halsey, 1874-1950. Determined collector of the great and the good, and a successful interior designer.

  Mrs Laura Mae Corrigan, née Laura Whitlock, 1879-1948. Impervious to snubs and snobs, the Wisconsin-born queen of malapropisms and consummate party-giver was a heroine in World War Two.

  Lady Emerald Cunard, née Maud Alice Burke, 1872-1948. San Francisco-born hostess whose sparkling wit attracted the cultural elite, she became a key figure in the Abdication crisis.

  Dame Margaret Greville, aka ‘Mrs Ronnie’, née Margaret Helen Anderson, 1863-1942. The illegitimate daughter of a Scottish millionaire, she courted princes and politicians for her own Machiavellian ends.

  Lady Edith Londonderry, née Edith Chaplin, 1878-1959. London’s pre-eminent society hostess and a passionate activist for women’s rights, who sported a tattooed snake on her ankle.

  Introduction

  ‘Existence is a party. You join after it’s started, and you leave before it’s finished.’

  Elsa Maxwell, 1883–1963

  Between the two world wars, a number of spirited, ambitious women from differing backgrounds used their considerable charm, their intelligence and their fortunes to infiltrate and influence the upper ranks of British society. By cultivating the prominenti in fields as diverse as politics and court circles, theatre, science and the arts, each great hostess sought to create her own ‘set’, a virtual forum where she could bring together the most important, interesting and illuminating people of the day.

  Six particular ‘Queen Bees’, each born in the Victorian era, had profound effects on British history. As a result of the social revolution wrought by the First World War, they slipped through the filters that previously would have barred them from the highest social circles. Each was able to reinvent herself as an independent, often influential focus on the political, social and cultural elite. To be a great hostess was a career choice for these resourceful and energetic women at a time when their formal opportunities for making a mark on the outside world were limited.

  By creating convivial and welcoming homes, and providing lavish and enjoyable hospitality, they consciously attracted the most stimulating and dynamic people of the day. They had a profound and radical effect on the many aspects of the inter-war era, from the idiocies of the Bright Young Things to the abdication and the Munich Agreement.

  Throughout history, there have always been certain women who have been keen to shape the society of their times by using their influence, charm, contacts and humour. Whether queens or mistresses, aristocrats or bluestockings, they have furthered their own, their families’ or their friends’ interests, to achieve their aims or to provide themselves with intellectual and cultural stimulus. Through the use of ‘soft power’, society hostesses have brought together the famous, the notorious, the gifted and glamorous, the talented, beautiful and wealthy, creating their own milieus in which their own interests and talents could shine in reflected glory. They have used their opulent salons and elegant drawing rooms to marshal their own cliques, to launch the careers of bright young people with no background, to advance the interests of their protégés and allies, to matchmake and scheme, to gossip and to pass hints to the well-connected of their acquaintance, and to place scurrilous stories about their rivals.

  The inter-war Queen Bees who appear in this book came from very mixed backgrounds. Three of the six – Lady Nancy Astor, Mrs Laura Corrigan and Lady Emerald Cunard – were American in origin, and only Nancy could make any claim to gentility. Their British-born contemporaries and rivals were Lady Sibyl Colefax, Lady Edith Londonderry and Mrs Margaret Greville; of these, only Lady Londonderry was of high birth. Despite their diverse origins, all of them were determined and ambitious ‘social mountaineers’. Each one initially gained an established position within the hierarchy of British society through making an advantageous marriage; once they had a ‘name’, they were able to harness their intelligence, their wits and their resources to pursue their own passions.

  Their areas of operation varied, and inevitably their social circles often overlapped, resulting in rivalries. Nancy Astor and Edith Londonderry both moved in aristocratic circles, as a result of their marriages to influential and wealthy career politicians. They were both brought up as political conservatives, but subsequently developed radical social ideas of their own, and used their contacts and powers of persuasion to achieve their aims, with far-reaching consequences.

  Lady Cunard and Lady Colefax, on the other hand, favoured the artistic, musical and literary scenes that flourished across Britain, America and Europe between the wars. Sibyl Colefax and Maud Cunard (or Emerald, as she later preferred to be known) competed fiercely with each other to attract both the intelligentsia and celebrities to their tables, as well as fostering the burgeoning relationship between Edward VIII and Mrs Simpson, an affair that was to have such dramatic consequences for the royal family.

  Conversely Mrs Margaret Greville, known variously as ‘Maggie’ or ‘Mrs Ronnie’, was a great friend of the old guard at Buckingham Palace, but became involved in the complex world of internatio
nal politics through her curiosity and her early misplaced enthusiasm for Hitler and his ‘little brownshirts.’ Her complete antithesis and despised social rival, Mrs Laura Corrigan, was widely dismissed as a frivolous, foreign millionairess with a knack for social gaffes, whose entire raison d’être appeared to be organising novelty parties with glittering prizes for the Bright Young Things, so that she could indulge her own fantasies of being a circus ringmaster. However, it was brave Mrs Corrigan who defied all expectations, remaining in Paris when the Nazis occupied the city and dedicating her considerable fortune to funding her charitable work by putting herself at considerable personal risk during the Second World War.

  The Queen Bees of London society benefited from advantageous marriages that gave them wealth and brought the necessary social mobility that went with it. The rigid class distinctions that had existed in the nineteenth century were sufficiently permeable after the Great War to allow these women to rise to positions of influence. Naturally, many women of that era were obliged by their social position and that of their husbands to entertain their contemporaries on the grand scale, by offering and receiving hospitality, ‘matching cutlet for cutlet’ in the telling phrase of Lady Violet Greville, Margaret’s formidable mother-in-law. However, the six characters under consideration here actively made it their life’s work to surround themselves with a distinctive coterie, to bring together diverse individuals they felt should meet under their roofs. They often cited altruistic reasons, although one cannot avoid the inevitable conclusion that each Queen Bee also enjoyed a little reflective lustre from attracting the most desirable individuals to their homes.

  Tellingly, each of these six women seems to have been driven by a volatile childhood or unhappy experiences. Both Lady Londonderry and Maud Cunard lost a beloved parent while still young. Sibyl Colefax’s restless mother was estranged from her father, and she grew up living under sufferance in other relatives’ homes, shuttling between India and London, or eking out a pittance in out-of-season Continental resorts. Margaret Greville was well aware of the stigma of illegitimacy that hung like a cloud over her early years, spent in an obscure boarding house in Edinburgh. Laura Mae Corrigan was born in rural poverty in the American Midwest and was driven by a childlike determination to have the well born dance to her tune. Nancy Astor’s father redeemed the family’s fortunes after the American Civil War, but she too appreciated the impermanence of apparently secure fortunes, and made a disastrous early marriage to an alcoholic that coloured many aspects of her later life.

  As a result of their early years, each Queen Bee sought to create a social circle of her own as an adult, a set of friends and acquaintances over whom she could have some control. They were aware of the importance of making a good marriage, and notably each one married a man who could provide what she required from a lifelong partnership, even though the husbands tended to be very different in character from their wives.

  Although they tended to lack formal education, the society hostesses were clever, curious and largely self-taught. Coinciding with the moment when women were first allowed some access to the professions, after the end of the Great War, several of the hostesses became high-profile role models through their pioneering careers outside the home. The eldest of the six, Mrs Margaret Greville, an astute businesswoman and one of the wealthiest people in Britain, was fifty-five years old before she was allowed to vote in the general election of 1918. Nancy Astor was a mother of six children and forty years old when she was elected Member of Parliament for a Plymouth constituency in 1919. The youngest, Laura Mae Corrigan, was forty-three when she launched her charm offensive on London in 1922. All of these women were already mature before they embarked on the most influential years of their lives.

  The reach of women like Nancy Astor, Mrs Greville and Edith Londonderry was considerable; they were celebrities in their own age, travelling extensively, forging valuable personal connections in America, India and Europe. They exerted considerable influence on the government and the legislature, and demonstrated through their own example that women could have careers and roles beyond those traditionally ascribed to them. Their diverse activities affected the royal family, the aristocracy and international relations. Lady Astor and Lady Londonderry used their influence to improve the lives of women of all classes, by implementing legislation designed to protect their interests, such as banning the sale of alcohol to under-eighteens, by improving maternal and infant mortality rates through the provision of trained midwives funded by the state, and by proving through the aegis of the Women’s Legion that women could work outside the home. By contrast, Emerald Cunard, Sibyl Colefax and Laura Corrigan provided much-needed patronage and stimulus, which enhanced the rich and varied cultural life of Britain. Even Mrs Greville, notorious for her apparent snobbery and cultivation of the rich, discreetly funded a scholarship programme for nearly four decades which enabled hundreds of ambitious young people from poor backgrounds to gain professional qualifications by studying at night school.

  The six Queen Bees of the inter-war years helped to shape the course of British history. They had stamina, energy and determination; they also enjoyed proximity to power and collecting celebrities. Their hospitality was legendary; above all, they were excellent company and knew how to throw fabulous parties. As Oswald Mosley wrote in his autobiography: ‘It was all enormous fun. The cleverest met together with the most beautiful, and that is what social life should be.’1

  1

  Origins

  The six society hostesses who came to dominate London society were born between 1863 and 1879, at the height of the Victorian era. They were the products of their era and their diverse upbringings, but what marks them out from their contemporaries was the way in which each woman transcended her origins, using her intelligence to reinvent herself.

  The oldest of the hostesses, who was to become Mrs Margaret Greville, was born Margaret Helen Anderson, in a discreet rented house in St John’s Wood, London, on 20 December 1863. The two Scots of notably modest origins who claimed to be her parents, Helen and William Anderson, were far from Edinburgh, where they both lived, when Helen’s child was born. The registrar who recorded the birth assumed they were married, but in fact Helen and William shared nothing more than a coincidence of surname, and the same employer. They were involved in an elaborate plot to legitimise the baby, and to spare Helen the stigma of being an unmarried mother.

  Helen Anderson worked as a humble domestic servant in Edinburgh in the early 1860s. She became the mistress of the entrepreneurial bachelor brewer William McEwan, and in 1863 she discovered she was pregnant. Mr McEwan had a trusted employee at the brewery, the cellarman William Murray Anderson, who was married with a family of his own. William Anderson was willing to help solve Helen’s predicament, and so the two Scots moved to London together to await the baby’s arrival, pretending to be husband and wife. After registering the birth and following the child’s christening in April 1864, William Anderson returned to his marital home in Edinburgh, and he remained working in the brewery till the mid-1890s. It seems that Mr McEwan bankrolled the deception, so that Helen Anderson might appear to be a respectable widow, whose husband had died in London, leaving her with a small daughter of uncertain age, when she returned to Scotland. Records are scarce, but by 1868 Mrs Anderson was running a boarding house at East Maitland Street in Edinburgh, an enterprise presumably funded by Mr McEwan. Meanwhile, Helen’s family lived at 102 Fountainbridge in the same city, across the street from William Anderson’s household at number 107, and they all worked at Mr McEwan’s brewery, apparently amicably.

  Little Margaret’s true origins were probably suspected by many in Edinburgh, but Mr McEwan had deep pockets. His private account books show that he made irregular but generous payments to a ‘Mrs Anderson’ for the next two decades; he also funded young Margaret’s education, even providing dancing lessons. So when, in 1885, Mr McEwan, now an extremely wealthy and well-connected Liberal MP for Central Edinburgh, and apparently
a confirmed bachelor aged fifty-eight, announced he was marrying the respectable middle-aged widow Mrs Anderson, aged forty-eight, who ran a boarding house in the city with her daughter, eyebrows were raised and lips pursed in Morningside drawing rooms. The press were very careful always to refer to Miss Anderson as Mr McEwan’s ‘stepdaughter’. Nevertheless, the newly married McEwans and Margaret relocated to London, removing themselves from Scottish censure. As Margaret was to advise her friends sagely in later years, ‘Never comment on a likeness.’

  William McEwan did not formally adopt Margaret, but he dropped hints in the right circles that his ‘stepdaughter’ would inherit the bulk of his massive fortune, and she was launched into London society. He moved in rarefied circles; as a Privy Councillor, he knew many senior statesmen and landowning families. He was also familiar with the Marlborough House set, the associates and friends of the self-indulgent Prince of Wales, the future Edward VII, who had no compunctions about seeking the financial advice – and informal loans – of self-made millionaires.

  It was believed that a young woman’s wedding day was the most important of her life. Aspiring social climbers had to use whatever assets they might possess to attract a desirable mate, and one of the most desirable attributes a marriageable young woman might offer was a substantial fortune provided by a parent, benefactor or protector. In the case of Margaret Anderson, all three roles were combined in Mr McEwan. He was keen to secure his daughter’s future by arranging her marriage into a good family. An aristocratic title was a highly desirable acquisition for ambitious families whose wealth came from ‘trade’. Conveniently, there were a number of upper-crust British families whose impressive escutcheons and rolling acres urgently needed shoring up with ready cash. As a result, many a marriage was discreetly arranged or tacitly encouraged between the parents of sons set to inherit venerable titles and daughters who could provide newly minted banknotes. Any attrition caused by a rapid scramble up the social ladder could always be alleviated by the soothing poultice of money.