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

  The McEwans and Margaret Anderson, now in her mid-twenties, had moved to 4 Chesterfield Gardens, London, in the late 1880s; living at number 7 in the same street were Lord and Lady Greville. He had been Prime Minister Gladstone’s Private Secretary and moved in high Liberal circles, as did Mr McEwan. The two neighbouring households became acquainted. The Grevilles’ eldest son and heir, Captain the Hon. Ronald Henry Fulke Greville, or Ronnie to his friends, was considered quite a catch; easy-going and charming, handsome, fond of horse-racing and a great friend of the Prince of Wales. Despite their grand title and extensive property in Ireland, the Grevilles were perennially short of cash. In order to keep Ronnie afloat in the high-spending Marlborough House set who hung around the Prince, it was imperative that he found a wealthy wife.

  However, Margaret Anderson, the girl living just across the street, was not Ronnie Greville’s first choice. He pursued Virginia Daniel Bonynge, who was a rich, beautiful and good-natured American; to add to her attractions, her stepfather, William Bonynge, a Californian gold-miner and financier, had planted a dowry worth $4 million on her. Unfortunately, William Bonynge was locked in a vicious vendetta with a former business associate, John McKay, and the fight became so ugly and notorious on both sides of the Atlantic, with slanderous stories about their wives deliberately placed in the press and spread around the London clubs by the protagonists, that the matter came to a head in a violent fist fight in a San Francisco bank in January 1891, a skirmish that was reported with evident enjoyment in the press:

  Mr Mackay [sic] struck when Mr Bonynge was not looking. Then they had it. Chairs turned over, inkstands flew and the ink made long, black streaks on the wall. It was a regular possum and wildcat fight. President Heilman said, ‘Gentlemen! Gentlemen! This will never do!’1

  Despite the two-year courtship, the Grevilles decided against the marriage; Ronnie resolved to look for a bride with a similarly wealthy stepfather but a less volatile background. He also needed a wife who could thrive in the slightly louche company that surrounded the Prince of Wales, who was to become King Edward VII. Ronnie found the perfect partner much closer to home; Margaret Anderson, the illegitimate daughter of a millionaire, brought up in an Edinburgh lodging house, who could charm and entertain the highest in the land yet knew the value of keeping secrets. Almost exactly three months after the fist fight in San Francisco, Margaret married Ronnie.

  Lord and Lady Greville presumably knew that their future daughter-in-law was not the only child of a deceased manual labourer from Selkirk who had died in London at an unspecified date in the mid-1860s, the cover story that concealed her true parentage. They would not have allowed their eldest son and heir to marry someone so far below their social strata. Margaret wasn’t a member of the peerage, but she was pre-eminent among the ‘beerage’, the daughters of self-made entrepreneurs, who were successfully marrying into grander but cash-strapped families. The glamorous wedding took place on 25 April 1891, and the subsequent marriage was very happy; Ronnie provided Maggie with elevation into the highest social circles. One of Ronnie’s best friends from his army days was George Keppel, who was married to Alice, a beautiful Scot. The Grevilles and Keppels became firm friends. Alice went on to become the future king’s much-loved mistress, and the Grevilles became part of his inner circle. In return, Maggie provided pleasure-seeking, dandyish Ronnie with a well-padded lifestyle, including a luxurious home in Mayfair and ample opportunity to indulge his hobbies, such as horse-racing and, in time, motoring. Meanwhile, she adopted the slightly ‘racy’ name of ‘Mrs Ronnie’, and began to establish herself as a hostess of note on the London circuit.

  Once they were married, she persuaded Ronnie to resign his commission with the Life Guards and take up politics. With support from his friend Winston Churchill, Ronnie won Bradford East for the Conservatives in 1896, and he represented the constituency for ten years. Mrs Greville was accustomed to mingling with politicians, having observed her father in action; politics brought out her Machiavellian streak, and even the Prime Minister, A. J. Balfour, commented that her conversation was ‘a sort of honeyed poison’2. Unlike her husband, she was ambitious and craved proximity to power. Mrs Greville’s god-daughter Sonia was in no doubt that she was a formidable character:

  In any generation, Maggie would have been outstanding. The daughter of a shrewd old Scottish brewer, from her earliest years she had taken an interest in his business, mastering the intricacies of its processes and management until eventually she won for herself a seat on the Board through her own business acumen. Always, she had loved power, in her youth sipping it, in small draughts, in her father’s office in Edinburgh; later (with his money behind her), savouring it, in its social context, in the drawing-rooms of Europe […] she had married Papa’s greatest friend, Ronnie Greville, eldest son of Lord Greville, a charming unambitious man whom she moulded affectionately into any shape she pleased […] when no child of her own materialised, she took up her pursuit of power again (preferably, beside a throne), firmly conducting Ronnie through the lobbies of politics.3

  Through making a glittering marriage to Ronald Greville, young Margaret Helen Anderson had reinvented herself. She had transcended her murky beginnings and risen above the speculation about her true parentage to become a woman of status and substance. It is significant that, immediately following her marriage in 1891, the new Mrs Margaret Greville started to keep press clippings about herself, supplied by a professional cuttings agency; it was as though her life had begun anew, and she was now poised to make a name for herself.

  The future Lady Sibyl Colefax was born in Wimbledon on 4 December 1874, in a house owned by her uncle by marriage, Walter Bagehot, the noted journalist and essayist, editor of The Economist and author of The English Constitution. Sibyl’s father, William Halsey, had returned to his civil service posting in India by the time of her birth. In 1875 William’s wife, Sophie, and their new daughter joined him at Cawnpore, and Sibyl’s early years were spent in India. She had a brother and sister, Willie and Ethel, respectively eleven and ten years older, but they were at boarding school in England, so she effectively grew up as an only child. Her early years were not happy; her parents were fundamentally incompatible and the marriage was stormy. She described her childhood simply but eloquently: ‘My father worked, my mother wept, and I played on the floor and knew nothing.’4

  Until Sibyl was six, she and her mother flitted restlessly between India and Europe. Summers were spent at Simla to avoid the worst of the heat; there Sibyl encountered Lockwood Kipling, the curator of the museum and principal of the school of art at Lahore. He missed his own two children, Rudyard and Trix, who, like so many of the ‘children of Empire’, were at school in England. He liked this intelligent but rather solitary little girl, encouraging her interest in art and literature, and she remained friendly with the Kipling family for the rest of her life.

  After the sensory exuberance of India, with its vibrant colours, sounds and smells, Sibyl disliked cold, gritty and monochrome London when she and her mother returned in 1880. Sophie promptly left her daughter in the clutches of her rather formidable sisters, known as the ‘Victorian aunts’, while she escaped to Europe in a borrowed fur coat, in search of adventure. Fortunately the day-to-day care of Sibyl was handed to a servant called Mary Jordan, who had been her grandmother’s maid. Mary provided warmth, security and affection for the little girl, a compensation for the lack of love from her parents. Sibyl referred to many of her relatives as ‘grim’, and as soon as she had the chance she cultivated her own intense friendships. She viewed family as a lottery but recognised that, with discrimination, one could create one’s own social circle.

  Sophie returned from Europe at Christmas 1880 and moved with all three children into her sister’s house on Wimbledon Common. Sibyl was now on the fringes of artistic London; she knew May Morris, daughter of William Morris, and Margaret Burne-Jones, whose own parents were the painter Edward Burne-Jones and Alice Kipling. Another aunt, Emilie Barrington, w
as known as ‘The Egeria of Melbury Road’, a reference to a nymph of classical mythology who advised the king of Rome. Emilie had failed to enter the Royal Academy to study art, so she ruthlessly pursued famous artists and sculptors, like a lepidopterist completing her collection. In 1879, with her husband Russell, and her widowed sister Eliza, Emilie bought a house next door to the painter and sculptor G. F. Watts in Melbury Road, Kensington, a very short walk from the homes of eminent painters Holman Hunt and Lord Leighton. For two decades Emilie hounded the artistic elite of west London, ‘dropping in’ on Watts while he was working in his studio, and buttonholing Lord Leighton through her friendship with his sister. Sibyl visited Melbury Road often, and Aunt Emilie’s relentless lion-hunting was a useful object lesson in how to create a salon. Scraping an initial acquaintance with a famous person was not impossible, but the successful hostess needed a sympathetic and congenial atmosphere in which her quarry would meet others of their own or (preferably) superior rank and achievement.

  Family relationships remained strained; in December 1882 Sibyl’s mother, Sophie, returned briefly to India, omitting to tell Sibyl of her plans until just before her departure. ‘As the train moved out I knew for the first time the agony of sorrow – the sense of desertion – which I can feel even today’5, she wrote in later years. Sibyl was sent to a boarding school, which she enjoyed because for the first time she had company of her own age, but then the mercurial Sophie changed her mind and engaged a French governess to teach her at home. Fortunately Mademoiselle Bigot was young and lively; now Sibyl had a companion and chaperone to take her to musical concerts and plays, and her cultural horizons expanded.

  By 1889 both Halsey parents and all three children were reunited uneasily under one roof at Warwick Gardens. William had retired from the Indian civil service in 1883, and a subsequent trip to Australia to try to make a fortune had come to nothing. He now found it difficult to readjust to life in Britain after decades in India, a common problem with returning ‘expats’. Sophie avoided her husband by travelling extensively in Europe, taking Sibyl with her as a companion. For a number of winters they lived in cheap and obscure hotels on the French Riviera, eking out a limited budget.

  In the spring of 1894 Sophie finally agreed that she and Sibyl should go to Florence, a decision that was to change her daughter’s life. Idle Sophie preferred to lie in bed in the mornings, while solitary Sibyl, now nineteen, used those hours to explore the Renaissance city on foot. Fortunately, a group of older British visitors took her under their wing; they were ‘doing’ Florence and had a particular interest in its art, culture and architecture. The group included the writer Lytton Strachey, Roger Fry and his wife, the art expert Herbert Horne and the knowledgeable art historian Bernard Berenson. The group held idyllic picnics in the Tuscan countryside and explored the Duomo and the Uffizi, the galleries and palazzi, talking all the time of their theories, their discoveries, their favourite artists. Sibyl was enchanted.

  Once I had fallen in with my Florence friends it was different. They opened all the windows of the world to me […] that Spring in Florence and on the hillsides of Tuscany settled once and for all what I really wanted. To be able to turn to books great and small. To listen to enchanting talk, gay, learned, frivolous […] that I realised was the first real part of growing up. To those friends and those beginnings I owe so much.6

  Considering Sibyl’s lifelong enthusiasm for creative and cultured people, her choice of Arthur Colefax as a husband seems at first uncharacteristic. They met in May 1897, when she was twenty-two and he was thirty-one. Arthur was a reticent Yorkshireman, logical and disinclined to flights of fancy. By contrast, Sibyl was mercurial in speech, with a distinctive artistic and theatrical bent. A former grammar school boy who won a scholarship to Oxford, Arthur read Natural Sciences and was awarded a first-class honours degree. He completed a PhD at Strasbourg, where he learned to speak and read German fluently, quite a rarity among Victorian Englishmen. Arthur’s first love was the law but, ever cautious, he had opted for the regular life and reliable income of an academic, until he unexpectedly heard of a law scholarship that allowed him to pursue his true vocation. He was called to the Bar in 1894 and embarked on a successful career as a barrister specialising in international patent law, using his linguistic skills and scientific background.

  Arthur and Sibyl finally became engaged in January 1901; to Sibyl, Arthur represented the solidity and reliability she had lacked as a child. The new Mr and Mrs Colefax were respectable rather than wealthy, and Arthur’s fluctuating income was to concern them throughout their marriage. They married in Knightsbridge in July 1901, and honeymooned in Somerset, before returning to 85 Onslow Square in South Kensington, their home for the next eighteen years. After her rackety upbringing in a succession of other people’s houses, Sibyl finally had a house of her own. It was here that she first displayed her distinctive skill in designing interiors, installing panelling in the downstairs rooms and painting it in light colours, introducing attractive walnut furniture in the drawing room, creating a mahogany dining room and a comfortable sitting room furnished with antique rugs, and with a view over the garden. All these elements she was to repeat with great success in her later homes, and in her eventual career.

  The consummate political hostess the future Lady Londonderry was born Edith Helen Chaplin on 3 December 1878. Her mother died when she was only four years old, so Edith was brought up at Dunrobin Castle, Sutherland, the home of her maternal grandfather, the third Duke of Sutherland. She retained a romantic passion for Scotland throughout her life, and it was a factor in her burgeoning if unlikely relationship with Britain’s first Labour Prime Minister, Ramsay MacDonald, the illegitimate son of a crofter.

  Aside from her aristocratic origins, there was much about Edith that many found appealing. She was tall, handsome and poised, with a rather commanding presence, and sported a tattoo of a snake on one ankle, a risqué adornment for those times. Edith was very athletic and fond of the outdoors life; in addition, she was an excellent horsewoman, who would occasionally shock convention by riding astride her mount rather than side-saddle, as was thought more seemly for young ladies of her caste. She was a keen shot, adored field sports and had great organisational and inspirational abilities, as she was to prove in her later years.

  Her grandfather’s London home was Stafford House in the Mall, an extremely grand mansion close to Buckingham Palace. In time Edith’s Aunt Millicent became Duchess of Sutherland and was able to create her own social milieu, entertaining a band of like-minded aristocrats known as ‘The Souls’. Aunt Millie was an intellectual with a love of culture and literature, who held advanced ideas about the welfare of the working classes and believed in the necessity of greater equality between the sexes. Millicent was only eleven years older than her young niece, and it was at her glittering receptions at Stafford House that Edith acquired a taste for exerting ‘soft power’ through one’s social life.

  Playing the Tory hostess was a role for which blue-blooded Edith always seemed destined, initially in loyal support of the political ambitions of her husband. They met in 1897, and in 1899, at the age of twenty, Edith married Charles Vane-Tempest-Stewart, Viscount Castlereagh, eldest son of the sixth Marquess of Londonderry. He was considered to be quite a catch, but his cousin Winston Churchill referred to him frankly as ‘that half-wit Charley Londonderry’.

  Charles was one of the most eligible bachelors of his day, tall, slim and handsome. An excellent horseman, he had joined the Royal Horse Guards (known as ‘The Blues’) in 1897. The Londonderrys’ fortune was considerable: they owned 27,000 acres in Ireland and 23,000 acres in England, and their income was mainly from mining coal, a commodity much in demand in the late Victorian and Edwardian eras. The family owned Wynyard in County Durham, a palatial neo-classical mansion where they hosted large house parties, entertaining guests with game shoots and visits to the racecourse. Magnificent Mount Stewart, overlooking Strangford Lough in Northern Ireland, was the Londonder
rys’ main provincial residence; here they spent Christmas, Easter and Whitsun, occupying themselves with shooting, wildfowling or sailing. They also had a large estate in north Wales, Plas Machynlleth. Their London base was Londonderry House, a monumental aristocratic town house on Park Lane designed by the Wyatt brothers. The main stairway rivalled that of nearby Lancaster House, with a large skylight, rococo chandelier and two individual flights of stairs leading up to the Grand Ballroom. This was modelled on the Waterloo Chamber at Apsley House, home of the Duke of Wellington. Like the Iron Duke, the Londonderrys had a taste for grandeur, French furniture and sculptures by Canova.

  Sociable, good-humoured and curious, Edith was quick to establish her own group of friends in London society. Among this group, she retained her childhood name of Circe, the name of the Greek goddess of magic who was able to transform humans into animals. Consequently, her coterie became known as The Ark, each adopting humorous nicknames supposedly representing their characters. However, the name they chose for their hostess’s husband, Charley the Cheetah, had a double-edged significance. He was a serial and dedicated philanderer whose personal charm seems to have got him off the hook many times. His amorous activities were well known; Charles was consistently unfaithful to Edith from the very start, even conducting an affair with Lady Westmorland during the early days of their engagement. Edith forgave him when it came to light, writing to him, ‘Myself, I don’t care because I know it is all nonsense […] Darling, you know I don’t mind one little bit.’7

  He seemed to have a lifelong particular penchant for American women. Charley and Edith’s wedding took place on 28 November 1899, but shortly afterwards she discovered that he had been having an affair with a vivacious married American actress, Fannie Ward from St Louis, later known as the ‘Perennial Flapper’. Fannie gave birth to Charley’s daughter Dorothé on 6 February 1900, a mere ten weeks after the Londonderrys’ marriage. Charley also had a lengthy and passionate affair with the American heiress Consuelo Vanderbilt, who was unhappily married to the ninth Duke of Marlborough, his second cousin; the couple ran off to Paris together, to the delighted horror of British society. His longest and most serious extra-marital relationship was with Eloise Ancaster, from New York State, the wife of the Earl of Ancaster. Charley would even enfold notes to Eloise in the letters he sent to Edith, asking her, ‘You might send the enclosed to Eloise […] Put a stamp on and just send it off. That would be very sweet and dear of you.’8 Both Edith and Charley referred to Eloise as his ‘wife’, so much was she a constant presence in their lives. He assumed that all parties would accept the situation, and Edith chose once again to excuse her husband, saying, ‘I don’t blame you because the women hunt you to death. You are so beautiful.’9