Mrs. Keppel and Her Daughter

by Diana Souhami

  Bertie’s association with Jews was an embarrassment to many of high-born gentile blood. It was not as unmentionable as the sexual orientation of his eldest son and of his lover’s eldest daughter, but it was a threat to their sense of society. Sir Edward Hamilton, Chief Secretary to the Treasury, wrote in his diary of a dinner for the King and Mrs Keppel given by Cassel:

  I quite made up my mind that when he came to the Throne, the King would have such a sense of his own dignity and be so determined to play the part of monarch that He would only dine at exceptional houses. But after dining with Cassel of course he can dine anywhere. I much regret it.

  Bertie, if he knew of such sentiments, was above them. He appreciated racial diversity, entrepreneurial success and capitalist enterprise.

  Born in 1852 in Cologne, Cassel came from an orthodox family, his father a banker with an unremarkable income. True to the legend of the self-made plutocrat Cassel left for England in 1869 when he was seventeen in the clothes he wore and with a violin. In London he worked for Bischoffsheim and Goldschmidt, merchant bankers who made loans to foreign markets then encouraged investment on the stock exchange. It was an area of finance prone to price rigging and crashes. If shaky governments defaulted on repayments bond-holders had no redress. Contentious loans were negotiated in central America and elsewhere.

  Cassel steered a course, was promoted and, within ten years, had personal capital of £150,000, stakes in all manner of enterprises and worked only for himself. He did not entrench himself as a director or chairman of any of the companies in which he held substantial stakes. He was, said his biographer Anthony Allfrey, ‘one of a new breed, an economic imperialist, a lone strategist’. Such partnerships as he formed were expedient and temporary.

  He made a fortune on the new railroads which ‘guzzled capital’. Thousands of miles of track were needed across the American prairies. In temporary partnership with Jacob Schiff, director of the New York bank Kuhn Loeb, he loaned capital to and bought shares in the big railroad companies: the Canadian Pacific, Chicago and Atlantic, Denver and Rio Grande, Texas and Pacific, Texas and St Louis, the New York Ontario.

  He became a dollar multi-millionaire, a major stockholder worldwide. He drew dividend from investment in American beet sugar, South African gold and diamond mines, the Westinghouse Electric Company, the Central London Railway (now the Central Line), Vickers’ armaments and shipbuilding factories. In Sweden he invested in the whole of the country’s capital market and industrial infrastructure. He arranged government loans to China, Japan, Russia, Uruguay, Egypt.

  With Cassel’s sagacious advice and Bertie’s indulgence, lucrative investments were made for Mrs Keppel, too. She had shares in the Argentine Great Western railway, the Cordoba Central, the Baltimore and Ohio, the Great Northern, the Illinois Central, the Chicago St Louis and New Orleans, the Royal Mail Steam Packet Company, the Transvaal Diamond Mining Company, the British South Africa Company. ‘When she came into his life twelve years ago she was bankrupt,’ Lord Esher said of her when Bertie died in 1910.

  In her novel The Edwardians, Vita Sackville-West gave Mrs Keppel the pseudonym Romola Cheyne and mocked insider dealings and her acquisitive skills:

  investments bulked heavy in their talk, and other people’s incomes, and the merits of various stocks and shares; also the financial shrewdness of Mrs Cheyne … who cropped up constantly in the conversation; Romola Cheyne, it appeared, had made a big scoop in rubber last week – but some veiled sneers accompanied this subject, for how could Romola fail, it was asked, with such sources of information at her disposal? Dear Romola: what a clever woman. And never malicious, said someone. No, said someone else; too clever to be malicious.

  Kingship, politics, business, adultery and personal profit intertwined. Wheels of enterprise need lubrication. In 1902 Cassel wrote to Bertie from the Cairo Savoy about his new Egyptian Agricultural Bank: ‘The poorer classes have not been slow to take advantage of the borrowing facilities placed at their disposal.’ Within a few months the poorer classes were paying interest on a million sterling. The Khedive – the Egyptian viceroy – wanted to visit England and hoped King Edward would visit Egypt. ‘The Khedive is very susceptible of kind and considerate treatment,’ Cassel wrote. ‘I think his Highness is very pleased to have found in me a medium through which he can communicate with your Majesty.’

  Bertie encouraged Cassel’s skills. Codes of practice were not scrutinized. ‘You will have doubtless heard,’ he wrote to him on 1 June 1902

  that Peace is signed [the Treaty of Vereeniging ending the Boer War] which is the greatest blessing that has been conferred on this country for a long time! ‘Consols’ are sure to go up tomorrow. Could you not make a large investment for me? It is to be hoped that the Chancellor of the Exchequer may announce on Wednesday not to put the extra pence on the Income Tax … I send these lines by hand. Excuse great haste.

  Beneath the trappings of great wealth Cassel remained a loner, his private life bleak. After three years of marriage in 1881 his English Catholic wife, Amalia Maud Maxwell, died of consumption. At her dying wish he converted to her faith. She left him with a baby daughter ‘Maudie’ – Amalia Mary Maud. His divorced sister Wilhelmina Schönbrunn and her two children came from Germany to keep house for him. She reverted to the name of Cassel and some supposed her to be his wife.

  Cassel emulated Bertie’s style and extravagance but without his louche appetites. In 1905 he bought 28 and 29 Park Lane and, in three years, and with 800 tons of white Tuscan marble created Brook House, a mansion to match the King’s Marlborough House. Twenty-foot-high pillars adorned the hall and glass-domed staircase. Visitors who climbed the crimson-carpeted stairs saw life-size portraits of Bertie and Ernest that showed how alike they looked. An oak-panelled dining room seated a hundred. There were thirty bedrooms, twelve bathrooms, six kitchens, a staff of thirty-one, hydraulic lifts, footmen in full livery with powdered hair, paintings by Frans Hals, Romney, Reynolds, Murillo and Van Dyck, Renaissance bronzes, Dresden china, Chinese jade, English silver and antique furniture, much of it chosen on the advice of Bond Street’s Joseph Duveen.

  Cassel went through the motions of aristocratic pleasures but was not to the manner born. From Crichel he wrote to his daughter Maudie:

  The party is like all these parties. Everything very well done … Weather delightful and the shoot excellent. I look on. The King is in good spirits and gracious as usual.

  His games of bridge with Bertie and Little Mrs George were a service. ‘The King,’ he wrote to Maudie in April 1902 when he was a guest on the Royal Yacht, ‘is rather pleased with me because I made one or two mistakes at bridge.’ He hunted with the Quorn but looked, ‘a stout Teutonic gentleman in a pink coat, uncomfortable in it and on his horse’. He bred horses and gave them to Bertie’s friends. His colt, Handicapper, won the Two Thousand Guineas which earned Bertie’s respect and congratulations. In 1895 he registered to join the Jockey Club. Even with Bertie’s influence it took thirteen years before he was admitted.

  In middle age, when he had massively accumulated all the trappings of success, he lamented, ‘I have had everything in life that I did not want and nothing that I did.’ Bertie had bestowed all honours: the Order of Merit, Knight Commander of the Royal Victorian Order, Knight Commander of the Order of St Michael and St George. ‘Levee dress will be worn,’ read Cassel’s invitation to Buckingham Palace at noon on 18 December 1905,

  those attending the Investiture will leave their Cocked Hats, Helmet etc in the Lower Hall. They should wear one glove on the left hand. Swords are not to be hooked up.

  In Frederick Ponsonby’s view these decorations were cost-effective baubles. Bertie’s

  greatest wish was to see men wearing as many as possible … A man who received a Grand Cross of some Order, value £25, was happier than a man who received a snuff-box worth £200, so monarchs saved their purses and pandered to the unwholesome craving of human beings to wear decorations which they had in no way earned.


  Sir Edward Hamilton said Bertie ‘liked to have a rich man at his beck and call and by this means is able to benefit the Favourite’. The benefit showed. At Portman Square Mrs Keppel’s sham Louis XV chairs and imitation Meissen china were replaced by the real thing. Three bathrooms were installed and more staff acquired: the butler Mr Rolphe, the cook Mrs Wright, Miss Draper the housekeeper, maids called Katie and Peggie, George the ‘boot boy’, a nanny, a nurserymaid, a governess. Joseph Duveen of Bond Street advised on pictures and antiques for Mrs Keppel, too. She visited him in her electric brougham driven by Mr Freed.

  Her social visits dovetailed with the King’s. He hated being apart from her. Lord Esher, a close friend of Bertie’s, who for two years worked as Cassel’s partner, wrote to his son Maurice in July 1905 from Batsford Park, Lord Redesdale’s Gloucestershire home:

  The King is perfectly happy. His admiration of Mrs K. is almost pathetic. He watches her all day and is never happy when she’s talking to someone else … she is never bored of him and always good-humoured. So, her hold over him grows.

  She, not the Queen, was with him for winter shoots at Chatsworth as the guest of the Duke of Devonshire, or at Elvedon owned by Lord Iveagh. For racing at Goodwood they stayed with Mrs Willie James at West Dean Park in Sussex. For Cowes week they were guests on the yachts of Arthur Morley or Sir Thomas Lipton. For the Doncaster St Leger they stayed with the Saviles at Rufford Abbey. After Balmoral, Bertie joined her at the Sassoons’ Scottish house, Tulchan Lodge, or at Duntreath. When separated from her on public holidays he sent her notes: ‘This woodcock wishes you a happy New Year’ on a card with a picture of a gamebird; ‘Another Bonne Année. I think this girl is like dear little Sonia’ on a card with a sepia photograph of a child. And he lavished presents on her: a brooch set with precious stones, the initials spelling DEAREST, a silver cigarette case engraved with a crowned E, a hatpin with stag’s horns, a ruby tiara.

  Mrs Keppel was compliant, available, flattering, firm, appeared to submit, but dominated him with her charm. ‘She sits next to him at dinner irrespective of rank,’ Esher observed. ‘Mrs George Keppel very smart and much toadied to,’ Lord Carrington wrote of a dinner given for the King by Lord Rosebery in February 1908. Like Cassel, politicians knew that to win the King’s approval they must first please her. When Carrington wanted in 1906 to change Bertie’s antipathy to the prospective Liberal Prime Minister Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman he invited him, the King and Mrs Keppel to dinner:

  HM was in capital spirits and remained till nearly one o’clock. He played bridge and won £4. After dinner he had a long conversation with CB on foreign politics and the King told me as he went away he was quite satisfied with CB’s opinions and declarations.

  Mrs Keppel could amuse Bertie, use him and make him change his mind. Violet said her mother’s investments by 1918 yielded at least £20,000 a year, which helped her stay luminous, resplendent and of the world of orchids, malmaisons, fine clothes, obeisance and romance.

  In later life Violet in anger was to

  wonder dully what relation I was to this woman to whom all beauty was non-existent, and who only judged people on their material worth … who hates music, never reads a line of poetry, or anything for that matter but the most trashy novels, who is not genuinely interested in art and cares nothing for even one of the things that mean such a lot to me.

  When young such heresy was not overt. Mother, Violet said, was the star round which her own world revolved. She stored sensual memories of her: her geranium-scented bathwater, the flower smells of her bedroom, violet-scented cachous, chestnut hair, a lace dressing gown, a grey spring dress fastened from throat to knee with tiny braid buttons, a black velvet low-cut evening dress, a black feathered hat, a diamond and pearl collar.

  As time went on to be Mrs Keppel’s daughter was to have its problems as well as its vicarious glamour. For given a mother so endowed, luminous, desired and resplendent, it was difficult to feel as lovable, good-looking or successful. ‘We do not equal still less surpass her.’

  In some invincible way Mrs Keppel was resplendent and fêted because of His Majesty. And Majesty was Grandpapa or ‘Kingy Gateau’, a mix of Father Christmas and godfather, who must be curtsied to, attended and revered but never discussed. ‘And if not Grandpapa – who? What?’ Father perhaps? Or just a large mysterious stranger who smelled of cigars and eau-de-Portugal, wore rings set with rubies, came downstairs from Mama’s bedroom in the late afternoon and around whom life revolved and to whom everyone deferred.

  SIX

  Each year Bertie, Alice and her girls took their Easter holiday in Biarritz. George went to the office, Alexandra visited relatives. For their spring wardrobe – straw hats with ribbons, light coats, dresses, stockings and black buttoned boots – Violet and Sonia were taken to the ‘juvenile department’ of Woollands in Knightsbridge. A dresser they knew as ‘No. 10’, whose mouth was always full of pins, decked them out.

  Bertie travelled out separately, calling himself the Earl of Chester for decorum’s sake. ‘He seldom took more than thirty attendants apart from his suite.’ Three motor cars with chauffeurs were sent on ahead for his personal use. He travelled through France in three private railway carriages – one furnished as a clubroom with Spanish leather armchairs, card tables, drinks, cigars. In Biarritz he and his retinue stayed at the Hôtel du Palais. Soveral ‘the ladies’ man’, and guests for bridge and picnics were always in the royal party.

  A palace courier accompanied Mrs Keppel, her daughters, Miss Draper and the nanny. They were all assigned cabins for the Channel crossing and a private railway carriage, divided into compartments. ‘At Calais Mama was treated like royalty,’ Sonia wrote. The chef de gare met her and escorted her through customs. On the French train a car attendant ‘hovered over her like a love-sick troubadour’.

  Their luggage filled a van. Violet and Sonia had a large trunk each, several baskets and a medicine chest. Nanny’s trunk was small. Pride of place on the journey went to Mama’s luggage:

  Studded wardrobe-trunks, standing up on end and high enough to stand in; hat-boxes; shoe boxes; rugs; travelling cushions; her travelling jewel-case. The ‘big’ luggage went in the van, but Miss Draper was in charge of the ‘small’ luggage.

  By day they watched the scenery from large fawn-coloured armchairs. ‘Mama disliked eating in the restaurant car,’ so meals in baskets were brought into their compartments. At night double sleeping berths were unfolded, Violet and Miss Draper slept in one compartment, Mrs Keppel and Sonia in the other. Mother underwent a transformation that made her less than goddess-like in Sonia’s eyes:

  Out of a square, silk case she brought a small pillow, a shapeless nightgown and a mob cap. Under the nightgown she subdued her beautifully curved body. And under the cap she piled her shining chestnut hair. Next she greased her face. Then she helped me up the ladder to my upper berth and kissed me goodnight. Lastly she took a strong sleeping pill, put on black night-spectacles and lay for dead till morning.

  I dared not move and any inclination to go to the lavatory had to be controlled until daylight filtered through the shuttered window. And even then I was terrified I would fall down the ladder and wake Mama. So I lay through the night rigid and wakeful … Sometimes I would peer over the edge of my berth at Mama and in the weird blue ceiling light her white face with its black-bandaged eyes looked ghastly.

  Beauty was restored by the time they reached Biarritz. Ernest Cassel met them and took them to his Villa Eugénie built by Napoleon III. His sister ‘Bobbie’ kept house as she did in London. ‘In fact,’ wrote Sonia, ‘Sir Ernest was fervently served by all his female relations and his approbation or disapproval governed their day.’ The villa was like a vast conservatory with marble tiles and glass doors. Mrs Keppel had a floor to herself. Violet and Sonia stayed on the nursery floor with Cassel’s granddaughters Edwina and Mary Ashley. Richer than the Keppel girls, Bertie was their godfather and their knickers were edged with lace.

  A
t Biarritz Little Mrs George was Bertie’s Queen:

  For her it must have seemed the nearest thing to a family life they could enjoy together … There was no question here as to whether Count Mensdorff could or could not invite La Favorita to a formal banquet at 14 Belgrave Square because of those awkward problems of placement she might create around his Embassy dining-table. There was even less question as to whether ‘Mrs G.K.’ should be asked to stay for the weekend at Eaton because both the King and Queen Alexandra were coming as well.

  Every day at 12.15 like a staid married couple the King and Alice walked arm in arm along the promenade with Caesar, the King’s white Norfolk terrier who was groomed by Wellard, the second footman. They lunched in the royal suite at the Hôtel du Palais. One of the menus cited hard-boiled plover eggs, salmon, chicken, asparagus, strawberries, Chablis, champagne and Napoleon brandy. In the afternoons they went sightseeing or to the races. None of the entertainments was with children in mind but Violet recorded a visit in 1906 to the Spanish village of Fuentarabbia where she saw posters for a ‘corrida’ and drank chocolate with cinnamon ‘which seemed like the height of refinement’. The King and Alice dined at 8.15 and played bridge until midnight. Bertie was an erratic bridge player and swore if the cards did not suit him.

  Cassel’s daughter Maudie described the Biarritz visits as unbearably tedious, the entire time focused round the King’s dull routine. ‘We are his servants quite as much as the housemaid or the butler,’ she wrote. And Violet when older derided Biarritz as ‘the most callous and trivial of French watering places’.

  On Easter Sunday they all wore new clothes and in the morning gave presents. Sonia particularly liked the

  lovely little jewelled Easter eggs given by Kingy and Sir Ernest, particularly an exquisitely midget one in royal blue enamel, embossed with a diamond ‘E’ and topped by a tiny crown in gold and rubies.

  In the afternoon in a convoy of cars they went for an elaborate picnic. Caesar sat on Violet’s knee. In Triple Violette she said she secretly detested the dog, which smelled. Kingy chose the site – usually by the side of the road. Footmen set out lunch: a long table, linen cloths, chairs, china plates, silver cutlery, all sorts of cold food in silver bowls.