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

by Siân Evans

  Between 1914 and 1918 the Cliveden estate was dedicated to the war effort. The gardeners transformed the flower beds into vegetable plots, and the lawns were turned over to grazing sheep and poultry-keeping. Most of the menfolk had signed up or had joined reserved occupations, and the domestic staff were almost entirely female. No alcohol was served for the duration of hostilities; Nancy was resolutely teetotal, but she had previously provided drinks for her guests. Meanwhile, her energy was phenomenal: she sailed through her two wartime pregnancies, giving birth to her fifth and sixth children: Michael in 1916 and John Jacob II in 1918. ‘My vigour, vitality, and cheek repel me. I am the kind of woman I would run from’, Nancy said of herself. On the contrary, she was extremely attractive to men; the hot-blooded widower Lord Curzon pursued her for years. She enjoyed his company but was unwilling to have an affair, so their relationship was one of ardent friendship. He was a frequent visitor to Cliveden, but in 1915 his unreciprocated affections moved on to Mrs Grace Duggan and, when she was unexpectedly widowed, George Curzon proposed marriage, and Grace accepted. Curzon’s long-standing lover, the notorious novelist Elinor Glyn, spotted their engagement notice in a six-day old copy of The Times and stalked out of Curzon’s country house, Montacute, never to return. Nancy Astor was relieved by Lord Curzon’s remarriage and she took a close interest in his three motherless daughters, the celebrated Curzon sisters, who were to play such key roles in British society in the 1920s and 1930s.

  The Londonderrys also threw themselves into supporting the war effort by offering their London home as a hospital. In addition, ‘Captain Charles Castlereagh MP’ was in Paris by 29 August 1914, acting as aide-de-camp to General William Pulteney, who commanded the Third Army Corps in France. Charley served under him for a year before rejoining his own regiment, the Royal Horse Guards, becoming second-in-command in 1916. He acquitted himself honourably at the first Battle of Ypres, the Somme and the Battle of Arras, but was appalled at the carnage he saw and felt a great sense of loss over his dead and wounded friends. His first-hand experience of the horrors of war influenced many critical decisions in his later life.

  In February 1915 Charley’s father, the sixth Marquess, was desperately ill with pneumonia. His wife, Theresa, dubbed by war correspondent and former British Army officer Charles à Court Repington ‘the ferocious Lady Londonderry’, sent a note asking to see him. The couple had exchanged barely a word in thirty years, after a jealous rival, Gladys de Grey, had sent him a bundle of stolen love letters Theresa had written to Harry Cust. This was Lord Londonderry’s last chance for reconciliation, but he refused and died without seeing his wife. Three years later, when Lady Londonderry was gravely ill, her nemesis Gladys similarly sent a telegram asking for forgiveness. Once again, the answer was no.

  Edith led a radical public campaign to mobilise women during the war. She had lunched with her disapproving mother-in-law at the end of August 1914 and the conversation turned to her support for votes for women, which was ridiculed. The (unnamed) editor of a famous newspaper who was present apparently offered her a wager of £5 that at the end of the war there would be no Suffragettes, as ‘War will teach women the impossibility of their demands and the absurdity of their claims’. Edith accepted the challenge; it was the spur she needed. By the autumn she had launched a drive to enlist female volunteers in order to free up men for military service. Edith campaigned persuasively for women with knowledge of agriculture and an aptitude for rural life to work on the land, a radical idea. The press largely agreed that it was the duty of fit and willing women to volunteer their labour in order to help shorten the war.

  The Women’s Legion was very successful; at first it tackled the shortage of farming labour, by recruiting female volunteers to help bring in the harvest and to care for livestock. The organisation acted as an employment agency, placing willing women workers where they were most needed. They undertook the management of horses, animal husbandry, milking, thatching and muck-spreading, weeding, fruit-picking and ploughing. Edith wrote in later years:

  The effect of regular work and wearing sensible clothes and thick shoes was immediately seen. Many girls and women that I thought would be far too delicate or highly strung for the work turned out to be the best; this applied not only to agriculture but to all sections of the Legion.2

  As President of the Women’s Legion, Edith adopted a military-style uniform, which disconcerted servants at the smart houses of her London friends; she was sometimes redirected ‘downstairs’ to see the housekeeper, as it was assumed from her outfit she was collecting for the Salvation Army. Edith took such misunderstandings in her stride; these were exceptional times. She wrote numerous press articles exhorting women to put their energies into war work and was not deterred by the many anonymous letters and insults she received. So successful was her initiative that, as the war advanced, women filled other critical roles previously the preserve of men:

  Women cooks were replacing the male Army cooks at home and these women were gradually put into uniform. Next in order were the Army Service Corps girls and the Royal Flying Corps drivers of the Women’s Legion, and dispatch-riders appeared in neat uniforms wearing breeches. As the war progressed the Legionaries were followed in 1917 by the regular Women’s Armies – the WAAC, the WRAF and finally the WRNS […] There were also women police; women ‘bus conductors; all the land girls, foresters, and munition workers; there were railway girls, and the drivers of the Royal Mail vans … by the end of the war 80 per cent of the labour in this country was carried on by women. A training such as these women had undergone during the terrible years revolutionised all previous ideas. Not only had their dress become rational and useful, but they themselves had risen to the occasion, their outlook had broadened, they were sure of themselves and of their vocations, and knew that they had ‘made good’3.

  Queen Mary was very complimentary about the valuable work the Women’s Legion was undertaking when she inspected them in March 1918. As a result of her war work, Edith was the first woman to be appointed as a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in the Military Division, when the honour was inaugurated in 1917. In the same year Charley was recalled from the army because his services were required by the new Prime Minister, Lloyd George. He had been an MP for nine years, but was obliged to give up his seat when he inherited his father’s title in 1915. Because of his valuable Parliamentary experience and his knowledge of Northern Ireland, he was appointed a member of the Irish Convention, a short-lived attempt to head off the growing crisis over the issue of Home Rule.

  Edith and Charley offered Londonderry House to be used as a hospital for wounded servicemen. Most of the building was taken over, leaving only two rooms on the ground floor and the top floor for the family’s use. Edith was fully occupied running the Women’s Legion, so the day-to-day provisioning of the hospital was managed by her cook, Mrs Harris, and her housekeeper, Mrs Guthrie. The nursing was organised by a succession of matrons, but Edith helped to care for some of the shell-shocked soldiers, whose behaviour was often alarming. Some patients were also fond of adding graffiti, make-up or props to the neo-classical statues that adorned the gallery, one of their wards. The marble figure of Apollo sporting a Glengarry cap, or an Aphrodite enhanced with rouge and lipstick, lifted the patients’ morale. Air raids over London were similarly treated as a joke, and the wounded would limp and hop to the balconies of Londonderry House to watch the pyrotechnics. By 1918, when the Zeppelin air raids were more frequent and deadly, the patients and staff were forced to shelter in the cellars.

  Writing in the late 1930s, Edith recalled fondly how, despite other commitments, Londonderry House became a wartime meeting place for her friends. Every Wednesday evening she held a dinner party. In jest, Londonderry House had been renamed The Ark, a reference to the Biblical tale. The friends created the Order of the Rainbow, recalling the divine signal that the floods were over. The members of the Order were each given the name of a creature or a mythological or magical figure.
Edith was known as ‘Circe the Sorceress’; Winston Churchill, now the Secretary of State for War, was ‘The Warlock’; and Edith’s husband was ‘Charley the Cheetah’. Despite the jovial nicknames, the clique were very well informed. Lord Balfour, First Lord of the Admiralty (‘Arthur the Albatross’), related the story of the Battle of Jutland to the Ark the same night that radio reports of it reached London and two days before accounts appeared in the newspapers. Other members included Sir Edmund Gosse (‘The Gosshawk’), J. M. Barrie (Barrie the Bard) and Nancy Astor (who was ‘Nancy the Gnat’, appropriately enough). On Wednesday evenings pre-war sartorial rules were abandoned, and invited guests attended in either day wear or evening clothes. Politicians and aristocrats rubbed shoulders with artists, writers and convalescing officers, as well as the more bohemian set, all fuelled by champagne. The Ark was one of the first salons in wartime London to dispense with formality, and Edith inaugurated supper buffets rather than structured dinner parties, so that refreshments were available to guests whenever they arrived.

  Meanwhile Edith tolerated Charley’s mistresses with fortitude; she would advise him on how to treat them, and even bought small presents for him to give them. For many years she was loyal to him personally, and very keen to advance his political career. However, it must have rankled that he did not adore her enough to leave other women alone. For Edith her marriage was a love match, like that of her own parents, and a complete contrast to the frosty emotional wastelands occupied by Charley’s parents. Her husband was careful to tell her that she mattered more to him than any of his ‘girls’, and although it was hurtful, she chose not to see his entanglements with other women as a threat to their relationship. However, as she was socially successful, personally popular and very good-looking, it was perhaps inevitable that she would look outside her marriage for emotional fulfilment and admiration.

  As the war dragged on, the British royal family were acutely aware of the public mood, and anxious to distance themselves from their German relations. The King’s first cousin by marriage, Prince Louis of Battenburg, was hounded from his post as the First Sea Lord in October 1914. In 1915, after British ocean liner RMS Lusitania sank, with the loss of 1,198 lives, the level of hostility against Germany rose. The King maintained that he was British to the core, despite his German grandfather, but he was angered by H.G. Wells’s remark about ‘an alien and uninspiring Court’. ‘I may be uninspiring, but I’ll be damned if I’m an alien!’ In 1917, a low point in the war, he decided to change the family name to Windsor, and cousin Louis adopted the surname of Mountbatten.

  Meanwhile, King George patriotically banned sugar and alcohol from the royal residences for the duration. Queen Mary, who was fond of a glass of hock and a light touch with patisserie, would often motor over from Windsor to see her new friend Margaret Greville for tea. A lady-in-waiting would telephone Polesden Lacey to announce the royal visit. ‘Dear Queen Mary, always so welcome, but always so little notice!’ purred Mrs Greville smugly. The importance of the tea table as a forum for exerting ‘soft power’ was recognised by Vogue magazine in October 1916:

  Socially, as every woman knows, the tea hour is invaluable […] possibilities lie in the tea-table for expressing her own delicate personality, and gently making evident any aesthetic, original or discriminating qualities she may possess.

  The Queen enjoyed visiting Polesden, and she was also keen to advance the relationship between Mrs Greville and her second son, Bertie, who was currently serving in the Navy but who would inherit the estate one day. Mrs Greville invited Bertie to dinner and to stay for weekends when he was old enough; their first lunch together was in March 1918, and afterwards Margaret wrote to his mother in rapturous terms, saying: ‘He is delightful, such charming eyes, manners and complexion […] fancy a delightful young radiant being like that being so charming to me.’

  Mrs Greville always enjoyed the company of young people, especially the children of her friends, and she liked them to call her ‘Mrs Ronnie’, an informal, slightly sporty nickname with pronounced Edwardian overtones. The Keppels were frequent visitors to Polesden, and stayed with their old family friend for Christmas of 1916, bringing with them their daughter Violet and her young fiancé, Captain Osbert Sitwell. It soon became apparent that the engagement had been a mistake (not least because both parties preferred their own sex). However, in Violet’s discarded beau Mrs Greville found a presentable, aristocratic young chap who was excellent company. Their friendship was genuine, if unorthodox; she was a fifty-three-year-old, traditionally built Scottish widow of great wealth, and he was a charming and well-mannered twenty-six-year-old Guards officer of indeterminate sexuality, with a titled but penny-pinching and eccentric father. It was a relationship that benefited both Osbert and Mrs Ronnie, and was to last until her death.

  Mrs Ronnie was sociable, and entertained with select gatherings at her newly refurbished London house, 16 Charles Street. The general mood of national austerity deemed it distasteful to hold ostentatious events, but there were opportunities for hostesses to invite the great and good to mingle discreetly. She held weekly dinner parties on Wednesday evenings at her Mayfair home, where the dining room held some of her exquisite paintings. A select band of guests would gather around a single long table, laden with museum-quality early silver and decorated with sumptuous flowers sent up from her country house. The produce was also from the Home Farm. In addition, Mrs Greville often invited her favourites to stay at Polesden Lacey for long weekends; she prided herself on maintaining high standards of comfort and hospitality throughout the duration of the war.

  Mrs Greville was prominent among the London-based hostesses in wielding influence in political circles. In February 1918 the dinner guests of Lord Wimborne, the conservative politician and first cousin of Winston Churchill, were forced to take cover because of an air raid. They amused themselves while the bombardment continued by drawing up a ‘Cabinet of Ladies’ to replace the male politicians, who they thought were exhausted by the war. Minister for Propaganda was Lady Cunard, the Chancellor of the Exchequer was Mrs George Keppel, and the Financial Secretary was Mrs Ronald Greville.

  The Great War ground on, and both Nancy and Waldorf were busy with their myriad concerns: his Parliamentary career, the hospital and estate at Cliveden and their young family. But Waldorf’s days as an MP were numbered. His eccentric father, William Waldorf, was living in romantic Hever Castle in Kent, a medieval structure reputedly haunted by the ghost of Anne Boleyn. By 1910 he had spent £10 million on renovating the castle, including a village in Tudor style to house his guests. At night he would pull up the drawbridge, and shut out the modern world. William was living the life of an English gentleman of former centuries; all he needed now was an aristocratic title. He started making discreet enquiries with that end in mind.

  On 1 January 1916 Waldorf was telephoned by a journalist asking him how his father’s ennoblement would affect his own political ambitions. This was the first inkling Waldorf had that his Anglophile father had now acquired a title. W. W. Astor had secretly courted the upper echelons of the Conservative Party, donating generously to various charities: more than £26,000 to the War Fund, £41,000 to Lord Rothschild’s Red Cross and £6,000 to Queen Mary’s Fund for Women. Now he was Baron Astor of Hever, a hereditary title that would pass to Waldorf when William died, ending his role as an MP. Waldorf was outraged, and vowed to change the law so that he could remain a Member of Parliament. The new Baron was offended by his eldest son and heir’s ingratitude and disloyalty, and changed his will so that on his death Waldorf would receive nothing. This estrangement was to have far-reaching consequences for the family; it was also to alter the political history of Britain.

  The disposition of another American millionaire’s fortune was to have enormous consequences for the Corrigans of Cleveland, whose vast fortune had been created by the entrepreneurial steel magnate James Corrigan Senior. When he died in 1908, his only son and heir, also called James, discovered to his shock that he
had been left just a little over £3,000 in unrestricted funds. His father’s 40 per cent share of the steel company he had founded, worth millions of dollars, was held in trust until James Junior turned forty, in 1920. Price McKinney, the company’s former book-keeper, had been appointed the trustee of James’s fund. Resentful and under-occupied, James spent the next five years gaining a considerable reputation as a playboy. Sources differ as to where and when he first encountered the resourceful and ambitious Laura Mae Whitrock. The professional party planner Elsa Maxwell, who knew Laura well in Paris in the 1930s and liked her, claimed that she had been working as a telephone operator at a hotel in Cleveland. According to Elsa, James was a guest at the hotel and had been drinking heavily; he had made a blind date for the next day with the attractive-sounding telephonist who tried to put through his calls. Other sources claim that Laura, with her respectable physician husband Dr MacMartin, was invited to James’s house-party in 1913, when he was recovering from a sensational court case. A nineteen-year-old girl from Pittsburgh sued him for $50,000 for breach of promise after Corrigan promised, but failed, to marry her following the death of his father.

  Whatever the truth, Laura later described their first encounter as ‘love at first light’; she quickly divested herself of Dr MacMartin, and married James Corrigan on 2 December 1916. His wedding present to her was a Rolls-Royce worth $15,000, complete with a chauffeur. Laura had arrived in some style. But snobbish Cleveland society was unimpressed by the marriage of the thirty-seven-year-old playboy with a scandalous history and his divorced bride, who was from a working-class background and a small backwoods industrial town. Polite matrons disapproved and avoided Nagirroc (‘Corrigan’ spelt backwards), their grand home on Euclid Avenue, and even James’s business contacts were ambivalent about socialising with the couple. Laura Corrigan resolved that she and James deserved to find a better milieu, where they and their millions would be better appreciated. She set her sights on New York.