by Siân Evans
Meanwhile Mrs Greville was at last able to return to her regular haunts of Paris and meet her old friend and social rival Grace Vanderbilt, from New York, of similar vintage and even wealthier than she was. The two middle-aged ladies ventured out to a plush restaurant in Fontainebleau for a sumptuous lunch of lobster and Château d’Yquem. During the return journey, while they were driving along a lonely rural road, the back axle of the car broke, the vehicle overturned, and the passengers were deposited into a ditch. Their chauffeur, Pierre, was knocked unconscious in the accident, and they faced a dilemma; Mrs Greville insisted that they must flag down any passing vehicle and persuade the driver to take him to hospital. Grace Vanderbilt asked fearfully, ‘But supposing we were to be taken for two cocottes?’ Maggie eyed her burly friend, brushed a clump of weeds from her rubies, and answered, ‘I think my dear, that we may take that risk.’
Mrs Greville was an observant woman with a strong romantic streak, and she took a keen interest in the affairs of the younger generation, often taking an active role in assisting courtships along. She noticed that one of her housemaids was obviously smitten by a handsome but tongue-tied young gardener at Polesden, but they were both too shy to speak to each other. Mrs Greville told the maid that she must spend the summer looking after one of Madam’s lapdogs at Polesden, and that the pet required frequent walks in the grounds. Physical proximity and the introduction of a dim Pekingese as a safe conversational topic had the desired effect: the relationship developed, and the young couple married.
She also assisted her beloved god-daughter Sonia Keppel, whose romance with the Hon. Roland Cubitt had hit the buffers, owing to his parents’ disapproval. His father and mother, Lord and Lady Ashcombe, were near neighbours of Mrs Greville. Rollie’s three older brothers had been killed in the war; understandably, he was very precious to them. Sonia’s older sister Violet had recently eloped to France with Vita Sackville-West, to the titillated horror of polite society. The Cubitts were wary of their son marrying into a family so rife with scandal: Mrs Keppel’s well-known affair with Edward VII was safely in the past, but was lesbian adultery acceptable in one’s in-laws? In a pincer movement worthy of a brace of formidable aunts in a P. G. Wodehouse novel Mrs Keppel and Mrs Greville bore down on the jeopardised romance. Mrs Greville’s chauffeur drove her to the neighbours’ country house; while her Rolls idled gently on the gravel, she refused to step inside. When a puzzled Lord Ashcombe came out to greet his unexpected visitor, she told him plainly that she did not consider his family good enough for her god-daughter and swept off. Meanwhile, with a professional poker player’s skill, Mrs Keppel trapped Lord Ashcombe into settling a huge financial sum on the young couple, in order to match the Keppels’ dowry. The wedding went ahead on 17 November 1920, and Mrs Greville was lavish with gifts for the young couple.
Mrs Greville’s Edwardian glory days left many a legacy. Both she and Alice Keppel had been friendly with Sir Ernest Cassel, Edward VII’s financial adviser of genius, and they benefitted from his advice. Sir Ernest was very fond of his two grand-daughters, Edwina and Mary Ashley, especially as their mother, Sir Ernest’s only child, had died in 1911, when they were very young. The girls had a stepmother, with whom relations were strained, and so Edwina went to live with her grandfather in London. Mrs Greville particularly liked young Edwina, who joined a Polesden house party in July 1920. Fellow guests that weekend included Prince Bertie and Grace Vanderbilt, the American millionairess. Through Grace, Edwina met Louis Mountbatten, known as Dickie, in the summer of 1921, and the young couple were instantly attracted to each other.
However, Dickie was just about to set out on a nine-month tour of India and Japan with his cousin the Prince of Wales. He knew that Mrs Greville was planning a lengthy trip to India to coincide with the royal visit. Like them, she would be a guest of her old friend Lord Reading, the Viceroy of India. Dickie was sure Mrs Greville would be willing to act as chaperone if Edwina’s grandfather, Sir Ernest, approved, and then Edwina could join him in India.
The lovers’ plans were overturned by the sudden and unexpected deaths of first Dickie’s father, Lord Mountbatten, and then, just ten days later, of Sir Ernest Cassel. Both Dickie and Edwina were grief-stricken. Under the provisions of Sir Ernest’s will Edwina stood to inherit £7 million, but not until she was twenty-eight or married, whichever came sooner. Meanwhile, she was very short of cash, while Dickie worried that his motives for wanting to marry her might now be misconstrued as fortune-hunting.
Resourceful Edwina went to see Mrs Greville and mentioned the attractive young ADC who would be in India with the Prince of Wales at the same time as her friend. A practised matchmaker, Mrs Greville took her cue and asked Edwina’s father, Colonel Ashley, if his daughter could stay at Polesden after Sir Ernest’s funeral; having obtained his approval, she invited Dickie Mountbatten too. Their romance was supposed to be secret, but it was evident that they adored each other.
Nevertheless Dickie set off for India on 26 October with the Prince of Wales, leaving Edwina behind, still in full mourning, and Mrs Greville had to sail to Bombay without her on the SS Morea. But on her arrival Mrs Ronnie prompted the Viceroy to write and invite Edwina to come and stay in the middle of January, when she would be in half-mourning; with the letter Edwina was able to get her father’s grudging agreement, and she finally arrived at the palatial Viceregal Lodge in Delhi in the early hours of 12 February 1922.
The setting was extremely formal, and etiquette rigidly observed: maharajahs and princes came to meet the Prince of Wales, uniforms and decorations were worn at a succession of state banquets, garden parties and fancy-dress parties. Mrs Greville sported her famous emeralds. There were trips to tombs and forts, hunting and parties, but there was also a rather fraught atmosphere. The Prince was not an easy guest: he was petulant at being separated from his mistress, Mrs Dudley Ward; he resented the business of ‘kinging’ as he called it; and he smoked and drank too much. His only consolation was the company of his companions, his cousin Louis Mountbatten and an officer in the British Indian Army, ‘Fruity’ Metcalfe, who was to become his equerry and loyal friend. The Prince appreciated the company of pretty, compliant women, and consequently he resented having the fifty-eight-year-old Mrs Greville, his mother’s great friend, keeping a beady eye on him at banquets and garden parties, tiger shoots and cocktail evenings. She even managed to rearrange the seating at a dinner party for 220 people so that the Prince, the guest of honour, was forced to sit facing her across the table.
Meanwhile Dickie and Edwina’s romance flourished, and Mrs Greville lent them her vast drawing room so that they could have somewhere private to meet. They believed that only the Prince and Mrs Greville knew that they were in love, but when Dickie found his valet, Hiscock, unexpectedly cleaning Edwina’s riding boots, and Edwina’s maid, Weller, carefully ironing his ties, he realised the secret was out. Dickie proposed to Edwina on 14 February, and she accepted. They decided to keep the engagement secret, but by 20 February they had confided in Mrs Ronnie, as she had been Edwina’s chaperone, and then broke the news to Lord and Lady Reading, their hosts.
The announcement alarmed the lackadaisical chaperones. A budding tendresse between two young people in a romantic, exotic setting was one thing; an engagement between a member of the royal family and a juvenile multi-millionairess with whose care they had all been entrusted while she was more than 4,000 miles from home was quite another. Somewhat belatedly, doubts crept in. Mrs Greville seems, rather late in the day, to have questioned Lord Mountbatten’s true motives and worried that perhaps he was only after Edwina for the vast fortune that she would inherit on marriage; and what would Edwina’s family say to the whirlwind romance that had swept through Viceregal Lodge? Could they at least dissuade Edwina and Dickie from making any formal announcement until their respective families had given permission? Mrs Greville wrote a distraught note to Lord Reading:
My dear Viceroy4
I am absolutely wretched about that child �
� I couldn’t sleep a wink, I have grave misgivings. They were both at me last night – & she will not be reasonable, all I begged for was that no engagement should take place now, in a year she will be sick of him.
She has promised me that she will not write home till she has seen you, but she promised me she would do nothing here – I want time – this is absolutely confidential only I feel she is being thrown to the wolves so although it is mean of one to betray her confidence I feel you are the only pillar of strength […] I don’t dislike him but he is wily and I am really wretched and very sore at her for breaking her word to me. And she looked so white-faced and motherless last night. Dear Viceroy please insist on no engagement – I have failed ignominiously but you are so strong. Bless you and forgive me.
Lady Reading wrote somewhat apologetically to Edwina’s father, Colonel Ashley, expressing the view that she had hoped Edwina would have fallen for someone more mature and established. Edwina’s father was offended that King George V heard about her engagement before he did, because Louis Mountbatten sought his approval, and he dragged his feet in giving permission for months, but eventually at the beginning of May 1922 all was resolved and the engagement was officially announced to general relief, with the wedding planned for 18 July 1922.
Back in Britain, Edwina’s supposed chaperone recovered her equilibrium and promptly claimed credit for the match. Mrs Greville held a congratulatory dinner party for the Mountbattens and some fifty guests, including Prince Bertie, her heir, at Charles Street, and a ball for 300. She also had the Mountbattens to stay at Polesden Lacey. London society could not get enough of the glamorous young couple; a potent combination of good looks, fabulous wealth and royal connections made them a magnet for the hostesses. Lady Cunard gave them a luncheon party, a dinner party and two dances, and Mrs Corrigan threw a party for them.
It was the society wedding of 1922, with 800 guests, including numerous royals. Dickie Mountbatten’s best man was the Prince of Wales. Lady Cunard gave Dickie a set of onyx and diamond waistcoat buttons, but unfortunately he thanked Mrs Vanderbilt for them by mistake. Mrs Greville gave diamond hairclips for Edwina, cufflinks for Dickie and a silver inkstand and bellpush. Mrs Greville attended the wedding, and she remained on good terms with the couple for many years to come.
While lavish party-throwing and sumptuous gifts were the preserve of the truly wealthy, lower down the social scale money was hard to come by in the years immediately after the war. The Colefaxes were forced to face some hard realities. Arthur’s worthy but unpaid wartime role at the Ministry of Munitions had resulted in a knighthood in 1920, but Lord and Lady Colefax’s financial situation, like that of many others immediately after the Great War, was uncertain. They decided to sell both Old Buckhurst, where they had entertained more than 800 guests between 1914 and 1921, and their house in Onslow Square, to buy a single house in London as both a family home and a forum for Sibyl’s entertaining. In 1921 they found Argyll House, at 211 King’s Road in Chelsea. It had been designed by the Venetian architect Giacomo Leoni around 1720 as a ‘small country house’ in the neo-classical style, with a high-walled garden on the south side, iris beds and an ancient grapevine that rambled up to the roof.
The Colefaxes fell in love with it instantly. The house needed considerable amendments to make it suitable for modern life; the stable was demolished and an extension added in matching yellow brick, which was then ‘treated’ with a mixture of water and soot to match the original structure. Servants’ quarters were created, including a pleasant sitting room for staff. The cellar was turned into a large kitchen with a garden window, and a luggage lift was installed.
Sibyl tackled the interior, removing Victorian additions. The rooms were repanelled and painted the colour of old ivory. A fine Georgian staircase was added, and Sibyl introduced antique walnut or lacquered Chinese furniture and colourful antique rugs. The dining room was rather small, but seemed larger because of the antique mirrors, which reflected the wall-sconces, and the central chandelier made of assorted crystals collected by Sibyl. She liked symmetry, with matching pairs of chairs, vases and flower arrangements. She also favoured the type of colourful floral chintz that had been brought to Britain from India by the East India Company in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, which still tended to be found in the bedrooms of English country houses; now it livened up convivial groups of upholstered chairs and sofas, encouraging her guests to sit and talk. Sibyl’s gift was in identifying the essential character of the organically grown English country house, but making it cleaner, tidier, more comfortable and better lit. Her genius was in distilling these traditional features to make homes that looked historic, but subtly better. She recognised precisely what the newly wealthy required, a ready-made heritage, because she came from exactly the same background. For the next fifteen years Argyll House was to be her beloved family home, a showcase for her decorating talents and the stage on which she performed.
Unlike the other hostesses, Sibyl was keen to cultivate the Bloomsbury group, a loose agglomeration of Modernist writers, artists and intellectuals. Two talented sisters, Virginia and Vanessa Stephen, lived at 46 Gordon Square in Bloomsbury, the leafy residential area near the British Museum, until their marriages, and their location gave the movement its name. Their social circle included their husbands, Leonard Woolf and Clive Bell, and Duncan Grant, Virginia’s lover Vita Sackville-West, the economist John Maynard Keynes, the critic Roger Fry and the painter Walter Sickert. Their personal relationships were closely intertwined. Their somewhat louche lifestyles and ill-defined romances raised eyebrows. It was said that the Bloomsbury group ‘lived in squares, but loved in triangles’.
‘The Bloomsburies’ were championed and cultivated by Lady Ottoline Morrell, who was related to the first Duke of Wellington: her half-brother was the Duke of Portland. She was married to the Liberal MP Philip Morrell, was six feet tall, had flaming red hair and dressed eccentrically in brilliant colours. The Morrells had bought a Tudor mansion called Garsington in Oxfordshire in 1914 and restored it, and they also had an impressive London house, 44 Bedford Square. Both houses were to become regular haunts for the Bloomsbury group, who appreciated the better things in life, especially if someone else was paying. In 1916 Lady Ottoline offered a refuge to Clive Bell and other conscientious objectors by inviting them to stay at Garsington and work on the home farm so that they could avoid conscription. She was a resolute friend to avant-garde writers such as Virginia Woolf, Siegfried Sassoon and T. S. Eliot.
The Morrells maintained what would now be called an ‘open marriage’; Lady Ottoline’s lovers included Bertrand Russell, Dora Carrington and Roger Fry, as well as a stonemason employed at Garsington. Her unorthodox lifestyle prompted D. H. Lawrence to make her the central character of his book Lady Chatterley’s Lover, and he also pilloried her as Hermione Roddice in Women in Love. Aldous Huxley mocked the free-thinking atmosphere to be found at Garsington, where the Morrells entertained weekend house parties in style, in his 1921 novel Crome Yellow.
Lady Ottoline was an aristocratic woman who acted as patron for a particular set within the creative avant-garde. By contrast, Sibyl Colefax rose from unremarkable beginnings to collect the celebrated from all fields – the well born and wealthy as much as the literati and the avant-garde. In most aspects of her life Sibyl was more conventional, and therefore less vulnerable to sniping and ridicule. She too cultivated Bloomsbury, despite their vinegary disparagement of her and the other ‘celebrity’ hostesses. Sibyl first began to pursue Virginia Woolf in 1922, bombarding her with invitations, which irritated the irascible novelist. Woolf claimed she refused Sibyl’s initial overtures not only because they had not met but also because she was aware that her suspenders and stockings were shabby, and she loathed shopping for new clothes in order to appear respectable. In time the two women became oddly friendly, though Virginia Woolf remarked that Sibyl liked ‘to listen to clever talk, and to buy it with a lunch of four courses and good wine’5. Woolf preferre
d to see Sibyl alone, avoiding other writers, especially those she called ‘great men’, and resisted having to sing for her supper in a cluster of other guests. Virginia Woolf termed gossip about Sibyl as ‘Colefaxiana’ and coined the term ‘Colefaxismus’ to denote a casual remark intended to imply privileged knowledge of the subject.
Sibyl made a speciality of collecting literary lions: at Argyll House one might encounter Arnold Bennett, H. G. Wells or Max Beerbohm. Grand Irish writers appreciated her hospitality too; George Bernard Shaw would grace her table as well as that of Lady Astor, and the poet W. B. Yeats was an occasional fellow diner as well as being a regular guest of Lady Londonderry at Mount Stewart. Perhaps Sibyl’s most satisfying literary scalp was that of George Moore, who, although he adored Lady Cunard for decades, still loathed sitting at her dining table with his rival Sir Thomas Beecham, and preferred the deference given to him by Sibyl. She also cultivated Harold Nicolson and Vita Sackville-West, and there was a nearly an unfortunate encounter at a party at Argyll House on 7 April 1921, when Denys Trefusis, unhappily married to Violet, spotted Vita across the room and left immediately; Violet and Vita had recently had a passionate affair and eloped together to France, leaving their respective, unfortunate husbands behind.
