by Siân Evans
The menace of war had depressed demand for Colefax & Fowler’s decorating services, and in 1938–9 Sibyl’s income from the company dropped to £500. When hostilities started, Sibyl threw her considerable energies into running a Women’s Voluntary Service canteen in Belgravia while her business partner John Fowler, who was exempt from military service because of his poor health and myopia, enlisted as a fire warden in Chelsea and drove ambulances. Colefax & Fowler’s premises remained at Bruton Street, run by assistants, and Sibyl and John worked there whenever their other duties allowed. As the war progressed, the strict rationing of materials and a shortage of skilled craftspeople were a handicap. Nevertheless, Sibyl and John used their considerable ingenuity; army blankets were dyed, cut into strips and re-stitched to make striped curtains. Surplus silk parachutes became voile drapes, and pyjama fabrics, calicos, bookbinding linens and striped cotton nurses’ uniforms served as furnishing fabrics. The firm’s customers resourcefully plundered their own stocks to supply old bedspreads, sheets and tablecloths which were dyed and turned into slip-covers. John Fowler even converted one client’s discarded frock into cushion covers for her sitting room.
Sibyl’s wartime mania for socialising led Noel Coward to remark that she hadn’t been known to finish a sentence since September 1939. She clung on in Queen Anne’s Gate, but rationing drove her to organising ‘ordinaries’, dinner parties held at the Dorchester on Thursdays, after which each participant would receive a discreet bill for their share of the meal and beverages. Over the course of the war, the cost gradually rose from 10 to 15 shillings a head, and wine and sherry became scarce, but the ‘ordinaries’ were a great success because of Sibyl’s unerring ability to attract the most interesting people to her table. She was so well informed that in May 1940 she told Harold Nicolson that Churchill was about to appoint him as Parliamentary Secretary to Duff Cooper, Minister for Information; Harold was amazed, but Sibyl was correct.
Invitations to her social events were now even more illegible; Noel Coward joked that the war censors were compelling Lady Colefax to use a typewriter. When Churchill became Prime Minister in May 1940, Lord Berners played yet another subtle but savage trick on poor Sibyl. He sent her a hand-written note:
Dear Sibyl,7
I wonder if by any chance you are free to dine tomorrow night? It is only a tiny party for Winston and GBS. I think it important they should get together at this moment. There will be nobody else except for Toscanini and myself. Do please try and forgive this terribly short notice. Yours ever,
Eight o’clock here and – of course – any old clothes.
This was the perfect bait for Sibyl – an intimate little supper with Churchill, Shaw and Toscanini – but who was the host, and where was the party? The signature was illegible, the address looked like Berkeley Square, or maybe Belgrave Square, but the house number was a Gordian knot of digits. Sibyl rang everyone she knew in increasing desperation, as the hours ticked by, determined to grasp the glittering prize that remained tantalisingly out of reach.
Gerald Berners also satirised Sibyl in a light comedy called The Furies, which was staged in the summer of 1942 in Oxford. It features a female character called Adelaide Pyrex, a socially ambitious woman who claims ‘houses are my passion’ and who cannot refrain from suggesting improvements to the homes of others. Adelaide Pyrex bears a marked resemblance to interior decorator Sybil Colefax. Not everyone was so heartless; Sibyl’s finances were in a dire state, and on 8 March 1943 there was a well-attended benefit evening held for her at the Dorchester, with a pianist and a quartet. Perhaps surprisingly, it was Lady Cunard who organised the evening to raise funds for her former rival.
The most formidable of the great hostesses, Margaret Greville, finally passed away at the Dorchester in September 1942. Now in her late seventies, she had been in increasingly poor health, partially losing her eyesight and confined to a wheelchair, claiming that she had ‘everything wrong with her except leprosy’. Although she was regarded by some as an ‘Edwardian period piece’, she socialised with the great and the good till the very end.
She was on devilish form for one dinner party in her suite; as the bombs fell outside and sirens wailed, the great hostess was ablaze with the Greville emeralds because, she claimed, if one was going to be blown up, one should go out in style. As the food was served, she challenged her guests to guess the special ingredient in the savoury mousse they were eating. ‘Rabbit!’ she hissed, and gave a long, appraising glance at the wife of the Chilean ambassador, who was wearing a modest fur cape that definitely was not mink.
Charles Ritchie, the Canadian diplomat, left a vivid account of her in her final months:
Dined with the Masseys off salmon-trout and asparagus. Mrs Ronnie Greville was there – sitting in a bath-chair with her feet dangling onto a footstool, her small hand covered in diamonds, and with her painted face – she looked like a monstrous baby – something in grand guignol. This was also the impression given by her only having one eye – the other is dead and blind – and that one raked the table round – illuminated by intelligent malice. The conversation was on a royal plane during a great deal of dinner, highly aristocratic tit-bits of scandal (Lady Y who has run away with the groom. Lord X who had eloped with his stepmother.) […] the old girl is kept alive by her sleepless snobbery, her still unquenchable zest for the great world. She is a Lowland Scot, and the Lowland Scot from Boswell on is the most insatiable animal on earth when it comes to worldly glitter and bustle. I should know – I am one.8
Despite her disabilities, Mrs Greville was still scheming to the end. She informed Victor Cazalet MP that the King and Queen felt that Winston Churchill was hogging the limelight by delivering stirring messages to the populace that should come from the King. On 28 June 1942 she insisted to the Canadian High Commissioner that Prime Minister Churchill should go. ‘I have known him for fifty years and he has never been right yet.’ She was still close to the royal family, and made the lengthy and uncomfortable journey to Scotland, joining the King and Queen for afternoon tea at Balmoral on Sunday 16 August 1942. Alan Lascelles, who pushed her wheelchair, noted in his diary that Mrs Greville ‘has been a constant mischief-maker for twenty-five years, but I don’t think she will make much more now’. Queen Elizabeth was taken aback by her old friend’s appearance. She wrote to Osbert Sitwell on 13 September 1942: ‘it was too pathetic to see this little bundle of unquenchable courage and determination, quite helpless except for one bright eye. I had not seen her for a couple of months, and was very shocked and sad at the change. But with all her weakness there was just the same tenacity of purpose, and I felt full of admiration for such a wonderful exhibition of “never give in”.’9
On 25 August 1942 the Duke of Kent, younger brother of the King, was killed in a plane crash in Scotland while on active service. He had been a friend of Laura Corrigan, Mrs Greville and Lady Astor, and he visited Plymouth with the Astors just two days before his death. Noel Coward, who had known him for nineteen years, his brother King George VI and his cousin Dickie Mountbatten wept inconsolably at the funeral at St George’s Chapel, Windsor. One can only imagine the thoughts of widowed Queen Mary; she had lost one son, John, who died in adolescence; her eldest, David, was estranged from her by the abdication; and now Prince George had been killed as the result of a ferocious war between her country of origin and the nation where she was Queen.
The Duke of Kent’s death and the arduous journey back from Scotland may have exacerbated Mrs Greville’s final illness. Back at the Dorchester she took to her bed, and her devoted maid Adeline Liron and butler Bole cared for her as her vitality ebbed away. Old friends visited; Beverley Nichols recorded that her final words to him were: ‘That damned Ribbentrop. Thank God I told him what I thought of him when he came to Polesden […] I told him that if ever there was a war, he might beat the English, but he would never beat the Scots.’10
Osbert Sitwell wrote a moving account of her final hours in a letter to Queen Elizabeth. He described
how Mrs Ronnie had stopped eating, and had told him that she was in pain and wished to die. Then she had a cerebral thrombosis, which left her in a coma. Osbert stayed with her, but she did not regain consciousness. Osbert attended the doctors’ conference on Monday evening, but there was nothing more they could do. Mrs Greville died peacefully at 2 a.m. on 15 September 1942, with the faithful Bole at her bedside.
Till the very end she managed to deceive; her own doctor, Alexander McCall, signed her death certificate giving her age as seventy-five, but in fact she was three months short of her seventy-ninth birthday. However, one important truth did emerge immediately; the Londoner’s Diary gossip column in the Evening Standard for 15 September, the day of her death, stated baldly that ‘Her fortune came to her from her father, William McEwan’, confirming in print what many had long suspected.
Following her funeral at Polesden Lacey and a memorial service in London, which was packed with ambassadors, the participants gossiped about her life and legacy in a way that would have delighted her. But Mrs Ronnie had one more card to play. In a lifetime packed with manipulation and duplicity her most daring ploy had been her offer to bequeath her property and a substantial fortune to Prince Albert. Between 1914 and 1942 she enjoyed twenty-eight years of ample hospitality from the royal family. She could not have foreseen that her protégé and his Scottish wife would become King and Queen in 1936; nevertheless at some point she changed her will, deciding instead to leave the bulk of her estate to the National Trust in memory of her father. Crucially, she did not tell the royal family about her change of heart; Queen Elizabeth found out during a visit from Gerald Russell, Mrs Greville’s solicitor, a few weeks after her death, and wrote to her husband, the King, with the disappointing news. However, there was a consolation prize; a small black tin trunk, which contained some sixty pieces of the most spectacular jewellery in existence. ‘With my loving thoughts’, Mrs Greville left the Queen her diamond and platinum Boucheron tiara, the five-strand diamond necklace that had once belonged to Marie Antoinette, the Empress Josephine’s emeralds and a diamond ring that had belonged to Catherine the Great. The provenance of these jewels, their ownership by historic women of international influence, mattered to Mrs Greville; now they were the property of Queen Elizabeth, the daughter she never had.
Laura Mae Corrigan’s war record amazed those who had previously sniggered at her malapropisms and misunderstandings. She had been based in Paris since 1938, retaining the Ritz Hotel’s Imperial Suite. It occupied a large section of the first floor, and was furnished with Laura’s exquisite tapestries and Louis Quinze furniture. On occasions she obligingly moved out to allow VIPs to stay there instead, such as Winston Churchill in the spring of 1940, before the fall of France. With the onset of war she used her fortune and her contacts to organise a charity, the Bienvenue au Soldat, a relief effort that sent packages of essentials to wounded soldiers and civilians and supplied hospitals. Although she was a civilian, Laura Mae Corrigan adopted a uniform, a rather chic one of her own devising, which gave her a certain undefinable authority in Paris.
Occupied Paris was a tense city, but Mrs Corrigan, as an American national, was a neutral, and a phenomenally wealthy one. When the German High Command requested the Imperial Suite for the use of Reichsmarschall Hermann Goering, head of the German Air Force, Mrs Corrigan helpfully moved into a less palatial suite, but stayed on at the Ritz, rightly seeing it as the nexus of power. The high-ranking Nazi officers who took over the hotel approved of the pleasant, middle-aged American widow in couture fashions and assorted wigs. She had positive pro-Nazi credentials: she had known von Ribbentrop, now Hitler’s Foreign Minister, when he was German Ambassador in London, and was an acquaintance of the Duke of Windsor, who was fondly believed to be pro-German.
The American Ambassador had advised all US nationals to leave France before the inevitable German takeover, but there were some who resolved to stay, among them the interior designer Elsie de Wolfe. However, unwelcome news reached Laura Corrigan. She had invested her husband’s fortune wisely, and her annual income in 1940 was $800,000, worth about $12 million nowadays. Now that France had fallen to the Nazis, the American government was anxious to prevent the Germans sequestering vast fortunes and using them for their own ends. Consequently Laura was informed by the US State Department that her American assets were frozen while she remained in France and her income would be restricted to just $500 a month.
With her cash supply effectively cut off, Laura reviewed her options. If she tried to leave France, her magnificent possessions might well be confiscated. It dawned on her that perhaps the best course of action was to stay, and to use her belongings as bargaining chips. She planned to sell her luxury possessions clandestinely to finance her activities in support of the war effort.
For ten weeks workmen had laboured to transform the Imperial Suite. Goering required a vast bathtub; lengthy wallows in the tub were part of his ongoing treatment for morphine addiction, as immersion in hot water for hours helped minimise the withdrawal symptoms while doctors administered injections of methadone. Goering’s compulsive acquisitiveness was legendary; he collected art, antiques and jewellery. His great girth and time-consuming therapy meant he was delighted to acquire more without having to leave the Imperial Suite. But it was a dangerous game to play: the Nazis were now the law enforcers in Paris, and if Laura showed her complete hand, Goering might order all her assets seized, and she might find herself interned on some trumped-up charge.
First, she hid her magnificent fur collection; the Ritz Hotel had a number of discreet built-in cupboards and she secreted her sables and minks in one of these, then arranged for a massive armoire to be placed in front of the cupboard. Her furs lay safe and undiscovered throughout the war. Then she sought a meeting with Goering. He was as wealthy as Croesus, mercurial and capable of acts of great violence; he was also obsessed by gems and jewellery, and was rumoured to keep a bowl full of precious and semi-precious stones next to his bed. Taking a calculated risk, Laura first offered him an emerald ring; perhaps surprisingly, he paid her £50,000 for it. She then sold him a gold dressing case, which he sent to Hitler. He also paid handsomely for Laura’s magnificent Renaissance tapestries and her antique French furniture, as well as a number of her gem-studded bracelets which he wore under his uniforms, according to Elsa Maxwell.
Superficially, it seemed as though she was actively collaborating with the Nazis, but in the autumn of 1941 she sold all her belongings except for two dresses and a small selection of clothes, two wedding rings, a wristwatch and a string of pearls. Laura gathered up her cash and her remaining portable belongings and headed for Vichy, the spa town that was the headquarters of the collaborationist French government, and consequently a nest of spies, Germans, French Resistance operatives and displaced expatriates. Laura took a room in a modest hotel and used her cash to continue funding her charity for war wounded. She also assisted Americans who were trapped in France because they lacked the funds to arrange safe passage out of the country, and she acquired the nickname of ‘The Dollar Queen’ among those she helped. She used her neutral status to flit between occupied and free France, assisting French soldiers, the Resistance and civilians, a dangerous business.
Following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941, Hitler followed suit by declaring war on the United States. Now that Americans were considered enemy aliens in German-occupied Europe, the attitude towards them changed. About a hundred American women were interned by the Germans at a camp at Vittel, which was crowded and uncomfortable. Laura Corrigan arranged for packages containing warm clothing, soap, cigarettes, toiletries and food to be sent in to them. Eventually even she ran out of money; on 5 October 1942 Time magazine reported:
Laura Mae Corrigan, 60, [sic – she was nearly 64] wealthy expatriate who became known as ‘the American Angel’ for her war relief in France, finally had to abandon her work for lack of funds. A Cleveland steelmaker’s widow who had been one of London’s most spectacular h
ostesses for more than two decades, she plunged into the job of helping feed, clothe, doctor and amuse soldiers and war prisoners in France three years ago, sent aid to thousands of men in French prisons and camps, took to selling her jewels and clothing when her money began to run out. Last week she had sold the last of her jewels, the last of her furs, [and] prepared to return to London.11
She escaped through neutral Portugal, and once back in Britain, Mrs Corrigan took a suite at Claridge’s and threw a party on Christmas Eve 1942; one of her guests was her fellow society hostess Emerald Cunard. In March 1943 Mrs Corrigan was presented to King George VI at a glittering reception held by the Overseas League, a reflection of her valuable war work. She continued to help wounded soldiers for the duration of hostilities, and leased 11 Grosvenor Place to create a club for young Allied Air Force officers. The house belonged to Lord Moyne, director of his family’s brewing firm, Guinness, and Leader of the House of Lords. The Wings Club opened in August 1943; her old friends were happy to lend their names to this venture, with the ubiquitous ‘Chips’ Channon serving on the club committee and the widowed Princess Marina, Duchess of Kent, as chief patroness. It seems as though Laura’s wartime activities impressed many when they came to light; during a row about who was parvenu and who inherently bourgeois, ‘Chips’ Channon stoutly defended Mrs Corrigan to Emerald Cunard, saying that Laura was in the best society, and that anyone in Paris who was not received by her was ‘beneath consideration’.
For her war efforts she was given the Légion d’Honneur by Marshal Pétain, and the Croix du Combattant, which is rarely awarded to women because it is only given for acts of bravery in the front lines. She also received the King’s Medal from George VI. Elsa Maxwell said of Laura, ‘she was honest, she had vitality, and she had a heart as big as a bank’. Nevertheless, she remained the butt of jokes to war-hardened Londoners; V2 rockets were known colloquially as buzz-bombs, but Laura blithely referred to them as ‘bugger bombs’. In addition, Evelyn Waugh wrote to Nancy Mitford alleging that the newly liberated French had suspected Mrs Corrigan of collaboration and attempted to shave her head as a punishment, but received a rude shock.
