She Who Dares E-Book

Lyndsy Spence

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Seitenzahl: 401

Beschreibung

History has seen many women make their mark by defying the limits set against them, stepping out of the boxes they had been put in and forging their own path.She Who Dares is a collection of pen portraits of ten extraordinary women who dared to defy the norm: Mariga Guinness, Enid Lindeman, Sylvia Ashley, Joan Wyndham, Venetia Montagu, Irene Curzon, Sylvia Brooke, Sydney Redesdale, Hazel Lavery and Jean Massereene. They were often witnesses to or participants in key events in the last 100 years, including abdications, the rise of fascism and two world wars. Their lives were dramatic and vibrant, usually involving tangled webs of relationships, heartbreak and scandal. From influencing politics to being accused of witchcraft, from glamorous society beauties to nonconformist tom-boys, each of these women deserves to be described as trailblazing.

Leseprobe

SHE WHO DARES

SHE WHO DARES

TEN TRAILBLAZINGSOCIETY WOMEN

LYNDSY SPENCE

For Lola, Harriet, Mariga, and Henrietta

First published in 2019

The History Press

The Mill, Brimscombe Port

Stroud, Gloucestershire, GL5 2QG

www.thehistorypress.co.uk

© Lyndsy Spence, 2019

The right of Lyndsy Spence to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without the permission in writing from the Publishers.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978 0 7509 9170 4

Typesetting and origination by The History Press

Printed and bound in Great Britain by TJ International Ltd

eBook converted by Geethik Technologies

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements

Author’s Note

1     Princess, Preservationist: Mariga Guinness

2     The Stucco Venus: Enid Lindeman

3     The Serial Bride: Sylvia Ashley

4     An Ingénue’s Progress: Joan Wyndham

5     A Dangerous Devotion: Venetia Stanley

6     The Machiavellian Queen: Sylvia Brooke

7     The Baroness: Irene Curzon

8     The Girl Who Became Muv: Sydney Redesdale

9     The Muse: Hazel Lavery

10    Society Star: Jean Massereene

Notes

Bibliography

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I am grateful to the following individuals: Patrick Guinness for granting me permission to quote from Mariga Guinness’s letters and diaries, to reproduce his photographs, and for answering my questions; Marina Guinness for sharing her amusing anecdote of Mariga; Lord Gowrie for his telephone interview; Josephine Batterham of the Derek Hill Foundation for permitting me to view Mariga’s letters to Derek Hill; Lord and Lady Massereene for their permission to quote from Jean Massereene’s letters; Julia Shirley for her generosity in sharing information on Mariga and for interviewing her mother, Rose Bryson, on my behalf; Isabel Boyle and Doris Morrow for their memories of Mariga during her years in Glenarm; Kathy Crozier and Claire Mann for a most enjoyable day at Castletown House and Conolly Folly; Aidan O’Boyle for his knowledge of Irish architecture and for assisting with source material; Benjamin Treuhaft for an enjoyable afternoon discussing Sydney Redesdale; John Hayden Hasley for his memories of Sylvia Ashley; Libby Cameron for answering my questions about Enid Lindeman; William Cross for sharing his collection of rare books; Andrew Budgell for his helpful editorial comments; Mark Spence and Yasmin Morgan for their many excursions in search of Mariga and co.; Stephen Kennedy for accompanying me on research trips to Dublin Castle, Mountjoy Square and Glasnevin Cemetery; my family for encouraging my (hare-brained) projects.

I am especially grateful to Lord Gowrie for his permission to reproduce Derek Hill’s portrait of Mariga Guinness, to the Bryson and Huxley families for making available their personal photographs of Mariga Guinness, and to Len Kinley and John Young for permission to use their archived photographs of the Massereene family.

I thank the following archivists for their help in accessing files and assisting with copyright permissions: Andrew Glew, the Tate Archive; Richard Ward, the Parliamentary Archives; Oliver House, the Bodleian Library University of Oxford; Georgia Satchel, the Mull Museum; Lesley Park, the Cumbria Archive Centre; Morx Arai, Huntington Library; Philip Magennis, Antrim Castle Gardens; Rebecca Geddess, Public Records Office Northern Ireland.

AUTHOR’S NOTE

The original title of this book, These Great Ladies, was inspired by Evelyn Waugh’s appraisal of his society friends. For, in October 1931, the stage adaptation of his bestselling novel Vile Bodies opened at the Arts Club Theatre and caused a socialite’s revolt. Many thought his satirical portrait, drawn from high society, struck too close to home. Lady Irene Curzon considered him a ‘silly little creature’1 and Lady Dorothy Lygon called him a ‘snobbish cad’2. Emerald Cunard, formerly Maud Burke of New York, bought tickets but did not like the location of her seats and complained of having to take Prince George to the eighteenth row. ‘Old trout,’ snapped Waugh, ‘she’s only an American anyway.’3 Doris Castlerosse, a wily, wilful courtesan known in lower echelons as Jessie Doris Delevingne, refused to pay for her ticket. Their behaviour prompted Waugh to remark, ‘Oh dear, these great ladies.’4

Without harbouring Waugh’s venomous bite, I consider the ten women who feature in this book to be great ladies. They were true individuals and held a unique place in society between the world wars and thereafter. Many have fallen into obscurity but their stories deserve to be told.

1

PRINCESS, PRESERVATIONIST:MARIGA GUINNESS

The extremities of Mariga’s life, the abandonment she felt from both parents and the memories of a lonely childhood, inspired in her a resilience against the modern world. She was born Princess Hermione Marie-Gabrielle von Urach in London on 21 September 1932, to Rosemary (née Blackadder), of Scots and Norwegian descent, and Prince Albrecht von Urach, a descendant of the German House of Württemberg – the same family as Mary of Teck, the Consort of King George V. ‘She is much more German than my Great-Aunt Elisabeth, Queen Mother of the Belgians,’ Mariga said of her cousin, Queen Mary. Related to every royal house in Europe, Mariga’s pedigree was older than the House of Windsor: her grandfather, Prince Wilhem of Urach was briefly King Mindaugas II of Lithuania; her great-grandmother, Princess Florestine, was the daughter of Florestan I, Prince of Monaco; and amongst her reigning aunts and uncles was Elisabeth ‘Sissi’, the Empress of Austria. Years later, Mariga attended a dinner party and a guest spoke of Sissi and her alleged affair with King Ludwig. Mariga replied, ‘They were just cousins.’ The guest challenged her response, claiming that neither he nor Mariga could be certain. ‘I have it on good authority,’ she told him. She did not confide that Sissi and Ludwig were amongst her regal ancestors. But, then again, her upbringing was a world away from her noble birthright.

The fate of Mariga’s paternal family was significantly altered after the Monégasque Revolution of 1910, followed by a constitution in 1911 which Albert I, Prince of Monaco, suspended during the First World War, for her father had once stood to inherit the principality from his cousin and Albert’s heir, Prince Louis II, had no legitimate children. However after the First World War, France wanted a pro-French monarch to inherit the Monegasque throne, and so Louis adopted his illegitimate daughter, Charlotte, and she became his successor. In 1930 an American newspaper1 reported that Albrecht had gone to Paris to persuade the French Foreign Office of his right as the legitimate heir of Louis, but he was unsuccessful. The visit was not entirely hopeless, for he met Rosemary at the German Embassy in Paris, and despite being two years her junior and engaged to a Spanish aristocrat, he proposed marriage and she accepted. A royal title did not equal wealth, and the couple had to work for a living. Albrecht painted, and his first exhibition was financed by his mother and was a commercial failure, for it coincided with the Great Depression. Rosemary was a journalist and cartoonist: she created a children’s cartoon in The Sketch, designed advertisements for Shell, and in 1925 became the editor of the short-lived Parade magazine. She also contributed to the Saturday Review, the Evening Standard, and was engaged by the Manchester Daily Express to interview interesting people such as Feodor Chaliapin, whose answers consisted of sex and violence, and so could not be printed.

After Mariga was born, Rosemary and Albrecht continued their nomadic existence. She was not expected to live, owing to an infection she caught at birth, and having recovered two months later she considered November her real birthday. ‘We don’t show the baby to strangers,’2 Rosemary told her sister, Erica, when she asked to see Mariga. It was a curious response, but Rosemary was prone to such eccentricities. It should also be noted that Erica disliked Rosemary.3

During those early years the family lived in Venice, in a flat rented from Anna Mahler, as Albrecht hoped to establish himself as an artist; he counted Pablo Picasso as a close friend, and he sketched a portrait of Adolf Hitler, but it was declined because Hitler thought the staring eyes made him look mad.

In 1934 Rosemary left Mariga with Albrecht and sailed to America, to visit her brother, Ian, and his family in Hollywood. Ian’s stepdaughter, Willis, who later changed her name to Lili St Cyr and became a burlesque star, was fascinated by Rosemary’s dyed blonde hair and purple eyes, and how she had swapped an ordinary life for a royal title and world travel. ‘Go away, little girls, go away,’ Rosemary said to her nieces, as she was not interested in the curious children whose framed photographs she turned to face the wall. It was rumoured that she had gone to Hollywood to pursue a career as a film actress, for she had attended the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and played the part of ‘an extra nun’4 in Max Reinhardt’s play, The Miracle, and had worked for J.B. Fagan at the Oxford Playhouse and appeared in his play And So to Bed but could not remember her lines and was fired from the production. She loved Hollywood and in an article for Vogue she wrote of ‘a land fit for goddesses and the lovelies of the cinema to live in’. The studios, however, were dismissed as ‘hell … stuffy heat, everyone working like the devil’.5

At the end of her stay Rosemary wrote to Albrecht and told him that artists were sought by Walt Disney Studios to work on their animated films, an idea then in its infancy. He declined her suggestion to settle in Hollywood, as during that period he had taken an interest in photojournalism and by chance had captured the first unpublicised meeting between Hitler and Mussolini. It led to a career as a journalist in Japan, covering the Chinese-Japanese war, and working as a foreign correspondent for several German newspapers.

Mariga’s next home was in Kamakura, Japan, and it was there that her love of buildings began. Years later when a friend spoke of their talent for buying and selling houses for a profit, Mariga said that a ‘house is for always’. To her, a house had a soul and to neglect it was on par with neglecting a human being, or worse: the latter could speak up for themselves. The architectural style of a building was not only aesthetically pleasing to Mariga’s young eyes, but it offered a sense of stability in what had become an unhappy home life blighted by Rosemary’s moods and, then, her deep depression. ‘I adored Maman, though sometimes I was terrified by her unreasonable temper,’6 Mariga wrote to her father.

Having been accustomed to travelling and meeting people along the way, this new solitary existence did not bode well for Rosemary. Her husband was in China, reporting on the war, the Japanese did not mix with foreigners, and the staff at the German Embassy were aloof, regardless of her status as a princess. This, along with being thrown from her horse and suffering a concussion for a third time, added to a breakdown in Rosemary’s mental health.

Although Mariga feared the pendulum of Rosemary’s moods she loved her mother, and was taught by her to look at things as an artist would. In Japan it was decided by Rosemary that Mariga would have an informal education, perhaps a response to her academic career at Girton, which she attended on a scholarship to read English and Modern Languages. She was awarded a second class degree in the former and a third class in the latter. Whilst at university Rosemary met Arthur Quiller-Couch and became his mistress. ‘He rather spoilt her,’ her sister said. ‘Her head was a bit turned – she never bothered to work at all.’7 After her studies she travelled around Europe with a puppet show. Before leaving Girton, Rosemary got into trouble with the police and was fined 10s for riding her bicycle along a dark road without a lamp, and when questioned, she said, ‘I am very sorry; I was only going very slowly.’8 Thus, Mariga’s lessons consisted of drawing, literature, music, dancing, foreign languages, and sightseeing, and her father’s friend, Richard Sorge, a Soviet spy, taught her to play chess.

In 1938 Mariga’s childhood was forever changed, for in recent months Rosemary had been troubled by the reality of another world war, as she had lost her favourite cousin, Lt Ian Wilson, in the First World War,9 and she became obsessed with the idea that Emperor Hirohito was being misled by his generals. Acting on her concerns, Rosemary and Mariga went to Tokyo so she could warn the emperor in person, and as she entered his palace she was arrested by armed guards and injected with morphine. Mariga, who had held her mother’s hand as they walked to the private apartments, was frightened by the scene and was carried away screaming and placed at the German Embassy. ‘She always finds some logical explanation for doing these things,’10 Albrecht wrote in the aftermath of Rosemary’s behaviour. He also believed she would be cured by ‘normal European surroundings’11 and booked her passage on the Scharnhorst bound for Southampton, where she was met by an elderly friend, Hermione ‘Mymee’ Ramsden,12 a granddaughter of the Duke of Somerset and an early Suffragette.

A short time later Albrecht also arranged for Mariga to sail on a Japanese liner, chaperoned by the daughter of the British military attaché in Japan, who did not find Mariga difficult to care for although she missed her parents.13 Rosemary and Mariga accompanied Mymee to Norway, to her 10-acre wood, Slidre, overlooking the Jotunheim mountains. It had several wooden huts, executed in a traditional Norwegian style with elaborate carvings. Her stay there did little to restore Rosemary’s mental health, as she became depressed and left for Berlin, to meet Hitler – as with Emperor Hirohito, she had perhaps wanted to warn him of a war. However, the meeting never materialised, and in despair she checked into the Adlon Hotel and slit her wrists using a glass inkstand. ‘Of course it is awful for the child,’ Albrecht wrote to Mymee. It was decided that Mariga would live with Mymee at her Surrey home, Marley House, and Rosemary went to Chirnside to stay with her mother.

Some time after their separation, Mariga was brought to visit Rosemary, during which relatives heard the child shrieking. When they entered the room Rosemary jumped through a window, and two days later was found by the police. At the end of this bewildering period, which lasted from January to April 1938, Rosemary agreed to be assessed by Dr Bill Harrowes, the medical superintendent of New Saughton Hall (also known as Mavisbank House), an asylum south of Edinburgh, who noted she had ‘a well defined and well recognised variety of mental illnesses’,14 and was diagnosed with schizophrenia. Although Harrowes intended for her hospital stay to be as short as possible, he refused to let her be with Mariga, as ‘such an experience may deleteriously affect the whole of the child’s future.’15

After New Saughton Hall, Rosemary was committed to Craig House, where she lay ‘in bed for years, refusing to speak’.16 During this period Mariga became Mymee’s responsibility, for Albrecht was in Germany working for the foreign office and liaising with the Italian press.17 It was an eccentric childhood, living at Marley House in Surrey and spending her summers at Slidre, where an Aubusson carpet was laid out on the lawn and hot water came from an enormous tea urn from the Girl Guides in London. An old fashioned Fabian, Mymee believed that art and literature were the birthright of everyone. She was also a devoted spiritualist and was renowned for her experimental studies of parapsychology alongside her friend, Clarissa Miles, who had published their research on telepathy in the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research. It contributed to Mariga’s unorthodox education, and Mymee would go through a succession of sixteen governesses to educate her, one being an exiled Ethiopian princess. On an outing to a park in Norway, Mariga, who liked to tease her governesses, pointed to the nude statues and said, ‘Look at that one, don’t you think it looks wonderfully naturalistic?’ She was also enrolled in a boarding school at Malvern, Scotland, which she hated, so she left to resume her lessons at home.

Later, when Mariga was of age, Mymee sent her to the Monkey Club, on Pont Street, a finishing school for upper-class young women, where she learned domestic arts, typing, and how to behave in society. Its name was derived from the motto drummed into the students: ‘Hear no evil, see no evil’.18 This establishment played a part in connecting Mariga to her paternal family,19 for during the winter term she boarded at More House, a Catholic hostel, and met her cousin Prince Rupert Löwenstein, who, in the future, would introduce her to the man she would marry.

In the summer of 1939 Mariga and Mymee went to Norway and almost became stranded when war was declared in September. Mymee thought it too dangerous to attempt a sea crossing to England, but on the eve of the German invasion they crossed the border to Sweden and from there flew to Brighton. The remainder of the war was spent at Marley House and for a period in 1944 they lived at Ardverikie, Mymee’s family estate in Scotland – a protective measure against Operation Steinbock, the Luftwaffe’s strategic bombing of southern England. Mariga hoped that, after the war, she would be reunited with her parents and they would return to Germany, to the family seat, Schloss Lichtenstein, in the Swabian Alps. She was almost correct in her estimation, for Albrecht had considered sending her to his youngest sister, Mechtilde,20 who had three young children and lived with her husband, Prince Friedrich Karl Hohenlohe-Waldenburg-Schillingsfurst, at Schloss Waldenburg in southern Germany. It was not to be – Mariga continued to live with Mymee, Rosemary remained at the asylum, and Albrecht accepted a post in Rome as a foreign correspondent between the German and Italian press. Toward the end of the war he was appointed press attaché at the German Embassy in Berne. In 1943, he was falsely accused by Swiss spies of being a senior Nazi,21 and in 1945 he was interned for helping to smuggle capital out of Switzerland to America.22

In 1945 the war ended and Mariga’s dream of reuniting with her family remained unfulfilled. Rosemary had been given a lobotomy in December 1943, which at first had successful results: she was able to draw and play the piano, and according to Mymee was ‘almost her old self except that she will not discuss plans for the future. I am afraid that she feels that there is nothing for her to look forward to.’23 She also retained her independent mind, despite her treatment and surroundings, for a month later she wrote to Mymee, ‘I adore your pleasant schemes to count me against the Germans but you can’t. I love them and was always happy there and with my German.’24 Perhaps she wished for Mariga to have control over her destiny, for in a letter to Mymee she addressed the question of her being brought up English and not German ‘if she wants it … I am sure when she is sixteen she will be proud of the truth’.25 Albrecht also remained absent, as in 1946 he was charged by German authorities for having created Nazi propaganda* and for membership of the Nazi Party, which he had subscribed to in 1934 to pursue a career as a journalist. He apologised and there was no further action: a lucky escape, for his superiors were tried during the Nuremberg Trials. It marked a transitional period, as Mariga was now old enough to realise that she had no place in her parents’ lives, and when her maternal grandmother died in 1946 she felt she ‘no longer belonged to anyone’. Mariga later wrote in a letter to Albrecht that she spent ‘a miserable summer at the [Norwegian] hut in tears, but of course that didn’t help’. She was also surprised when Mymee – whom she treated as a parent – was unsympathetic toward her grief. ‘I think I nearly went mad – I seriously thought of throwing myself into a deep bit of the lake at Ardverikie but of course when it came to the point, I hadn’t enough courage – the water looked so horribly wild.’

At the age of 16 Mariga was sent by Mymee on an architectural tour of Paris and Touraine, accompanied by a friend named Eva. The sight of postwar Paris underwhelmed her, its buildings still in ruins after the Nazi Occupation. ‘Paris … that sparkling city of beauty and romance … with its Vogue models and its Quartier Latin, who would have thought its houses would be so dusty and drab?’26 At the end of the tour, and on her way to join Mymee in Norway, she stopped in Hamburg for a brief reunion with Albrecht. ‘Suddenly I saw him. I knew him at once. That big head – its hair grey now, that bristly moustache, bad teeth, tall figure and long arms … But I didn’t shout MAFFEN, I didn’t burst with hysterical tears,’27 she wrote in her diary. Albrecht, on his part, remained unmoved and he offered Mariga his hand to shake.

During their visit together, before the train whistle sounded and it was time to leave, they spoke of politics and liqueurs, and he gave her a magazine. Mariga imagined missing the train and staying with her father in Germany, but she sensed he would not know what to do with her. It was not the reunion she had dreamt of, since their last meeting in 1938, and after boarding the train she trembled with shock and ‘longed to cry’28 at the hopelessness of her father returning to her, or to her mother.

It was some time after their encounter that Mariga learned of her parents’ divorce and of Albrecht’s marriage, to Ute Waldschmidt, a woman eleven years her senior, with whom he had two children. ‘When I heard about your new marriage in such a horrible, indirect way, you, my God of perfection, were tumbled forever I thought into dust,’29 she wrote to her father. She believed that he would come back to her after the war, and would have landed ‘some rich type-writing job, and that Maman would remain cured by money, pretty clothes and you’.30 With Rosemary on her mind, she also wrote to Albrecht, ‘You must understand that I cannot forget the bolts and bars at Craig House.’31

A year later Mariga went on a tour of Italy and stopped in Germany en route to England, to meet her stepmother and half siblings. It was a painful visit, for it reminded Mariga that she and her mother had been left behind by Albrecht, and she failed to understand the predicament he was in following Rosemary’s breakdown. She knew she behaved badly, and wrote to her father: ‘I have awful manners – all my governesses said so, but I never realise the gaffes till it’s too late to do anything but apologise.’32 She also said she could not love her stepmother, whom she called ‘Momi’, whilst Rosemary was still alive.

Throughout the years friends spoke of the barriers Mariga put up when interacting with a person; she loathed hugs and kisses, and shaking hands. Some explained this peculiarity as shyness, others thought she tried hard to overcome it. And yet she appears to have not been self-conscious when it came to decorum. An example of such was when she came to the breakfast room wearing only a bath towel, and as she passed through, Lady Rosse said, ‘There goes a true aristocrat.’ In the 1960s, Cecil Beaton described in his diary an encounter with Mariga, calling her ‘the malocchio’ (the evil eye), ‘mad, frightening and horrible … like some mad female impersonator creating alarming ambiance wherever she wandered’.33 Beaton’s appraisal might have been a response to her ‘wandering eyeball’34 when she had a drink or two.

In 1951 Mariga was faced with an uncertain future, as Mymee had died at the age of 83 and from the £16,000 she inherited she rationed her living expenses at £1 per day. For the first time in years she went to visit Rosemary at the asylum and found her in a distressing state, unable to recognise her and claiming her daughter was 5 years old. The medical reason for Rosemary’s mental decline35 remains unknown. Presumably she had fallen victim to her restrictive environment: ‘I have nowhere (except the loan of two hooks in another lady’s wardrobe, kept constantly locked, and under my bed, the mattress) in which to keep anything.’36 She had lost her freedom – twice she had attempted to escape from Craig House37 – her husband, and her child. Mariga continued to visit Rosemary once a year until the late 1960s: sometimes Rosemary recognised her and sometimes she did not.38

During this rootless existence she invented the name Mariga from her birth-name Marie-Gabrielle, for until 1950 she had been called Gabrielle. She also left for Germany, and passing through the French countryside she spied an old house for sale and went on a tour. She asked the estate agent if it had a ghost, and he said no. ‘In that case I will certainly not buy it,’ Mariga replied. When she reached Waldenburg she was reunited with Albrecht and his family, who lived in a log cabin on the estate and grew vegetables, as the castle had been occupied by the SS in 1945 and after the war the US Air Force destroyed both the castle and the town. They were indebted to the local butcher, who continued to supply meat without payment, and Albrecht wondered how he could afford to pay the bill. But Mariga did not grumble, for the circumstances of her early childhood inspired in her a philosophy to ‘never complain, never explain’. To make ends meet and to earn pin money she exercised horses at a Waldenburg riding school, and modelled for fashion magazines in Stuttgart, where she attended classes at the Art Academy, as Albrecht had done years before. She also disguised herself as a reporter, having learned that Gary Cooper would be visiting the Mercedes Benz factory in Stuttgart (where Albrecht worked as chief press attaché), and she ‘asked him every question that came into her head’.

Whilst living in Germany Mariga had fallen in love with her distant cousin, Prince Moritz von Hessen. Though, as fate would have it, the romance ended badly. Prince Moritz’s mother, Princess Mafalda of Savoy, the daughter of King Emmanuel III of Italy, was the wife of Prince Phillip of Hesse, a member of the Nazi Party. Despite Prince Phillip acting as an intermediary between Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, Hitler and Joseph Goebbels wrongly accused Princess Mafalda of working against the German war effort. Hitler called her the ‘blackest carrion in the Italian royal house’, and Goebbels echoed the sentiment when he, too, referred to her as ‘the worst bitch in the entire Italian royal house’. As a consequence, Princess Mafalda was imprisoned at Buchenwald concentration camp, where the filthy conditions caused her arm to become infected. As a result the guards ordered it to be amputated, and she bled to death. The Nazis’ treatment of Prince Moritz’s mother, combined with Mariga’s father’s previous membership to the Nazi Party, conspired against the couple’s happiness and they were forbidden to marry. Heartbroken, Mariga said she would marry the first man who asked her.

Returning to England Mariga was persuaded by her cousin, Prince Rupert Löwenstein, to move to Oxford. She boarded at the home of Mr and Mrs Ruddock: he was the head porter of Magdalene College, and enrolled at an extramural school, ‘to learn something or other’.39 It was in the Ruddock household that she met Rupert’s friend, Desmond Guinness, and fulfilled her declaration of marrying the first man who asked her. A scion of the brewing family and the second son of Lord Moyne and Lady Mosley (née Diana Mitford), Desmond was considered ‘the last of the individualists’;40 he wore leopard-skin trousers, though only on ‘very informal occasions’, and his rooms at Christ Church were decorated with Blackamoor statues and Gobelin tapestries. Together and apart, Mariga and Desmond each possessed star quality, and they made a striking couple: his bright blue eyes, referred to as ‘Mitford eyes’, the genetic trait of his mother’s family, and her ‘devastating smile’. Perhaps in one another they recognised the strain their respective parents had placed on them, for although they did not share their political views many did not forget and could not forgive those who had ties to Nazi Germany. Desmond’s mother, Lady Mosley, was the wife of Sir Oswald Mosley (for whom she had left Desmond’s father, Bryan Guinness) and had befriended Hitler in the mid-1930s, for which she had been imprisoned at Holloway and then placed under house arrest until the end of the war. There was also the stigma surrounding mental illness, particularly for the relatives who were often silenced by shame and secrecy. It was believed that madness, as it was then called, ran in the family. Mariga thought it to be true, and at a social gathering, she announced, ‘I am related to the Wittelsbachs and a little bit mad.’

Mariga and Desmond were married on 3 July 1954, under Anglican Rites in Christ Church Cathedral, despite her being a Catholic. Amongst the aristocrats and European princelings was a stranger named Paddy O’Reilly, an elderly dustman from Dublin, who had received an invitation by mistake. Becoming something of a celebrity, the Irish press and television cameras documented O’Reilly’s journey from Dublin to Oxford for the wedding. Convention never held much esteem for Mariga, and she walked down the aisle wearing one shoe, as she had misplaced the other. Some said that a curious journalist had stolen it. A few days after the marriage had taken place, Mariga’s aunt, Erica, revealed the facts of Rosemary’s condition to the Guinnesses, and she claimed to have asked the head doctor at the asylum if it was hereditary, as Mariga’s father-in-law had wanted to know. ‘If it had been my son,’ the head doctor said, ‘I would have moved heaven and earth not to let that marriage take place.’ Desmond took a week to decide whether to remain married to Mariga, and was advised that Rosemary’s mental illness was not hereditary.41 The newly-weds honeymooned in Norway, and settled in a cottage outside Cirencester to study agriculture at the Royal College, as they both had ambitions to own a farm.

In 1955 Mariga and Desmond moved to Ireland to farm and from 1956–57 they rented Carton House in County Kildare, the family seat of the Dukes of Leinster, surrounded by 1,100 acres of parklands. On the estate was a shell cottage, created for the 1st Duchess of Leinster. Neighbouring Carton was Castletown House, the two estates divided by Conolly Folly, both of which had fallen into disrepair and would inspire42 the couple to revive the Irish Georgian Society, its objective being to ‘fight for the preservation of what is left of Georgian architecture in Ireland’.43 In many ways Ireland offered Mariga a sense of belonging and a place to begin anew after a lonely childhood. ‘Ireland is heaven, everyone is so dotty and delicious and no one dreams of taking anything seriously; except, perhaps, the Horse Show,’ she said. She had visited, several years before, as the guest of Mark Bence-Jones, and stepped off the aeroplane wearing a tulle ballgown, having come from a party in London. Enchanted by the countryside, ancient ruins, and Georgian architecture hearkening back to when Ireland had a royal family and a dynastic past, Mariga said, ‘I can’t think how you can ever leave Ireland.’ It was a prophetic statement, for, as it turned out, she never did. Her children were born there: Patrick in 1956, and Marina in 1957. In a letter to Derek Hill, Mariga wrote of ‘a gloomy midwife person [sitting] about crossly, saying how unlike Cliveden [her last job] it all is’.44

Having lived at Carton House for three years, Mariga and Desmond bought Leixlip Castle, a twelfth-century castle, built by Adam Fitz Hereford, an Anglo-Norman follower of Strongbow. Then in a dilapidated state, its restoration was driven by Mariga’s sense of practicality and artistic eye, inspiring within her a lifelong interest in Irish art and furniture, then considered redundant in a republic that no longer bowed to an Ascendancy. In 1958, the year they bought Leixlip, the Irish Georgian Society was officially founded by Mariga and Desmond – a revival in every sense, with a coterie of youthful members, though Desmond dismissed any notion they were part of the jeunesse dorée. ‘We were interested in architecture, engravers and silversmiths,’45 he said. It brought a new awareness to young people and convinced those who viewed the Georgian mansions and landmarks as a sign of English repression of their importance as a piece of history and a symbol of Irish craftsmanship.

Mariga moved into Leixlip, whilst Desmond was on a Guinness brewery course in London. She brought 400 books, a cat, and a rifle. After the grandeur of Carton, many wondered if they could be happy, perhaps a feeling inspired by the condition of the castle prior to its renovation. The baths were outside, being used as water troughs, and the electrical wiring was so unsafe the electricity board refused to reconnect the power. In those early days guests had to sleep on mattresses on the floor and the front door was never locked but was secured by propping a stick against the top step. ‘Do hope mattresses are dry,’46 Mariga wrote to Derek Hill, ahead of his visit to Leixlip. In another letter, she added, ‘And again apologise for revolting rabbit lunch and dreggs of vinegary wine, oh dear.’47

Later when Leixlip was renovated and brought to life with antique furniture and art, interior decorators came to respect Mariga’s design aesthetic. ‘Amateurs, dealers and decorators all learned from Mariga much more than they would care to admit,’48 said John Cornforth, the architectural editor of Country Life. Her eye for colour, particularly her bringing the soft greens of the Irish countryside into a large room by painting it in a bold hue, set her apart from the interior decorators who worked with the utilitarian lines of mid-century furniture. According to Cornforth, the drawing-room was tomato red, the dining room yellow, the entrance hall dark green. ‘One must never forget that every room has a soul,’ Mariga said. Modern touches in an historic house were frowned upon, and friends recalled Mariga spying a comfortable, tightly sprung sofa, and announcing, ‘Look at that!’ In a way, her respect for the past dictated how she lived her life, and in her later years, when she periodically lived away from Leixlip, the size of her Egyptian bed, with its high green canopy and carved sphinxes, dictated her lodgings. Adhering to authenticity, Mariga used wildflowers to decorate a room, as it was historically accurate and keeping within Leixlip’s medieval origins; there would be foxgloves and bunches of laurel, arranged with paper flowers.49 She also collected books and shells, and across her untidy desk she placed a military sword on top of the papers.50

Life had become an art form and an extension of her surroundings, and it was conveyed in how she looked and dressed. Now with a platform as chatelaine of Leixlip and a leader of their set, she began to dress in what became her signature style: black tights, patent shoes with buckles on the front, her long hair piled on top of her head, and her collection of eighteenth-century costumes were often worn for dramatic effect. In her later years, she appeared as a Tolstoy heroine: long skirts, ruffled blouses, and cardigans with holes in the elbows. On one occasion she wore a dress made of tinfoil, and on another she fashioned a bracelet from a lavatory chain. ‘She never lost her sense of theatre,’ said Lord Gowrie.51

The late 1950s and mid-1960s were to become the golden age of Mariga’s life as a hostess, and she and Desmond entertained aristocrats, foreign royals, celebrities, local tradesmen,52 and various colourful individuals they had befriended along the way. The parties thrown in the winter of 1958 set the tone, and continued until four o’clock in the morning. When Desmond became tired he wound up an antique Gothic organ which played ‘God Save the King’, signalling it was time to go home. In the early 1960s Princess Margaret and Lord Snowdon (who, when he was simply Antony Armstrong-Jones, had photographed Mariga in Venice) came to Ireland and were put up by Mariga and Desmond. Naturally, given the status of southern Ireland as a republic and the embittered feelings toward British royals, not everyone curtsied. Mariga herself failed to do so, explaining that she was the senior princess (with her lineage she was), but a friend told her that she was wrong: dispossessed royalty always curtsy. Princess Margaret’s lady-in-waiting appeared flustered and remarked that it was a difficult scenario, for the princess did not know who would curtsy and who would not. Although some might have viewed it as breaching protocol, Mariga did not care about social hierarchies and believed life could be bearable if people were polite to one another.53

As both hostess and guest, Mariga was described as possessing a superficial vagueness. However eccentricity often prevailed, evident when she was driving along a country road on her way to a party, and crashed into the side of an unmarked police car. She wound down her window and asked the policemen, ‘Are you the Pirates of Penzance?’54 As it turned out, they were – they had sung in the Gilbert and Sullivan production at Leixlip the year before. The policemen overlooked Mariga’s error and drove her to the party. Arriving late, she knocked on the door and was shown into the dining room, followed by the policemen. In her arms she carried what looked like wisps of hay, but they were, in her words, ‘herbs for the cook’. This sentiment was a reminder of her practical side. She was a good cook and used herbs from the school of Elizabeth David and Le Cordon Bleu. It was haphazard, done by eye and nose, often delicious, but sometimes guests were better off with the cheese and biscuits. Dinners were candlelit, so often guests could not see what they were eating.55

The only thing she disliked were guests smoking upstairs at Leixlip, for it was ‘very wooden, and the fire engines vague … I really mind this’.56 She was rarely offended, though took exception when a guest, who claimed to be a socialist, accused her of being high-handed with the locals. Responding to the individual she asked what he was doing in her ‘capitalist house’, and why, as a socialist, he did not help the butler with the washing up. ‘Socialists are always prepared to watch as you slave away,’ Mariga said. ‘The only people who ever offer to help are the English generals.’ She then declared herself ‘a REAL socialist … I believe that nobody has the same mind, so we must pool what everyone is good at’.57

This was particularly true of the Irish Georgian Society, a movement that was firmly rooted in Mariga and Desmond’s identities. Their first restoration project was the Conolly Folly, an eighteenth-century monument commissioned by Katherine Conolly, wife of William Conolly, the richest man in Ireland, to provide employment for farmers during the famine of 1740–41. The building itself, with its eight arches and stone etchings of pineapples and eagles, had no significant merit, as it was neither a religious monument nor was it habitable, except for its philanthropic origins. Weather-beaten and with its coping stones dislodged by weeds and the elements, its obelisk pillar, standing 140ft-tall, had been left to fall into rack and ruin. With the government taking little interest in once privately-owned, dilapidated buildings, the Irish Georgian Society acquired the folly in 1960 and with the help of public donations they bore the responsibility of restoring it. Successful in their quest, it became the symbol of the Society.

Another restoration project which Mariga and Desmond were passionate about was Castletown House, a Palladian country house built in 1722 for William Conolly by the Italian architect, Alessandro Galilei. In 1965 Castletown and its contents were sold to Major Wilson, a property developer who intended to build 200 houses on the 100-acre estate, though as the big house remained vacant it was targeted by vandals who stripped lead from its roof and smashed the windows.

A campaign was headed by Mariga and Desmond, and in 1967 he bought the house and its land for £93,000, for which it was said that they ‘had to remortgage [their] grandchildren’s fortune’58. Critics also dismissed their fund-raising efforts and referred to the Irish Georgian Society as ‘a consortium of belted earls’.59 Mariga, however, was quick to challenge such opinions, and emphasised that they had approximately 5,000 members, with 2,000 subscribing from America. She also led members of the Irish Georgian Society and student volunteers in the restoration of the house – they polished brass balustrades, steamed original wallpaper, painted ceilings, and cleared brambles from the overgrown grounds. Original furniture was bought at auction houses, with Mariga and Desmond rarely missing a good sale both at home and abroad, and money was donated by rich benefactors. After its restoration, Castletown House became the headquarters of the Society, and Mariga gave Jacqueline Kennedy a guided tour when the former First Lady of the United States visited Ireland in 1967.

During the first decade of the Irish Georgian Society, Mariga and Desmond were an unstoppable force, each exploiting their strengths for the good of their preservation work. Mariga was credited with charming the public, or as friends recalled, she ‘chatted up’ parliamentary ministers, foreign visitors, rich sponsors, and those who were curious or, rather, suspicious of her. Desmond was tasked with writing books on the topics of Irish architecture, art and furniture, and with giving lectures in America, where his visits often lasted for months at a time. On a lecturing tour of St Louis, Missouri, Desmond was accompanied by Eoin ‘Pope’ Mahoney, a genealogist, though he was mistaken for a gynaecologist.61 At another lecture, the topic being that of bodysnatching, Mariga was amused when members of the Society were inspired to bequeath their bodies to hospitals. ‘Yet another branch of the society’s activities,’62 she wrote to Derek Hill.

There were tours led by Mariga to India and Russia, and trips over the Irish border for Georgian-themed cricket matches played against the Northern Ireland National Trust. Mariga wrote of a cricket match, hosted at Castle Ward, the family seat of Lord and Lady Bangor, ‘The Northerners all wildly drunk, to show that they could, only to find most of our team were juvenile teetotallers.’63 She thought Castle Ward was ‘rather dry rotted’ but her mischievous sense of humour was piqued by Charles Stewart Parnell’s bed, loaned from a museum and exhibited for tourists. ‘Of course we would never have had him in the house,’64 said Lady Bangor.

For years to come Mariga and Desmond, armed with the Irish Georgian Society, fought those who planned to demolish Irish architecture. Amongst the historical properties they saved were Roundwood, Co. Laois; Damer House, Co. Tipperary; Doneraile Court, Co. Cork; and Tailors’ Hall and St Catherine’s Church, Dublin. Many campaigns were successful, some were not, but they seldom gave up without a fight. One such project was Mountjoy Square, which, owing to its symmetry (each side measured 140m in length), was the only true Georgian square in Dublin. Aside from its architectural importance, it was also of literary and political significance: James Joyce, Sean O’Casey and W.B. Yeats had resided there, and much of the 1916 Easter Rising was plotted at various addresses on the square. From 1966 until 1975 Mariga and Desmond led a campaign to halt Matt Gallagher, owner of Leinster Estates, from demolishing the south side of the square, particularly three original houses that were built in 1792. It was a promising beginning when a legal battle ruled in favour of the Irish Georgian Society and ordered Gallagher to provide support for the walls of number 50, to prevent further damage. Knowing that only a serious offer could ‘sway the stony heart’65 of Kevin Boland, Minister for Local Government, Mariga bought number 50 for £550 and moved in, despite it being surrounded by two Georgian properties which had been demolished to ground level. It was a reminder of their perilous structure: one house collapsed on two girls, resulting in their deaths, and the other killed an elderly woman. Arguing that restoration was the solution to such problems, Mariga borrowed £68,000 from ‘a rather nervous bank’66 to buy twenty houses from Gallagher, in an attempt not only to save them from demolition but to establish a charitable trust called Mountjoy Estates. However the plan failed and so she encouraged friends to buy houses, as she thought it the only tactic to fend off Gallagher, who wanted to replace them with modern office blocks, thus spoiling the architectural landscape of north Dublin.

During that period a Mrs O’Donnell bequeathed her house to the Irish Georgian Society, and Mariga went to meet her body at Shannon airport. ‘So confusing,’ she wrote, ‘as all the Roses of Tralee seemed to be arriving at the same time.’67 Despite her efforts the Irish Georgian Society did not acquire Mountjoy Square, though Gallagher failed to build his proposed office blocks, and in recent years the houses were rebuilt in an imitation Georgian style.

The late 1960s were a transitional period for Mariga, marked by the death of her father in 1969. His last words to her were: ‘Tu es … enfin tu as.’* Reflecting on her loss, she said, ‘I never expected my father to die.’68 Her marriage to Desmond had come to an end, though Mariga believed he would come back to her in old age and that she would always have Leixlip. Over the years he had had several girlfriends and she was pursued by the writer John Hedworth Jolliffe, ‘but perhaps she had wound him up more than was wise. Flirting can be taken up wrong’.69 There was a serious relationship with Hugh O’Neill (later the 3rd Baron Rathcavan), whom Mariga referred to as ‘Mr O’Neill’, and who rented a small house close to Leixlip whilst working for the Irish Times. They went to London in 1970 and bought two Georgian houses on Elder Street, in the East End, and knocked them into one. In 1973 Hugh hit a wild boar whilst driving at night in a Belgian forest, and broke every bone in his body. Mariga flew to Belgium and brought him to the King Edward VII Hospital in London, where she livened up his hospital room with delicacies and champagne, with a telephone for business deals and a constant stream of friends.70 Their arrangement was regarded as bohemian, as she was still married to Desmond, and Hugh’s grandfather mirrored society’s views at the time and disapproved of him living in sin. The affair lasted for several years before coming to an end, perhaps because Hugh wanted to marry Mariga and have children of his own, and she did not think divorce was a priority.

Mariga would live in London on and off for years, in between her travels and settling in various places. Later there was a flat on Bolton Street, given to her by her father-in-law, when the affair with Hugh O’Neill was over and she had left Elder Street. It marked another restless period in her life, reflected in her ‘knock-about’ clothing and what she called, ‘Les apparence extérieures de la pauvreté’** – a protective measure against being mugged. There were moments of eccentricity, however, when she gave dinner parties in her flat, often for fifteen or twenty people. On one occasion everyone got drunk and many were sitting on floor cushions, when a burglar crawled through the kitchen window. He passed the bathroom and saw her neighbour, Thea Porter, asleep in the bath, and was then confronted by a room full of people on the floor and Mariga standing with a carving knife. The burglar, thinking the woman in the bath had been murdered, fled the scene.71