Sheila

by Robert Wainwright

  The prince commented on it in a letter to Freda a few days later: “I see that photo of Sheila in last week’s Sketch . . . she does look so good doesn’t she & has such a babyish face though a very pretty one.”

  As it turned out, babyish was an appropriate term, at least in terms of her mindset. Sheila wrote to her friend Anne Douglas in early October as she waited impatiently for the birth of her second child, this time with a sense of delight helped by the expected end to the war: “By the time you get this letter I hope my new baby will have arrived safely. I go to London on the 16th, I think, as I expect it any time after that. Tony gets sweeter every day and trots about everywhere now. He will be 17 months this month, so there won’t be much time wasted between them! I feel I am rather like the proverbial rabbit!!!!”

  On October 30, 1918, she gave birth to another boy, Peter George Alexander St Clair-Erskine. The Earl of Rosslyn came to visit—“to inspect his grandchild”—and promptly paid a £50 bet he’d had with Sheila that she wouldn’t bear another son: “How clever of you m’dear,” he quipped. Despite his failings, Sheila had a fondness for Harry.

  A fortnight later the war was over. That night Sheila lay in bed at the Ritz with her infant son, listening to the sounds of euphoria. It reminded her of the cheers the night the war had been declared four years before. It seemed so long ago: “Thank God it was all over. Tony and Peter were safe; Loughie and my brothers had survived. Of all the people I loved, only Lionel was dead. I often thought of him. Anyhow, I decided there can never be another war. This war must end all wars—no one could ever be so stupid again.”

  As the armistice guns boomed across the city there was a scream. Her maid had fainted, mistaking the celebration for an air raid.

  “Later Loughie fought his way into the Ritz. He told me the generals were almost hugged to death. Everyone seemed crazy. He walked around the streets most of the night, jammed in the crowd. How exciting and thrilling—strangers embraced one another, people were cheering and singing and dancing. London had gone mad. What a happy madness!”

  6

  THE 4 DO’S

  Britain emerged from the winter shroud of 1918 to tally the loss of life and wrestle with post-war survival. The wild celebrations of Armistice Day, when thousands ignored the damp drizzle to sing and cheer the Empire, and lit bonfires beneath Nelson’s Column in Trafalgar Square “as if to rob the night of some of its darkness”, as noted by The Times, had given way to a realisation that the economy was devastated and employment scarce. The country may have won the war but it was on its knees financially and the New Year ushered in widespread civil unrest as the government struggled to cope with an orderly demobbing of its shattered troops.

  It would be five months later, as the winter turned slowly to spring, that a glimpse emerged of a future free of the bloodshed and daily casualty lists. No section of society had escaped unscathed from the conflict. For both rich and poor there would be fewer husbands for a generation; war had rendered the nation’s gender balance lopsided. Even so, there was a belief that Britain should return quickly to the social traditions that had been suspended since the war began, in particular the Court Season. There were 12,000 young women waiting “to make their bow to the King and Queen”, as an editorial in The Times described the occasion.

  But things would never be quite the same. The pre-war grandeur of London social life with its Edwardian stuffiness was giving way to lights and glimmer and fizz in this celebration of a rebirth. And accepted behaviour followed the trend. Life, it seemed, was too short to play by rules created in another century. The pre-war struggles of the suffragettes began to bear fruit, with women over the age of thirty being able to vote for the first time in the 1918 general election.

  The royal family, having changed its name and accepted commoners as prospective wives for their sons, now signalled that its rules of social engagement had softened. Actors and actresses could now be presented to the court, provided they were “ladies and gentlemen of irreproachable character”, as the change was interpreted by The Times. The rest of society followed the royal lead. It wasn’t an era of loose morals, but a realignment of life and expectations—for commoner, aristocrat and royal alike, as Sheila Loughborough highlighted in her memoir: “The years 1919 and 1920 were gay. We danced and enjoyed ourselves. We didn’t think seriously about world affairs. We did not feel guilty about not being serious. We had already been serious all the war years, and now we had won the war to end all wars.”

  The Prince of Wales was determined, when not constrained by royal duties, to make hay. His relationship with Freda Dudley Ward, already consummated, had now become all-consuming; they found ways of being together almost every day or, if they could not manage that, they would scrawl gushing, embarrassing love notes to each other. At least Edward did. His language suggested immaturity and selfishness, but his ardent desire for independence and to exert his right of choice in his conflict with his domineering father, King George V, also suggested an iron will and strength of character that would emerge publicly in another two decades when he chose love for American divorcee Wallis Simpson over the crown.

  And Bertie—quiet, hesitant and inflicted with a crippling stammer—was shadowing his older brother, including losing his virginity to a Parisian prostitute when the war had neared its end the previous October. His older brother revealed this in a letter to Freda: “He didn’t sleep at the Embassy as, in his own words, ‘the deed was done’, though he gave no details & perhaps just as well!! But you see darling, c’etait le premier fois car il etait vierge, which is why it amuses & interests me so much!! I long to see him & hear all about it.”

  It was not surprising then that Bertie and Sheila morphed into a private social unit with Edward and Freda as if brought together by sheer loyalty to the others. There were similarities with Sheila’s experience as a teenager when, because of a relationship between her brother Roy and best friend Mollee, she was drawn into a support role with Roy’s friend Lionel.

  But that’s where the similarities ended. She was now a married woman, albeit in a problematic union. She also had two young children although, like in most privileged London households, children were tended day-to-day by nannies until they were aged eight, when they were then sent off to boarding school. Besides, the two men who wanted her attention were royal princes. It was hard to resist, particularly with Freda encouraging her participation:

  “Freda had become my greatest friend,” Sheila would write. “She and I went everywhere together. The Prince of Wales admired her, and he and his brother Prince Bertie were often with us. We danced with them a great deal at all the balls, which annoyed some of the dowagers. However, we didn’t care. We knew that no party was complete without us—and them!”

  They called themselves the “4 Do’s”, apparently a nickname dreamed up by Edward which gently mocked his brother’s stutter, and perhaps as a rebellion against being told what they couldn’t do—a secret club within their very public existence, marked with a teddy bear on the dashboard of Bertie’s car given to him by Sheila. They were dangerous liaisons but that made it all the more exciting—two young princes challenging social expectation and exploring their independence with two unhappily married women.

  The 4 Do’s attended the theatre and music halls; they arranged dinners with select friends who knew of, or suspected, the liaisons, and mingled carefully in public at dances and parties in the grand homes and ballrooms of West London.

  Sheila was no longer the wide-eyed debutante, now very much at home in London society. Reflecting on the period three decades later, Sheila quoted from the lines of a 1927 song by the playwright Noël Coward, a close friend, to describe her mindset: “Dance, dance, dance little lady, youth is fleeting.”

  “There were balls every night in London and parties every weekend in the large country houses, few of which exist today,” Sheila would write. “Balls for the King of Spain at Eresby House where the Ancasters lived, at Holland House and Lancaster House
, Crewe House, Derby House, houses in Carlton House Terrace where Lord and Lady Curzon lived and where the Duke and Duchess of Marlborough and Lady Cunard lived. Lord Farquhar gave wonderful parties at his house in Grosvenor Square. So did Mrs Ronnie Greville. We went to them all, sometimes two or three in one evening.”

  There were also weekend trips, either with Edward at his residence in Sandwich or as guests of people like politician and businessman Sir Philip Sassoon on one of his two lavish estates on the outskirts of London, Trent Park and Lympne near Folkestone, where they once watched him walk away after crashing his own plane, extricating himself from the debris to declare, nonchalantly, “Look, I’ve smashed it up into tiny pieces, like confetti.”

  “We often stayed with Philip . . . He was a wonderful host and raconteur and he entertained on a lavish scale . . . The princes sometimes stayed with him.” Edward and Bertie even stole time at Freda and Sheila’s homes, sometimes under the noses of their husbands who were either unaware of or ignored their wives’ indiscretions. The frenetic pace of their trysts can be sensed in some of the short notes Edward shot off to Freda as the spring of 1919 turned into summer:

  May 12: We lunched and dined with Rosemary and Eric at Fleet yesterday & brought Loughie back in my car afterwards . . . I’ve been slumming all afternoon & have just had a game of squash with Do No.2 who is writing to Sheila, which won’t surprise you . . .

  May 14: Do No.2 left for Winchester about 3.00 in my car as he crashed his this morning; he’s having marvellous weather for it & I don’t expect to see him tonight!!

  May 23: What big babies we 2 Do’s are & I think the other 2 Do’s are even bigger babies than we are!! What marvellous fun we 4 Do’s have, don’t we angel & fuck the rest of the world, though guess TOI et MOI are the ‘bear leaders’ (perhaps too much so sometimes!!) & anyway we look on life more seriously & are so different to the other 2 Do’s!!

  May 31: Bertie has gone to see Sheila. I hope it’s all right, though I expect you know they fixed it up on the telephone this morning.

  Sheila’s relationship with the gentle Bertie had clearly developed beyond mere friendship. There was a mutual attraction and, from Sheila’s perspective, a welcome distraction as her marriage continued to disintegrate. In the last days of May, she had waved goodbye to her mother Margaret who had finally returned to Sydney after five years abroad. Sheila was now alone with two children under the age of two, her family a six-week ship journey away on the other side of the world.

  Even though they still had access to the house at Winchester, Loughie and Sheila had moved most of their belongings back to London where they had sold Stanhope Place and bought the lease of a much larger house in Hyde Park Terrace, which looked over the park. But behind the impressive front door there was only sadness.

  Loughie was disappearing into the clubs of Soho more frequently, staying with friends or running up unpaid accounts in hotels. He and Sheila argued when he was home: “He still drank too much and gambled high,” she would recall. “It was like living on the edge of a volcano. I feared his debts were enormous. Then finally the crash came. He sat by my bed all one night waving a loaded revolver, pointing it first at me and then at himself. He said it would be much simpler if we were both dead, as he owed so much money. Luckily, I managed to remain calm and eventually persuaded him to give me the revolver, which I carefully unloaded and locked away in a drawer.”

  This was an extraordinary diary entry, a moment which says as much about Sheila as a woman as it does about the times she lived in. How could a young woman, mother of two small children, respond with such calm to a man—any man, let alone her husband—waving a gun in her face and threatening to kill her? Surely, she would have confided her despair, shared her terror with someone?

  But no, Sheila was imbued not just with the familial loyalty that came with her Australian origins but had adopted the fierce codes of discretion required of marriage into the British aristocracy. As a mother and wife, she had become de-sensitised, inured to the danger inherent in her husband’s miscreant ways. Sheila, like so many women who came before and after her, was blinded by the hope that love and family would curb the violence.

  In the first days of June, Sheila penned a letter to her father-in-law, the Earl of Rosslyn, who had been helping her search for a bigger house in London where she could move with her two children—Tony, who had just turned two, and Peter, who was seven months and beginning to crawl. They had found a four-bedroom townhouse just north of Hyde Park, but it was her marriage which was the main concern: “Loughie and I have had another awful scene. I am so worried and unhappy. I want your advice. I hear you are coming back next week so I must see you. I can’t explain in a letter as it is so long, but it is more serious than it has ever been. Everything seems so hopeless.”

  But even in her anger and despair, Sheila recognised her husband’s human struggle. “Darling Harry”, as she referred to the earl, had been kind to her since she had arrived back in London in 1916, but the truth was that he had been a poor parental role model, virtually abandoning his children when his marriage to their mother had ended in 1896. It was little wonder that his son, having grown up watching his father’s infamous gambling exploits from afar, had fallen into the same hole.

  Loughie had struggled with self-esteem since being forced to resign his military commission the previous December. A letter to the War Office secretary concluded: “Lord Loughborough has been unfit for general service for over 18 months and it is regretted that there is no alternative but to gazette him as relinquishing his commission on account of ill-health. He will be granted the rank of Captain but such a grant does not confer the right to wear the uniform, except on ceremonial occasions of a military nature.”

  The reality of civilian life had struck him hard. The ruling class were no longer able to rely on income from their vast estates, particularly in the aftermath of war. If anything, their land assets were becoming liabilities, as the cost of maintenance outstripped income from the rent of agricultural land. Instead, the new generation of young lords were being forced to sell up and move into the workforce. Some relished the challenge but others, like the playboy Loughborough, found it impossible.

  He was given a desk job in the Pensions Department, among the maze of offices along Whitehall, but it was boring work and merely presented an opportunity for him to escape to the nearest club, where he would spend afternoons, evenings and even nights gambling and carousing. The situation had now become desperate.

  The earl responded to Sheila’s distress quickly, demanding that his son explain himself. A trustees’ meeting was arranged for June 5, to assess the financial damage of his exploits and what might be done to save his marriage. On June 4, the day before the meeting, Loughie wrote back to his father in a short but grovelling letter written from a friend’s house in London where he was staying:

  Dear father,

  No words of mine can express what I feel about your letter. I wouldn’t have minded blame and being given hell for it, instead of which you write a kind letter which has made me feel a worm. Whether anything can be done for me or not tomorrow I swear I will be a credit to you in the future. I’m miserable and my only happiness is that Sheila is sticking to me through it all which is more than I deserve. Please forgive me if you can and I hope in time to make you forget my past life. I have been a disgrace to you and everybody.

  Your devoted son,

  Loughborough

  PS: I will be at the trustees meeting at 12 o’clock. I may not be able to face lunch but if so I will be back immediately. I will tell the whole truth this time and keep straight, not try to, in the future.

  The meeting was short and sharp. The earl, as trustee and using money in a fund set up by his first wife—Loughie’s mother, Violet—from her own family’s fortune, would consider bailing him out of the financial mess, but only after he came clean about how much was owed. The trustees would then limit his finances to a £1-per-day stipend; this, on top of the £2000 a
year income Sheila received from her family, was expected to allow the couple to live comfortably. In return, Loughie had to agree to give up gambling. With that in mind, he and his wife should consider leaving England and heading overseas for a period, to escape the clutches of the gaming houses and try to rekindle the marriage.

  On June 7 Bertie telephoned Sheila, his brother recording the call in a letter to Freda written later the same day:

  Bertie rang Sheilie up this morning & fixed up for us both to go on to “Rankhills” tomorrow after we have played golf. I suppose I shall have to try & amuse Loughie so that they can have a talk though I’ll do anything for their sakes, poor darlings . . . But enough about Loughie as I’m very fed up with him, as you are darling; he’s cramped our style somewhat lately, hasn’t he, curse him, & I hate him though I’m so fond of poor little Sheilie.

  Edward and Bertie arrived late in the afternoon and had tea on the veranda, after which Edward insisted on visiting the local golf course with Loughie to play a few more holes. It was a ruse “to give Sheilie a chance of being alone with Bertie”. A reluctant Loughie could not refuse the heir to the throne and, with Sheila staying behind with the younger prince, the two set off only to find that the course was closed. Rather than head back to the house, Edward insisted on going for a walk around the course, later congratulating himself as “a little Master Clever”.

  He repeated the ruse after dinner, taking Loughie out of the room to give his brother more time with Sheila. Their conversation centred on the plan concocted by the earl to keep his son out of the clubs and gambling dens of the city. Edward listened quietly as Loughie detailed the plan for a world tour and withheld his opinion until later that night. After returning to London, he penned a note to Freda lamenting the decision and particularly what it would mean for the relationship between his brother and Sheila: