What a tragic life poor little Sheilie’s is & I’m afraid that a trip round the world isn’t going to make it any better; Loughie’s trustees must be mad giving him £300 a year & to say that he isn’t to work; it’s just asking for trouble!! How poor little Sheilie is dreading it, it’s so pathetic, though I think Loughie realises all right; it’s all so sordid though I think today has been good propaganda & I’m sure Loughie doesn’t suspect Bertie at all! He was really quite nice today & I couldn’t help feeling sorry for him, though I hate him!!
The princes returned to Lankhills the following Sunday, a guest book kept by Sheila recording their names, signed simply “Edward” and “Albert”, on June 15. The trip had been arranged hastily, spurred probably by Loughie’s absence and the fact that Freda was staying with Sheila for the weekend. The coast was clear!
Photographs of the visit would show a rare moment of relaxation for the royal brothers. In one, they’re perched on top of a fence in a field behind the house, the girls on either side. Freda and Edward are happy and smiling brazenly at the camera, but Sheila and Bertie seem less certain about the attention. In another, they have swapped places on the fence. This time it is Edward and Freda who look pensive and Bertie is beaming, a pipe in one hand and his other arm around Sheila who smiles at the gesture of affection.
There were more photographs taken that day. In one of them, Sheila is standing against a wall of the house, between the brothers. Edward, hands thrust into his trousers, presents a figure of the utmost confidence while Bertie, hands clasped behind him, smiles shyly. Sheila, as tall as the two men, is holding a lit cigarette and stares unflinchingly ahead.
While the princes were with his wife in Winchester, Loughie was in London making promises he would have difficulty understanding, let alone keeping. On Saturday, June 14, he again wrote to his father, this time detailing the extent of his losses and reiterating his promises to reform. His wife had consented to stand by him but it was clear the marriage was all but over, held together for appearances and pity and the sake of their young sons.
Dear father,
This is a difficult letter to write. I feel you won’t understand what a bloody fool I have been and after the way I have treated you I cannot expect your sympathy. Apart from the bills . . . I owe £6,800 to moneylenders and £2,000 of racing and gambling debts. I have done this in the last six weeks. Sheila and I have quarrelled but she has consented to come back to me not as a wife but because I implored her to come back to give me one more chance to make her respect me and after I have proved this she will try to love me again. I have agreed to the following conditions:
1. I shall never touch a drink.
2. Never play any cards.
3. Never bet on a horse.
I have promised these three things and if I fail in any of them I am to allow her to divorce me. My promises as you well know have always been broken. I don’t expect you to believe them this time till I have proved myself but I can truthfully say that I have at least realised what a mess I have made of my life and how badly I have behaved to you and everybody.
I want this one chance to make good. I don’t know whether you can or even if you are prepared to save me going bankrupt but I will come and talk to you about it on Wednesday with Sheila. I want to avoid it if it’s possible and start afresh and to bring no disgrace on Sheila by being a bankrupt. It is better to make a clean breast of everything to you. I am truly sorry and I mean it. I have learnt my lesson this time for good and all, and the future above will prove it. If you can please forgive my uncalled for attitude to you. I don’t say this because I’m in trouble and want your help but I know how disgracefully I have behaved toward you.
Loughborough
But even as he was promising to turn over a new leaf, Loughie was telling close friends that he couldn’t simply walk away from his share in a betting pool, as he wrote to “Jack” on the same day:
Just got your note. I’ve had no time to phone you. Am going to try and get round to see you about 6.45 but I’m full up with appointments. If not tonight before 11 tomorrow morning as I want to see you and hear all the news. I’ve got to forego the Derby—Sheila having made me make a vow not to race or touch a card again which I have done. It seems the only solution. I owe moneylenders £7000. I wish I’d told you before but I didn’t so now I’m going to Harry tomorrow and see if he will help. Of course my share in the box still stands and I’ll play it as agreed. Has Jolly got my hat I wonder. Love to Nell. Just off to a lawyer and will try and look in after.
Yours,
Loughborough
Sheila was writing too. As soon as the princes had returned to London her attention once again switched to her marriage, and she wanted to thank her father-in-law for his understanding: “Loughie is so touched by your letter to him. I know he realises now what a fool and rotter he has been and really means to make good not only to try. We will be there tomorrow about 12 and I do, do hope so much something can be done. All love, Sheila”
On August 12, a small item appeared in the “Court Circular” column in The Times. It read: “Lord and Lady Loughborough have gone abroad for an indefinite period.” The trip would last less than two months and achieve nothing but a delay to the inevitable. By October 1919 they were back in London and unhappy.
7
A DUKEDOM FOR A SHEILA
Lady Maud Cunard was a woman with whom to be reckoned; a legendary, biting matriarch of society who decided later in life that she loathed Alfred Lord Tennyson’s poem “Come into the Garden, Maud” and so changed her name to Emerald, simply because she liked them. She was American, married the elderly grandson of the businessman who had founded the Cunard shipping line, bore a daughter before leaving him on his country estate, and set up home alone in London where she took a series of lovers and became a patron of the arts.
Dinner parties at her sumptuous house in Grosvenor Place were as elaborate as her character, as the writer and hostess Elsa Maxwell, another American, once wrote:
Such was the way of the woman who, shortly before the turn of the century, brought London society to its collective knee and kept it there for close to fifty years. Lady Cunard loved to gather her lions together, lash them with the whip of her tongue, and watch them fight to the blood. By pitting them one against another she sought to make her guests more interesting to herself, to each other, and, not at all incidentally, to exploit her own acid wit.
As Sheila wrestled with her future and wondered at her improbable relationship with the second in line to the British throne, Lady Cunard invited her to lunch. It was an intimate affair, held at Kenwood, a great house on Hampstead Heath owned by the Guinness family, its walls lined with works of the masters, among them Rembrandt, Vermeer, Turner, Reynolds, Gainsborough and Constable.
“I distinctly remember the drive to Kenwood,” Sheila would write of the day. “Emerald had called for me in her car and we arrived to find a party of eight. I sat opposite Serge Obolensky. He only had to look at a woman for her to fall in love with him. He looked at me. My heart stood still. He was the most attractive man I had ever seen, and he had just escaped from Russia with a price on his head.”
A week or so later, the handsome Russian still in her head, Sheila and Loughie tried to rekindle their marriage by going to Scotland for a month to stay with Eileen and Geordie Sutherland at Dunrobin, “their dream castle by the sea”, where the guests included Winston and Clementine Churchill. “We played golf and stalked and shot and fished and invented some terrible practical jokes,” she wrote, before adding sadly that even in this tranquil environment, the drinking and the quarrels continued: “My love for Loughie was dying painfully, if not already dead.”
As they returned to London, Sheila’s thoughts again turned to Serge Obolensky. Bertie had been sent by his father to study history, economics and civics at Trinity College, Cambridge, and was in London infrequently. The relationship was cooling and a new man found his way into her life and her heart although he was awa
re of his royal rival: “We met again at various parties and we danced together,” she wrote. “He asked me not to dance so much with Prince Bertie. I told him it was a harmless friendship, as indeed it was. He said that when he had first arrived in England after his escape he had heard my name coupled with Prince Bertie and that we were all known as ‘The Duchess of Sutherland’s set’. This amused me.”
Sheila was falling heavily for Serge, captivated by his swashbuckling background. He had fought in the White Army during the Russian civil war, fled disguised as a student and arrived in London just as the affair between Sheila and Albert was gaining momentum. Tall, debonair and blessed with movie-star looks, he was quick to make an impression in London society, particularly as he had studied at Oxford before the war.
Serge was married, but estranged from his wife Catherine—a union he described as “one of wartime delusion” which, like Sheila and Loughie’s, would dissipate when the guns were silenced. Catherine, a niece of the Tsar, was now spending more and more time on the Continent, pursuing a singing and acting career, so Serge felt free to pursue other romantic relationships. He wanted Sheila and regarded the troubled Loughborough marriage as an imprimatur to woo her.
Besides, he would argue, London society in the immediate post-war years was much more innocent than its risqué reputation suggested. As he wrote in his autobiography: “Contrary to reports of that time and the impression that it seems to have left with succeeding generations, it was not an era of loose morality, devil-may-careness or anything of the sort. Rumours that one slept with anybody one wished to . . . could not have been further from the truth. People were just so damned happy . . . that they set about their various pursuits of happiness in as constructive a manner as was afforded them. In general, they had a whale of a time, were keenly appreciative of a good party, refused to be bored by anything and consumed quantities of good cheer.”
One of the places they frequently met was the Kensington home of his cousin, Prince Felix Youssoupoff, another exiled Russian aristocrat with a background more colourful than his own. Felix had once been heir to the biggest private fortune in Russia, with a life of opulence and excess that outstripped even the tsars. The Moika Palace in St Petersburg, where he was born in 1887, one of four palaces owned by the family in the city, had originally been a gift from Catherine the Great and the family’s main home in Moscow, one of three there, had been built by Ivan the Terrible. The family’s holiday home in the Crimea had a zoo and was just one of their thirty-seven estates stretching across Russia, bought with a fortune created from coal, iron ore and oil fields on the Caspian Sea.
And he was as flamboyant as his heritage. Felix often dressed as a woman in public, sometimes performing and singing in drag at a high-class nightclub, and yet he was married to a beautiful Romanoff princess, with whom he had a daughter, and they remained happily together for more than fifty years.
But the prince’s biggest claim to fame was that he had been the man who had led the assassination of the mystic Grigori Rasputin. Felix considered himself a hero—the man who rid Russia of a monster who had an almost satanic influence over Tsar Nicholas II and his wife, Alexandra, which was destroying Russia and killing its people as it struggled to hold off the German war machine. As it turned out, Rasputin’s murder was the precursor to a revolution that would ultimately lead to the assassination of the tsar and his family and scatter the surviving Russian aristocracy across the globe, leaving their vast fortunes and palaces behind.
After escaping prosecution, Felix, his wife Irina and their daughter fled the turmoil. To fund their life in exile, he smuggled out of the palace two rolled-up Rembrandt paintings—Man in a Large Hat and Woman with a Fan—and a clutch of diamonds. They made their way through the Crimea and Europe, eventually arriving in London in 1919 with other members of the now-exiled royal family.
The family quickly settled in Knightsbridge and began to hold court; they hosted flamboyant, bohemian affairs attended by growing numbers of exiled Russian aristocrats, even the ballerina Anna Pavlova, who mingled with an eager crowd of young, titled and wealthy Londoners. It was a time when all things Russian were popular in London. The wild music, played on semistrunka guitars, and the flowing brightly coloured silks and furs were a fresh and exotic distraction alongside the staid decorum of English ballrooms. The Youssoupoffs even held séance sessions.
Among those who frequented the apartment along the southern border of Hyde Park, where Felix would tell and retell his Rasputin story, were the princes Edward and Albert and their Do’s, Sheila Loughborough and Freda Dudley Ward. Here the glamorous quartet found a degree of freedom among a crowd of mostly their own generation.
But the English princes weren’t the only admirers of the two young women. Titled European men crowded around them at parties: Serge called them “cavaliers”. Sheila, dark-eyed and slender, looked languid as she stood alongside Freda’s tiny and fragile prettiness. Serge wrote: “I came to realise what close friends Sheila and Freda were. They were truly inseparable. Whenever [they] got together, a literal panic of laughter always ensued. I was smitten by Lady Loughborough almost immediately. The competition, however, was frightful!”
Freda “had tremendous steadiness and a will of iron, tempered by humour. She reminded me of an exquisite little bird, so sharp and quick were her features and her movements.”
Sheila, by contrast, was “a lazy lady”: “Her entire appearance was languorous. Her every gesture was dreamlike, as placid as an inland sea. She had flowing hair that swayed gently as she walked, and she had the most beautiful skin I think I’ve ever seen. She dressed softly and with simplicity, and one could hardly suspect the fertile imagination that was always bubbling within. For underneath, Sheila was pixyish. As [Russian artist Savely] Sorine once said to me: ‘You know, I’d just love to paint her, but I can’t . . . She’s Puck. She’s got one of those beautiful but incredible putty faces—impossible to put on canvas.’”
As well as mixing with the Russians, Sheila’s social calendar was becoming more and more full. Her marriage, and particularly her connection to Geordie and Eileen, the Duke and Duchess of Sutherland, had provided entry into this exclusive world, but she was now becoming a woman who could command the attention of the wealthy and powerful, all the way to the royal family. Her wartime fundraising experience and growing connections were establishing her as one of the new faces of society affairs.
For instance, Sheila was on the organising committee of the “Find the Slipper Ball”, a lavish Mardi Gras held at the Savoy Hotel in mid-January 1920, the proceeds from which were going to workshops for disabled soldiers. At midnight young men in pink emerged with hunting horns to signal a treasure hunt by guests for a jewel slipper stuffed with gold and silver coins.
The New Year had ushered in a swirl of glamorous events as London society brought out their feathers and diamonds and began to cast off the shackles of post-war reserve. The events were limited only by the organisers’ imaginations; they were customarily justified by a noble charitable cause.
There were also shooting weekends in the spring and the autumn—“so that one knew what one was doing”—and she was on familiar terms with “Bendor”, the Duke of Westminster, and Violet, the second of his four wives, as well as the Duke and Duchess of Marlborough, the Mountbattens and Lord Curzon, former Viceroy of India, about whom the country’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, would say: “After every other viceroy has been forgotten, Curzon will be remembered because he restored all that was beautiful in India.”
An incident that took place around this time is a good demonstration of the lavish world Sheila was living in. Just a few days before the “Slipper Ball” Sheila reported the theft of more than £11,000 worth of her jewellery from a flat in Duke Street where she was staying with friends.
Scotland Yard believed the thief had used a false key to get into the flat, where he had ignored everything but a black leather jewel case among Sheila’s luggage in an upstairs bedroo
m. The description of the loss was glittering—a dress ring with one large diamond in platinum surrounded by brilliants, a long platinum brooch set with thirteen pearls, a ring with a sapphire the size of a sixpenny piece, another sapphire ring surrounded by rose diamonds and two strings of pearls, along with three books of war bonds and her marriage certificate.
The press made much of the robbery and interviewed Lady Loughborough on her doorstep: “I regret the loss very much, especially one or two favourite ornaments which I prized exceedingly, but I can give you no further information, as I have no idea how they disappeared,” she told one reporter. The crime would never be solved.
But for all the glamour, her financial situation was actually quite grim. The Rosslyn estate trustees had taken care of Loughie’s latest debts, but the imposed financial regime of £1 per day was tight.
And Sheila’s private life continued to be in turmoil. As often as not, she was attending social events on her own, or arriving as a fifth wheel to another couple. It was a statement of the obvious—that her marriage was on the rocks—and it was being noted.
Even though Sheila’s relationship with Prince Albert was cooling as her attentions swung to Serge, they continued to see each other when he was in London. And despite their efforts at secrecy it was only a matter of time before it and the affair between Prince Edward and Freda Dudley Ward were reported back to Buckingham Palace. After all, it was now being discussed openly in society circles and by April 1920 the activities of Edward and Albert had reached the ears of King George and Queen Mary.
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