Sheila

by Robert Wainwright

  While she had been in Sydney, trying vainly to make her marriage work, Serge had formally ended his marriage with Princess Catherine. And a few months before Sheila returned to London Serge had found a new love in the much younger American real estate heiress, Alice Astor.

  Serge’s attention had been sparked by stories about the young woman’s interest in the occult, and in particular that she had been one of the first people to descend into King Tutankhamun’s tomb when it was opened by the archaeologist Howard Carter. Alice was twenty years old, beautiful and rich; Serge was aged thirty-two, handsome and, in his own words, “impoverished”. She was a commoner with the political power of new money (her aunt, Lady Nancy Astor, had just become the first woman to be elected to the House of Commons) and he was an aristocrat with the social power of old titles.

  Serge was bewitched by Alice’s youth while she probably viewed him as the father figure she’d lost during a tumultuous childhood. Her father, the fabulously wealthy and creative real estate investor and inventor Colonel John Jacob Astor, had divorced his wife Ava in 1909, when Alice was seven. The family was further split two years later, when Ava married an English aristocrat, became Lady Ribblesdale and moved to London, taking Alice with her but leaving her son, Vincent, who was older, in America with his father.

  Worse was to follow. On April 15, 1912, JJ Astor was one of the 1502 passengers who drowned aboard the RMS Titanic on its way to New York. The tycoon’s body was found a week later, identified by the initials JJA inside the collar of his shirt. He wore gold and diamond cufflinks and had £225 in English banknotes and $2440 in US currency in his trouser pockets (the modern-day equivalent of A$400,000).

  His death, after the earlier family upheavals, clearly had an impact on Alice, who came across as a quiet, serious and shy young woman. Her engagement to Serge would cause yet another family rift because Lady Ribblesdale, in particular, was opposed to the union, not just because of the age difference but because of her desire that Alice should find a moneyed English peer.

  Serge and Alice ignored the doubters and weathered Lady Ribblesdale’s opposition. The young woman was forced to run the gauntlet of suitors proposed by her mother and the pair would have to wait another year, until Alice turned twenty-one, before she was free to make her own marriage choice.

  Serge would later recall how Vincent Astor had wanted to buy his sister, as a unique wedding present, a pair of diamond earrings. They’d once belonged to Marie Antoinette, who had sewn them into her corsage as she fled Paris in 1793 during the French Revolution, before she was ultimately caught and beheaded. Strangely, the earrings had been retained by the French royal family and sold almost a century later to Serge’s aunt, the mother of Felix Youssoupoff, but she, in turn, had had to leave them behind when the family fled the Russian Revolution. “I begged Vincent not to buy them,” Serge wrote later. “I am superstitious in some respects, and those jewels were associated in my mind with bloodshed and tragedy. The earrings seemed to bring tragedy to whoever owned them.” Vincent bought the couple an estate in New York instead.

  Sheila Loughborough was among the guests when Serge and Alice finally wed on July 24, 1924. She went with Loughie even though they were now formally estranged. It would be the last public event they attended together and a firm statement that Sheila had drawn a line under both relationships—her marriage to Loughie and her love affair with Serge.

  Sheila would later reflect on the finality she felt on that day: “My love for Serge was luckily and obviously dead, and to me there is nothing so dead as dead love.”

  12

  A STRANGE SEX ANTAGONISM

  The crowd was baying, fifty deep in places around the room, enjoying the theatre of the absurd playing out in front of them. In the ring, set up in the centre of the first-floor auditorium of the grand public town hall at Canning Town, the two combatants were slugging it out in a four-round amateur contest, each giving as good as they copped.

  But it was more than the sheer physical encounter that made the spectacle so special. Brawls were frequently seen here in the poverty-riddled streets of East London, but rarely in this hall, which was normally reserved for rowdy trade union meetings. Here the humanist and Nobel Prize–winning writer Bertrand Russell had spoken out against imperialism; here Sylvia Pankhurst had held meetings to rouse support for the suffragette movement, but never could either of them have imagined this becoming the venue for a boxing match between a serving police officer and a member of the British aristocracy.

  The jostling and cheering crowd should have taken delight that these two men, representing sections of society they would normally despise, were beating each other up, but there was something heroic about this contest and its venue. Instead of despising the two participants, the crowd was adoring and encouraging them. Detective Black was known to many of them, as either a reassuring face or an irritating presence; he was a senior officer at the nearby West Ham station and an accomplished fighter with a semi-professional “pug” career behind him.

  His opponent couldn’t have been operating further out of his comfort zone. Even his rather soufflé schoolboy nickname “Buffles” indicated he was in the wrong part of town but Sir John Milbanke was a man who could hold his own in any company. At twenty-three years old and a titled baronet from the Yorkshire Dales, he had been a better-than-average footballer at Cambridge, a star polo player in the annual match against rival university Oxford and even a jockey in the amateur steeplechase events.

  But boxing was his passion. The “Boxing Baronet”, as the papers had dubbed him, was championing a revival in the popularity of the sport by setting up amateur bouts around London, often fighting his close friend, another aristocrat named Raymond Vincent de Trafford. Their contests in halls around the city attracted big crowds, who flouted the anti-gambling regulations by betting on their favourite toff. The two pugilists always wore well-padded gloves, “twice the weight of those used by the professional pugs and which do not impair the usual dinner party festivities after the bout”, one newspaper account quipped.

  Still, Buffles took the sport seriously enough to be trained by former Commonwealth light- and welterweight champion Johnny Summers, and he was distraught when threatened with the loss of his amateur status in late 1924 when he was accused of gambling in the lead-up to another planned fight against a policeman, AJ Clifford. He pleaded ignorance to the bets, made by de Trafford, and was let off with a week’s suspension. It was enough to lose the bout but not his treasured status.

  The young peer was equally at home and aggressive with a pen in his hand as a glove. In a lengthy column published in The London Evening News he lamented the decline of what he called “the art” and prescribed boxing not only for physical wellbeing but for common good and decency. His piece read in part:

  There is nothing which keeps a man so fit and gives him such a splendid sense of well being; and as a game it has the great merit of requiring only two to play it. Boxing can be enjoyed all the way round in evenings and in the very heart of London or one can indulge in half an hour’s brisk practice in the early morning before starting the day’s work. The value of boxing does not lie only in the fact that it is good exercise or that it enables one to defend oneself in an emergency. There is nothing that fosters the sporting spirit quite so admirably; and after all, it is the sporting spirit of the English as a race that is the essence of what historians are so fond of calling their “political and administrative genius”. To be able to take blows in good part, and to return them without malice—how much would not many a foreigner give to acquire that gift for himself and for his people . . . Let the nation as a whole take to the sport—employers and employed, bishops and bottle washers, princes and profiteers—and I think we should find a speedy return for the effort expended in increased dignity, self-respect and sense of proportion, and a lessening of industrial unrest and class hatred.

  So there he was standing toe-to-toe against a member of the constabulary, far from the clubs of M
ayfair and Soho, and in a part of the city that his type would never normally frequent unless by accident. He was not expected to win, but the contest was worth watching. The first two rounds were fairly even as the fighters warily circled each other, the detective marginally on top on points as the bout reached the halfway point.

  The match exploded in the third round when Sir John was caught in the face by Black’s straight left. He staggered under the blow but recovered his feet and then struck back, retaliating with a right hook which caught the detective flush on the jaw and sent him to the floor. Now it was Black’s turn to recover but, when the bout entered the last round, his size and experience came to the fore as he gradually wore down the baronet. The next morning an excited journalist from the Western Daily Press newspaper reported:

  Every blow of Sir John’s was applauded, and at one time he appeared to be an easy winner, for paying little respect to the arm of the law, he sent Black down for the count in the third round. No champion could have landed such a blow with better judgment. But Black got to his feet to defeat the count and though he had to spend most of the time beating off the attacks of Sir John, he retained a slight lead and was awarded the verdict on points.

  John Charles Peniston Milbanke looked like a boy, but he acted as if he was every inch a man. In 1920, even as a skinny eighteen year old, when photographed with his arms crossed for a picture that would be archived by the National Portrait Gallery, he commanded attention: tall, handsome, square-jawed and with eyes that challenged the cameraman to capture his confidence.

  His lineage suggested a reason to be confident about his place in life, boasting generations of leaders: high sheriffs, politicians, the cupbearer for Mary Queen of Scots, even Lady Anne Milbanke, the brilliant wife of Lord Byron, and her daughter by the poet, Ada, the Countess of Lovelace, the gifted mathematician recognised as the world’s first computer programmer. The Milbankes had been granted a baronetage by James I in 1616 after which they built a great house at Halnaby, in the county Durham, and created a dynasty although, like so many aristocratic families, their lands and country houses would be sold or abandoned within the first few years of the 20th century.

  The Boxing Baronet’s father, Sir John Peniston Milbanke, was the 10th Baronet and a war hero—a schoolboy friend of Sir Winston Churchill who was awarded the Victoria Cross at the age of twenty-seven for gallantry in the second Boer War. His citation read:

  On the 5th January, 1900, during a reconnaissance near Colesberg, Sir John Milbanke, when retiring under fire with a small patrol of the 10th Hussars, notwithstanding the fact that he had just been severely wounded in the thigh, rode back to the assistance of one of the men whose pony was exhausted, and who was under fire from some Boers who had dismounted. Sir John Milbanke took the man up on his own horse under a most galling fire and brought him safely back to camp.

  Fifteen years later, Milbanke Sr took heroism a step further, re-enlisting at the age of forty-two to fight the Great War and then dying on the battlefield of Gallipoli, walking into the teeth of enemy fire at the head of his troops and swinging his swagger cane. Here his remains would lie forever, never individually identified among the carnage of the August 1915 landing. His son, at the age of thirteen, had lost a father and become the 11th Baronet.

  In a strange way then, the present Sir John Milbanke and Lord Loughborough both followed the same course in their lives. Each of them tried to live up to a reputation: for Loughie, the romance of a life of audacity and swaggering bravado; for Sir John, the reality of a life of swashbuckling bravery and daring. Both men would achieve their aim, one in self-destruction and the other as a man to be reckoned with.

  And both men would become infatuated with Sheila Chisholm.

  Sheila had met Buffles in the summer of 1923, not long after the Loughboroughs returned to London from Australia, when he arrived at her house one day in company with Freda Dudley Ward and a hairdresser. Freda had been pestering Sheila about cutting her hair, which she insisted was dowdy and too long: “Everyone has short hair,” she declared as Buffles, whose presence and nickname were never explained, sat and watched Sheila being clipped like a sheep in the sheds at Wollogorang. “I almost cried when I saw my hair lying on the floor. Tony and Peter seemed quite frightened; they didn’t know what was happening to me and wanted my hair put on again. Buffles told me years later that he fell in love with me at that moment.”

  Freda was the conduit the second time they met as well, at a polo game in which Buffles starred for Cambridge against Oxford—just another admirer, albeit somewhat younger than the others, who saw a pretty young mother whose marriage was on the rocks.

  But there was something different about him, which emerged not in charm and polite conversation but the antagonism of mutual attraction. This became apparent the third time they met, during a social outing with mutual friends when Sheila objected to him smoking a pipe inside the clubrooms: “I felt furious and said: ‘I am accustomed to young men removing their pipes and brushing their hair before speaking to me.’ He glared at me and left the room.”

  Later in the evening there was another confrontation: “We all decided to play tennis. Buffles appeared in the hall, near the cloakroom. To my amazement and rage I suddenly found myself pushed inside and the door being locked behind me. I kicked the door and yelled for help but it was a waste of energy and breath. He had the key in his pocket and no one could induce him to let me out for over an hour. I could have killed him!!”

  Even when she split from Loughie she was reluctant to become too involved with Buffles. She had plenty of admirers and the last thing she needed was to commit to another relationship. Estranged was not divorced and there were certain standards to maintain, at least publicly.

  Privately though, she was searching for the elusive sense of love that the words of Baudelaire, that she used to read in the orchard beneath the pear trees back at Wollogorang, captured.

  There was another poet, an Englishwoman named Christina Rossetti, whose words haunted her, particularly a verse called “A Pause of Thought”, which dealt with the search for love and, despite its futile nature, the unwillingness of youth to give up or stop loving:

  I looked for that which is not, nor can be,

  And hope deferred made my heart sick in truth:

  But years must pass before a hope of youth

  Is resigned utterly.

  I watched and waited with a steadfast will:

  And though the object seemed to flee away

  That I so longed for, ever day by day

  I watched and waited still.

  Sometimes I said: “This thing shall be no more;

  My expectation wearies and shall cease;

  I will resign it now and be at peace”:

  Yet never gave it o’er.

  Sometimes I said: “It is an empty name

  I long for; to a name why should I give

  The peace of all the days I have to live?”—

  Yet gave it all the same.

  Alas, thou foolish one! alike unfit

  For healthy joy and salutary pain:

  Thou knowest the chase useless, and again

  Turnest to follow it.

  Buffles Milbanke embodied that search even though Sheila couldn’t really explain this attraction, even years later: “He was arrogant and yet shy, an attractive mixture,” she would recall. “I loved him but he annoyed me. We seemed to have a strange sex antagonism.”

  They both had Alsatians—his bitch named Mova and hers a male named Mr Fang—and both loved to ride horses. And they were both competitive, riding for hours in Richmond Park on summer evenings in 1924: “He had several polo ponies and we would race each other for miles, galloping into the sunset, with the two dogs following us. They never seemed to tire. We were competitive with our dogs and our ponies.”

  It was as if their relationship embodied her desire to a challenge the dominance of the men around her while enjoying the power of being a desirable woman among them: “I tho
ught I could do anything he could do—I often couldn’t.”

  The first public indication of a friendship was in June 1924 when the Daily Express reported on a dinner and dance at the Ritz hosted by Emerald Cunard who, curiously, had hosted the lunch years before when Sheila had met Serge Obolensky. The guest list was described as large in the column but only fifteen were mentioned, including Sheila Loughborough and Sir John Milbanke.

  Three months later Sir John gave his own dinner party at the Ritz. It was one of a dozen parties, dinners and dances held across London that night but a brief mention somehow found its way into The Times “Court Circular” column which noted: “Sir John Milbanke gave a dinner party at the Ritz Hotel on Tuesday when his guests included the Earl and Countess of Brecknock and Lady Loughborough.” There appeared to be special intent in its publication and brevity. Few readers who actively followed the social meanderings of the elite would have missed the revelation that Sheila Loughborough, estranged wife of Lord Loughborough, was attending a dinner on the arm of a young aristocrat named Sir John Milbanke. In a world in which the wife was routinely much younger than her husband, here was a coupling in which the woman was seven years older than her beau.

  Despite her attraction to Buffles, Sheila remained unconvinced about a more serious relationship. Her father came to visit in the spring of 1925 and tried to persuade her to divorce Loughie. And he liked Buffles: “He said our separation was neither one thing nor the other, that I was too young to live alone and asked what sort of a position I would be in if I fell in love and wanted to marry again etc. I told him I would never marry again, to which he replied: ‘Nonsense.’”

  Having Chissie in London was important for Sheila. Ag came every year, staying several months each time, but her father always remained at home. He had been abroad once before, but as the ship steamed back into Sydney Harbour he hurled his top hat into the waters and declared: “Australia is good enough for me”, vowing to never again leave her shores.