Sheila

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Sheila Page 19

by Robert Wainwright


  “I was about thirty and remember thinking, ‘how ghastly for poor Max to be so old . . . fifty’. He didn’t look it. Times have changed many things. One seldom hears the witty, carefree fascinating conversation, combined with the fun and gaiety we knew in those days. This party was almost the end of the 1920s.”

  In August Sheila and Buffles rented a house at Runnymede, on the banks of the Thames at Windsor near the fields in which the Magna Carta was said to have been sealed 800 years before. There they intended spending the month entertaining a parade of friends, among them the young banking heir Loel Guinness, who crash-landed his private plane in a field by the house on the day he arrived and walked away unscathed.

  It was the only excitement in what was supposed to be a month of long walks, golf and tennis and lazy dinners as daylight stretched well into the night, but on the morning of August 4, as she began preparations for another big lunch party, Buffles took Sheila aside with some tragic news—Loughie was dead.

  The details of his last few hours would emerge at an inquest to determine if he had fallen or jumped through an open window. Sheila would always believe the former but couldn’t bear to attend the hearing. Instead, she forced herself to read the newspaper accounts, which she then hid from the boys.

  The sadness wasn’t just his death but the manner in which he had been living, virtually penniless and, effectively, homeless; he had recently been forced to quit a rented one-bedroom flat in Cork Street off Regent Street, an up-and-coming art-house corner of the city, but a far cry from the stately addresses he had once enjoyed.

  But tragic Loughie still had many friends, among them Dr Alfred Lennane who had also been his GP for some years. Loughie had called him that morning and they’d spent most of the day together, meeting for a long lunch which stretched to dinner, perhaps discussing their joint interest in art or the doctor’s recent purchase of not one, but two Stradivarius violins.

  They left the restaurant about 9 p.m. and headed to a house in Holland Road, Kensington, where Loughie had been offered a bed for the weekend. Neither was drunk. In fact, Loughie had consumed very little alcohol at all during the day; instead he had sipped ginger ale, except for one brandy and soda that the doctor had prescribed for his friend to counter a coughing fit brought on, he believed, by excessive smoking.

  Strangely, the previous month Loughie had been featured in a newspaper advert for Baron’s cigarettes. It appeared in the Daily Express on June 26 and featured a photograph of the handsome thirty-seven year old, dressed in the uniform of the King’s Royal Rifle Corps he had not worn for more than a decade, and declared: “LORD LOUGHBOROUGH writes ‘I find the flavour of Baron’s Virginia Cigarettes exactly right. Flavour, coolness, smoothness and mildness. I like them very much indeed.’”

  There were three women at the Holland Road address when the two men arrived about 9.15. Miss Violet MacDonald, who would describe herself as a single woman of independent means, knew Loughie well. He had stayed at the house before and his father, the earl, had once rented her father’s yacht for a social event. She had agreed to let him stay, even though she already had guests—her aunt and a friend visiting from South Africa. But there was room enough in the large house, because her parents were away in Scotland for the weekend. After introductions, they sat down to play rummy, again sans alcohol.

  The mood was jovial, they would all later testify, other than during a break in play at 10 p.m., when Loughie excused himself to make a telephone call to someone in Eastbourne. Violet’s aunt, a Mrs Pickthorne, thought he looked a little upset when he returned to the table, but he resumed playing, without explanation. The game continued until 11 p.m., when Dr Lennane said goodnight and caught a cab back to his home in the city, just off Pall Mall.

  The doctor was still awake when the telephone jingled a few minutes past midnight. It was Violet MacDonald, worried about the behaviour of Lord Loughborough, who was acting very strangely and threatening to leave. Would the doctor come back please, and help settle his friend. They would put the doctor up for the night if necessary. The doctor agreed and called a cab.

  Miss MacDonald would later recount the strange series of events that had occurred after Dr Lennane left and before she phoned him. Loughie had decided to turn in for the night, and been put in the third-floor bedroom normally used by her mother. Miss MacDonald and her aunt stayed up a little later but, when they went upstairs, found their guest on the landing. He was clearly agitated; he said he wanted to leave and only agreed to stay if he could remove a collection of tortoiseshell hair brushes and articles on the dressing table.

  The items were removed and he seemed to settle down. Miss MacDonald said goodnight and went into the next-door bedroom, which she was sharing with her aunt. But a few minutes later Loughie knocked on her door and insisted that he was in the wrong room and wanted to go. They tried to pacify the troubled man and eventually led him upstairs to another room on the fourth floor, at the top of the house. It was then Miss MacDonald decided to call the doctor. Something was desperately wrong.

  It was almost 1 a.m. when Dr Lennane got back to Holland Road. He found Loughie perched on the edge of a bed in his pyjamas, with his suit folded neatly and packed in his suitcase. He was worried, he told the doctor, that he was going to “cause a disturbance to the family, which he hoped was not infectious”.

  “I chaffed him,” the doctor recounted a few days later, “and he seemed quite all right.”

  The doctor went downstairs to the bed Loughie had rejected but, still concerned and puzzled, went back up three times over the next thirty minutes to make sure that he was all right. “He was in bed but he was not asleep. After that I went to bed.”

  Miss MacDonald, disturbed firstly by a dripping tap and then by the unmistakeable sound of one of the huge floor-to-ceiling windows being slid open, also saw him lying on his bed as she passed the room. He was awake, but quiet. Eventually the house settled, although Dr Lennane could not sleep. He decided to read with the light on and door open in case his friend, in the room overhead, called out: “I must have dropped asleep for I gradually became aware that there was some moaning, apparently from the garden.”

  Rather than run downstairs and check outside, the doctor ran upstairs to check on his friend. What he discovered only confirmed the worst: “I ran up to his room to see that he was all right. I was astounded to find the bed empty and window open. It was wide open. I rushed down to the garden and found he had fallen on the crazy paving.”

  Dr Lennane woke Miss MacDonald to call an ambulance. It was clearly serious, given that Lord Loughborough had plunged at least 10 metres onto stone. The doctor, feeling around in the darkness, could tell his friend had broken an arm and one of his legs in two places. He must also have suffered internal injuries, although they weren’t immediately obvious.

  The young lord was unconscious when he arrived at St Mary Abbott’s Hospital in Kensington at 2.30 a.m., but he appeared to wake up as they prepared him for emergency surgery. Dr Lennane, who had gone with the ambulance, said the stricken man nodded, as if in recognition of those around him.

  The doctor left the hospital to go home as Loughie was being wheeled from surgery. Soon after, the Earl of Rosslyn arrived and joined the growing number of family by the bedside. Dr Eric Macdonald, an assistant medical officer, said Loughie seemed to recover from the anaesthetic but did not speak, let alone offer any explanation about what had happened. It was a matter of waiting.

  But, just as it seemed he might recover, the young lord’s condition quickly deteriorated. He died just after 7.30 a.m.—already psychologically broken and now physically destroyed.

  Lord Loughborough’s death was front-page news, even across the Atlantic where he was viewed as a hell-raiser: “The wildest man in London” was dead, as one breathless American account would detail, linking his death to a tragic play Loughie was said to have seen during the days before his death. There were even ghostly tales of apparitions, some inside Rosslyn Chapel and seen by a gro
undsman at the same time as Loughie lay dying in the garden back in London.

  The social exploits of London’s upper class were mostly documented by newspapers in gossip columns which celebrated beauty and style, where the worst that could befall one was to be ignored. But such a dramatic demise proved much more exciting. The Times, Guardian, Daily Express and regional papers all gave extensive coverage to news of the tragedy and the inquest, which quickly followed. It was irresistible. It even found its way into Australian papers because his links to Sheila, daughter of the late Harry Chisholm, made such good fodder. He may have been “tall and well built with a winning smile”, as one account pandered, but his physical attributes did not protect him from his character flaws.

  The inquest took just one day, hurriedly convened two days after his death and one day before his funeral. Dr Lennane was the chief witness, not only because he had been with Loughie all day but because he was also the young man’s GP and was aware of his fragile state of mind.

  He described the young lord as a hypersensitive man who was keenly aware of his impact on others. He said Loughie had suffered a nervous breakdown three months earlier and had been hospitalised for depression, although there was nothing in his behaviour that day to presage such a dramatic event: “He was perfectly cheerful all day from the time I saw him until I left him,” said the doctor. “He was in good spirits.”

  Neither was there any suggestion of drug or alcohol use, other than the brandy and soda, which, the doctor revealed, was strictly for medicinal purposes. Reports of the pair having been at the notorious 43 Club in Soho appeared inaccurate although it was clearly a haunt, infamous for its gambling and whores, which had contributed to Loughie’s demise.

  The coroner, a Dr Scott, was puzzled, as is shown by the following reported exchange.

  Scott: “I must ask you why you took all the care of him, why you went to his room two or three times?”

  Dr Lennane: “I was told he was wandering and wanted to go out.

  It was a little difficult to understand him sometimes. He had not a very precise way of talking.”

  Scott: “You cannot throw any light on his nervous condition?”

  Lennane: “No.”

  Scott: “Have you ever known him do anything irregular or unreasonable?”

  Lennane: “No. I have never known him to suggest suicide at any time.”

  Scott: “Have you prescribed sleeping draughts for him?”

  Lennane: “Not for some years.”

  Scott: “Did he complain of being depressed?”

  Lennane: “No. There was some slight depression about trivial things but I talked him out of it.”

  Instead, Lennane offered the suggestion that the death might have been a terrible accident caused by another coughing fit. In trying not to disturb the rest of the house, perhaps Loughie had opened a window, lost his balance while coughing and fallen out. It was a desperate theory, in an attempt to save what was left of his friend’s good name.

  And what of the mysterious phone call made during the card game? Could it throw any light on the tragedy? The woman Loughie had telephoned was in court, dressed in black, and gave evidence, but for the moment she remained unnamed. She was the owner of a flat in which he had been staying, but which he was now being forced to vacate. She said the lord’s manner had been normal, and he had merely wanted to give her a forwarding address—yet another reminder of his fall from grace for a young man who was facing a series of closing doors.

  Was that the answer? Had he finally had enough and had nowhere to go?

  But not all doors had closed. In fact, a new one had recently opened: a city publisher had engaged him to write about his exploits in London gambling clubs, firstly as a serial and then to be published in book form, perhaps similar to his father’s memoir. Rosslyn’s My Gamble with Life had been published in New York only the year before, (and had been described by reviewers as self-congratulatory). Its release was much to the horror of his family; the earl’s sister, the Dowager Duchess of Sutherland, had travelled to the United States on a quest to block its publication because it “rattles indecently forgotten skeletons of the Rosslyn clan”. She had failed.

  Loughie’s London publishers could clearly see potential in the father–son connection. “He [Lord Loughborough] was always very cheerful and was quite a promising writer,” the unnamed publisher commented when told of the death.

  But was the possibility of becoming financially self-sufficient enough to give him hope? Perhaps the fact that he had two young children by his marriage to Sheila, and that he had told friends he intended to marry again and was about to propose to an unnamed young woman, might have been reasons to live, and it could be put down to an accident.

  The mystery only deepened later in the day, when the identity of the woman in black at the back of the court was finally revealed. Heiress Iris Thornton was not only Loughie’s landlady but, so she believed, his wife-to-be. A tearful Miss Thornton had brought one of his last letters for the coroner to read, in the hope it might persuade the court that his death was an accident. He was happy about the future, she insisted, pointing to a sentence which read: “I missed my happiness once, but now everything is alright.”

  Miss Thornton told the court a convoluted story. She knew her beau was a fragile and damaged man, and perhaps she loved him for it. She wanted to save him. She had accepted Loughie’s faults and had kept a careful eye on him in recent months while they planned a life together, with her family’s money offering him financial salvation. But she had made a mistake when she asked him to vacate her flat that day. Her hope had been that it would force him to return to the safety of his father’s house, away from the temptations of London. Instead, she feared it may have contributed to his mood:

  He had telephoned me three times that day and the last words he spoke were “Goodnight, Angel”. He only rang up to tell me where he was staying. Oh, how I wish I had not insisted on his leaving the flat that day. I don’t think I was quite as nice to him as I might have been but I wanted him to go home and spend a quiet weekend with his father. It would have meant so much to both of us. It was silly of him to go and play cards and I was afraid that, away from me, he might start drinking.

  She believed it had been an accident. “I wanted to come here and prove it was an accident. Why, he promised to ring me up at ten o’clock the next morning and, if he was very good, I was going to let him come down for the day.”

  Miss Thornton attended the coroner’s court in the company of Lady Teddington, who also gave evidence but thought differently to her friend: “From the circumstances, as I know them, there can be no doubt that this terrible act was one of sudden despair—despair at another little turn of fortune’s wheel which he feared might snatch his happiness from him, and in his nervous and highly strung condition he could not face in the fulfilment of his hopes.”

  The jury took only a few minutes to weigh up the scenario, siding with Lady Teddington’s view. They pronounced that Lord Loughborough had committed suicide, brought on by depression and “a temporary unsound mind”.

  The day after the inquest Harry Rosslyn went to Runnymede to see his former daughter-in-law and beg her to go to the funeral and allow the boys to be pallbearers. Sheila was reluctant: “I thought both these ideas unsuitable because I had divorced Loughie and the boys were too young. However, to please Harry and also because I knew that Loughie would have gone to the ends of the earth for my funeral, I agreed to go. We were both extremely sad, and wondered if in any way we could have helped Loughie more. We both decided we had done all we could.”

  The Guardian newspaper covered his funeral two days later at the family chapel at Rosslyn. About a hundred people attended, including Sheila Milbanke, who sat with her two “golden-haired” sons beside her former father-in-law. The coverage had turned from sensational to atmospheric:

  Candles burned low on either side and beautiful floral crosses lay on top of the coffin, one from Lord Rosslyn and the present
Lady Rosslyn, stepmother of Lord Loughborough, and the other bearing the inscription “In loving memory of my darling boy—mother”. The chapel was dimly lit by candlelight but the sunshine, streaming in the window, displayed the wonderful beauty of the carved stonework for which Rosslyn is world-famous.

  Sheila stood at the graveside with the boys: “I had ordered masses of Lily of the Valley for Loughie. The scent of them made me sick, with memories my eyes were blinded with tears . . . so many memories. I thought: ‘Head high, walk very tall’ which always comes to my rescue.”

  On the train back to London, Sheila sat lost in thought: “It was the same train I had taken after my divorce more than three years before, after the imaginary ornaments that I had tried to hang on Loughie, as one hangs ornaments on a Christmas tree, had fallen off one by one. It was not his fault, I mused, that he couldn’t live up to my idea of what I wanted him to be. I remembered how, many years before, my mother had warned me against this trait in my character.”

  Tony and Peter were in a carriage next door: “I thought I would peep at them and see how upset they were after such a bad experience. They were playing a game called Peggity and screaming with laughter. Oh, glorious youth.”

  Sheila was still absorbing the tragedy a few weeks later, when the Daily Express columnist Tom Driberg, aka “The Dragoman”, spotted her one evening in a restaurant. In a piece written about whether the waltz was back in favour (Driberg thought not) the columnist described the scene: Sheila, “tanned by the Antibes sun”, was wearing black in stark contrast to others in bright colours. He also noted her demeanour: “Lady Milbanke did not dance, but sat quietly at the table with her husband.” Driberg would have been keenly aware of the Loughborough tragedy and that others would be reading his column. Sheila wanted it known that, in spite of her social commitments, she was in mourning.

 

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